Bridge of Waves: What Music Is and How Listening to It Changes the World by W. A. Mathieu

Author:W. A. Mathieu [Mathieu, W. A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Shambhala
Published: 2010-12-13T15:00:00+00:00

As seen through the prism of American popular music and jazz, the evolutionary shape of American culture is brightly limned—the more so if the listener resists the impulse to describe it in words. If you could listen to a recording of one piece of popular music from each year, from 1905 to the present and hold on wordlessly to your impressions—no discussion, no definition, just sound and feeling—you would get a sense of the American mind and spirit more intimate and revealing than a hundred history books. Whatever part of this experiment you can manage to do for yourself is a special kind of research, social anthropology from a vibrational source. Our music tells our story in a way nothing else can.

Ibony and Evory

There are many stories within stories. In American music, one of the most compelling is the racial one, the mutual influence of black and white. America has been very slow to give up its slaves, even in post-Obama times. A large body of our popular music deals head-on with race, putatively commemorated by Stevie Wonder performing Paul McCartney’s song “Ebony and Ivory”—perhaps more appropriately titled “Ibony and Evory,” because the stylistic mix has become so thorough it is difficult to track the complexity of the black/white feedback loops. There is a stunning moment in the musical Dreamgirls (about a Supremes-type singing group) when a black man and a white man are finalizing a deal. As they shake hands, the black man says, “You always wanted our rhythm and we always wanted your Cad-il-LAC.” “Our rhythm” refers to the innate intelligence of the body, of the village, of the natural world long lost to the citified, industrialized peoples of Euro-America. “Your Cadillac” refers to the development of an ambitious, success-driven intellect that had been exploding outward from central Europe for a millennium and landing, with Yankee greed and ingenuity, in America.

Consider the Afro-American feedback loops in the following tableaux:

• Al Jolson singing in blackface

• George Gershvin [sic], a Jew from lower Manhattan, writing perhaps America’s best opera ever—about a Southern black ghetto

• Louis Armstrong singing “Hello, Dolly!” and it’s a huge hit

• Elvis Presley on Ed Sullivan doing pelvic shtick to music he stole from (very poor) Southern rhythm and blues musicians

• Working-class Brits galvanizing the white world with pentatonic blues riffs learned from black players who themselves were cashing in on the hunger of white college kids in folk/blues clubs

• Canadian Gil Evans writing concerto-style compositions and arrangements for Miles Davis, who makes them soar

• Herbie Hancock playing beautifully well behind a white singer covering Joni Mitchell tunes

• White lawyers at their firm’s lavish Christmas party, roasting each other in what they imagine to be rap

• Rap and hip-hop itself, a special language of power invented by blacks and purchased mostly by white suburban teenage boys who can’t wear their trousers low enough: did they ever know that prisoners on death watch (mostly black) have their belts confiscated?

All of these images have complex soundtracks, redolent with juicy

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