To everyone’s profound nonsurprise, various pundits and public figures are attributing the UK riots to the old favorites: lack of parental discipline, and the degenerate culture of Those People. (You know; the ones who don’t need as high an SPF rating on their sunscreen.) In typically remote fashion, the Economist goes back through historical Kids These Days panics in recent history.
In talking about the “Negro music” aspect of this panic, dzik makes a spot-on observation about jazz that should be tattooed on the inner eyelids of all cultural snobs:
Of course, the real scandal of Miles, Sun Ra et al was that they took these “deplorable”, “tribal” roots and cultivated an art form capable of engaging with the European classical tradition and commanding respect on its own terms — that is the negro’s revenge and that is the negro’s revenge. To listen to the critics you’d think some people would have been less offended if they’d merely destroyed Western Civilization.
Damn straight.
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