Reading comp: what's the ILM verdict on this fragment of 60s crit?

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... Worse, Cage, deliberately or not, appeals to the 'exquisite' tradition. The cryptic wisdom of the Orient, the paradox, an ostentatious savouring of art as useless, a gloating over banalities as surpassingly beautiful all the ploys are there. We've had slim volumes of verse; Cage gives us slim volumes of sound. It is, after all, the 'exquisite' circuit that maintains Cage and Cagery? - and will earth it?

He makes all the traditional nee-Dada gestures towards notions of 'mass art'.

Just think of Tamla-Motown, or jazz from the ODJB to Charlie Parker, and the gestures are ludicrous or just rhetoric. Fox Music a la Cage is at the opposite pole to music a la Bird. Cagery is for the thoughtful, the sensitive, the man who's had culture (as Warholism is for the man who resents, i.e. fears it). Cagery is to Bird as Zen is to Dionysus. I prefer Birds to Cages, however high the cages fly...

― Enrique (Enrique), Thursday, 20 May 2004 09:20 (twenty-two years ago)

Taking Sides : Fox Music a la Cage vs Blue Rondo a la Turk

― mark grout (mark grout), Thursday, 20 May 2004 09:23 (twenty-two years ago)

He/she is clearly on the jazz side of things but I do not understand the comparison to charlie parker.

Does the reviewer think that people who listen to parker aren't sensitive or thoughtful? Parker could be music that is listened today (maybe not then) by people who resent the dominant culture.

― Julio Desouza (jdesouza), Thursday, 20 May 2004 10:01 (twenty-two years ago)

precis: intelligent WHITE musicians think too much unlike BLACK musicians who don't need to theorise because they just have natural riddim and anyway are thick as shit niggers so we don't expect them to "think" innit. lydian chromatic concept of tonal organisation whassat then?

― Marcello Carlin, Thursday, 20 May 2004 10:17 (twenty-two years ago)

i thought cage was black as it goes.

― Enrique (Enrique), Thursday, 20 May 2004 10:21 (twenty-two years ago)

are you going to tell us who wrote it?

― Julio Desouza (jdesouza), Thursday, 20 May 2004 10:23 (twenty-two years ago)

i think you are confusing john cage with luke cage, power man.

― Marcello Carlin, Thursday, 20 May 2004 10:24 (twenty-two years ago)

Well it's not David Toop, I'm pretty sure of that!

― Dadaismus (Dada), Thursday, 20 May 2004 10:25 (twenty-two years ago)

back in the '60s toop was hanging out at the UFO club grooving to the Floyd and AMM and wishing they were japanese.

― Marcello Carlin, Thursday, 20 May 2004 10:28 (twenty-two years ago)

I thought he claimed he was playing in "R&B" bands - that's R&B as in Otis Redding not Edgar Broughton

― Dadaismus (Dada), Thursday, 20 May 2004 10:29 (twenty-two years ago)

the piece was in IT (ak, wrongly, a International Times), which had material links with UFO.

― Enrique (Enrique), Thursday, 20 May 2004 10:33 (twenty-two years ago)

Must be Charles Shaar Murray, do I win a coconut?

― Billy Dods (Billy Dods), Thursday, 20 May 2004 10:56 (twenty-two years ago)

Surely not geezerish enough for CSM? Ian McDonald?

― Dadaismus (Dada), Thursday, 20 May 2004 10:58 (twenty-two years ago)

Dungbat.

― NickB (NickB), Thursday, 20 May 2004 10:59 (twenty-two years ago)

Doomie (hello searchmaaaan)

― mark grout (mark grout), Thursday, 20 May 2004 11:04 (twenty-two years ago)

NickB correct (are we carrying over the 'make up pointlessly offensive nicknames' bit from ILE, or do you have specific cause for animus?)

― Enrique (Enrique), Thursday, 20 May 2004 11:23 (twenty-two years ago)

Ah no, sorry, not at all, that's just how I remember his name in my simple childlike noggin. Raymond Durgat, that's the guy.

Err, Marcello the ODJB were white, right?

― NickB (NickB), Thursday, 20 May 2004 11:34 (twenty-two years ago)

BTW what's "fox music"? That whole sentence is just riddled with scanning boobs isn't it?

― NickB (NickB), Thursday, 20 May 2004 11:36 (twenty-two years ago)

Eeek, I meant 'piece', not 'sentence'. Worra retread.

― NickB (NickB), Thursday, 20 May 2004 11:37 (twenty-two years ago)

He has his own website. :-)

― jesus nathalie (nathalie), Thursday, 20 May 2004 11:45 (twenty-two years ago)

Getting details completely wrong was Durgnat's trademark. Obv at IT they didn't have v professional eds/fact-checkers, but elsewhere he gets the title of 'north by northwest' wrong (this coming from a man who wrote a book abt hitchock).

― Enrique (Enrique), Thursday, 20 May 2004 11:45 (twenty-two years ago)

Or did -- he died two years ago. I dunno if that's his website or not. I think not. But a lot of his stuff is golden.

― Enrique (Enrique), Thursday, 20 May 2004 11:46 (twenty-two years ago)

we can dig him up again and kick his corpse into deodorised dust just to teach him not to FUCKEN TRY IT CUNT

― Marcello Carlin, Thursday, 20 May 2004 11:47 (twenty-two years ago)

Hmmm, looking at that article, this seems to be the crux of his argument:

But his work can be abused in an all-too-fashionable way - used as perceptual banalities to relieve the vacancies that creep into one's mind when one abandons all efforts to understand and resist and retires to a passive nonchalance. Often it's spearmint for the toothless.

Seems a bit flimsy. And he's moaning about spending TWO WHOLE POUNDS on records. Bastard!

― NickB (NickB), Thursday, 20 May 2004 12:04 (twenty-two years ago)

two whole pounds? That was £849.99 in pre-decimal currency.

― Marcello Carlin, Thursday, 20 May 2004 12:11 (twenty-two years ago)

'spearmint for the toothless' -- are you not entertained?!

― Enrique (Enrique), Thursday, 20 May 2004 12:21 (twenty-two years ago)

is it as good as A Week Away?

― Marcello Carlin, Thursday, 20 May 2004 12:37 (twenty-two years ago)

Marcello OTM. (Also see practically all popular music criticism from this era.)

― sundar subramanian (sundar), Thursday, 20 May 2004 19:31 (twenty-two years ago)

(As in academic writing, not journalistic criticism.)

― sundar subramanian (sundar), Thursday, 20 May 2004 19:31 (twenty-two years ago)

This was popular-underground crit. I dunno, I think it's a bit much to label *any* argument along those lines 'racist'.

― Enrique (Enrique), Friday, 21 May 2004 08:43 (twenty-two years ago)

I actually think he's on to something in the first paragraph.

― Dadaismus (Dada), Friday, 21 May 2004 08:46 (twenty-two years ago)

here we call everyone who we diagree with racist. me, i just content myself with being right about everything.

― Dave Stelfox (Dave Stelfox), Friday, 21 May 2004 08:49 (twenty-two years ago)

From what I know of such things, the writer seems to be using the Nietzchean Apollonian/Dionysiac dichotomy that Simon Reynolds is fond of. The writer is a film critic usually, and he takes a pretty similar line there, and the cinema being what it is (ie dominated by whites) the 'racist' aspect isn't there: it's an aesthetic judgement. If Cage *was* black, which, as I've said, I thought he was, the 'race argument would be stupid. And, given that it doesn't matter whether he is black or not, I don't see why the race argument needs to be imported.

― Enrique (Enrique), Friday, 21 May 2004 09:04 (twenty-two years ago)

Well, he seems to be a promoting a bout between highbrow art concept and the katharsis of jazz. I think he's wrong to do this because obviously jazz is at times head music as much as anything else, especially around that time. Whether or not you can automatically make the leap from jazz (& Motown) to "black music", I dunno. Like I said, of the examples he cites, the Original Dixieland Jazz Band were white.

― NickB (NickB), Friday, 21 May 2004 09:19 (twenty-two years ago)

Based on this fragment, Durgnat appears to be making a rather crude (and yes, racially tainted) distinction/opposition between composition and improvisation. I seem to recall reading somewhere or other that Cage disliked jazz, tho' I can't remember why exactly (because melodic freedom (at least pre-Ornette) in jazz is still tightly bounded by formal rules? Because jazz enshrines the idea of the virtuoso/genius (Parker most obviously?))

I've also had a soft spot for Durgnat's highly idiosyncratic intellectualism - a bit like a UK Parker Tyler, standing stubbornly outside of any schools or dogmas - but on the evidence of this, music crit was poss. not his strong suit

― Andrew L (Andrew L), Friday, 21 May 2004 09:48 (twenty-two years ago)

two weeks pass...

missed this thread first time out. Durgnat's "A Mirror For England: British Cinema From Austerity To Affluence" (1970) is awesome. i'm inclined to agree that he should have stuck with what he knew best.

― robin carmody (robin carmody), Saturday, 5 June 2004 00:45 (twenty-two years ago)

Though a lot of his 'open scores' basically are structured improv from my POV, Cage was opposed to improvisation on principle because he thought it placed too much emphasis on the taste & memory (and therefore the ego) of the performer (which might be similar to the idea of the virtuoso/genius being a problem).

― sundar subramanian (sundar), Saturday, 5 June 2004 00:52 (twenty-two years ago)

Fox Music a la Cage is at the opposite pole to music a la Bird. Cagery is for the thoughtful, the sensitive, the man who's had culture (as Warholism is for the man who resents, i.e. fears it).

Cage v. Velvet Underground go!

― David Allen (David Allen), Saturday, 5 June 2004 15:42 (twenty-two years ago)

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