2018’s BlacKkKlansman closes to a hauntingly jivey rendition of Prince singing ‘Mary Don’t You Weep’, a negro spiritual, which tends to be a kinder way of saying ‘slave song’ (Lee, 2018). As with most pre-emancipation music, this was a song amongst African Americans that coded messages of resilience within religious narratives. For context, the last visuals of the movie jump out of the narrative into the real world and show footage of the Charlottesville riots in 2017, followed by then President Donald Trump refusing to assign blame to either side, and then David Duke, alluding to Trump while egging on white supremacists in Charlottesville and ends on graphic video and stars of a car driving into Black Lives Matter protestors that same day. The last frame of the film is an inverted USA flag. To have a song that gave strength to his ancestors in bondage play over the credits following these visuals shows Spike Lee unwilling to let mere symbolism speak within his film. The recently unearthed recording of Prince singing this spiritual, with just a ‘piano and a sniffle’, was, to Lee, brought to him by the Divine, saying, “It’s my belief that my brother wanted me to have that song. I’ll believe that until the day I die. How in the world could this one cassette, out of 10,000, just show up? That was not a mistake. (Kohn, 2018 ).”. (Whether this was collusion with the almighty, or not, there is obviously no quid pro quo, and any inquisition into this collusion would constitute a witch hunt). This is a Black point, made by a Black man, while telling another Black man’s story, using the music of a Black man singing a song of (Black) historical significance. In an ideal world, the word ‘Black’, in that sentence, could be replaced with ‘American’ or ‘Human’ and not lose meaning. However, the Blackness of the stories and their tellers, for now, remains relevant and necessary for the point to be made unambiguously. Black voices, especially singing voices, find often problematic homes in Hollywood films. The history of this has been well documented. This essay dissects two very recent critically acclaimed Hollywood film and how they treat jazz, bringing to the forefront various issues in the racial tone, considering the question of appropriation and the larger cultural repercussions these might have, if not acknowledged and remedied. Indeed, the above example of BlacKkKlansman finds itself being repeatedly more germane, most recently in the case of Alabama repealing the requirement that the KKK be taught to be immoral. The collective cultural conscience of the African American population of the US is obviously exceptionally receptive to the message that Spike Lee and Prince jointly make in the above example. Pivot now, to the breathless defensive lament of what jazz has become by Ryan Gosling’s Sebastian in La La Land. An ambiguous, earnest image that is impossible to racialise. Or so the filmmakers and a lot of its fans would like us to think. This sequence, backed diegetically by the swinging ‘Herman’s Habit’, paints the intended portrait of Sebastian and his mission:“Y’know…..I just think that people, when they say that they, y’know, hate jazz, they just…they don’t have context. They don’t know where it comes from. Jazz was born in a little flop-house in New Orleans; People were crammed in there, they spoke five different languages, they couldn’t talk to each other. The only way they could communicate was with jazz”. While technically accurate, this folksy little backstory fails to grant any substance to the socio-cultural force that jazz was in its birthplace of New Orleans. Jazz was a stamp of ownership, a rallying cry for a post-Jim Crow, pre-Great migration Southern blacks. It granted a language to the peoples of New Orleans, yes, but less in the way of linguistics and more as a unifier of social and political resistance. Jazz was the soundtrack to the South side of Chicago and to Harlem, as the newly emancipated and much-targeted northern black people established communities during the early 20th century. Jazz was less language and more code, much like the negro spiritual was a generation prior, a code that revealed protest and resilience (Hobson) (LESTER) . Folksy also, is the slightly more self aware and culturally conscious depiction of ‘the zone’ in Pixar’s soul. The ‘zone’, the transcendental plane that one ascends to in the heights of passion, where protagonist Joe Gardener resides while in the heat of his piano performances, is an interesting beginning to the separation of the Black protagonist’s labour that both constitutes and results in Jazz. By separating soul and mind from the body, the plot of the film happily glosses over the labour of love that music is to Joe Gardner, to the extent that he is willing to be a music teacher in New York City(thus obviously underpaid). The folksiness is bared in its deliberateness by the film’s production crew happily admitting that the musician profession was the easiest to root for, thus exploiting the history of jazz and black music in its ability to overcome (as with its practitioners) while patting itself on the back for representing a black neighbourhood community without so much as hinting toward any racial themes, other than the slight nod to the barbershop.. Soul finds itself with much less respite than it would like in the details: The setting, happily gets the city right and is but five miles south of perfection. The neighbourhood of Harlem, home of the early 1900s Harlem Renaissance, where New York jazz(especially of the African American disposition) is historically most often situated. The Astoria, Queens, setting is a little pallid, in a movie called Soul about a man who is passionate about jazz. Geography is a much more complex, though no less egregious, fallacy in La La Land, where the diversity of the city of choice, Los Angeles, is acknowledged in the introductory dance number and then left forgotten, glossed over to make way for the sheen of the Fred and Ginger(Astaire and Rogers) nostalgia a la Americana that it forgives its own lack of diversity for. This tokenism is best critiqued by Billy Stevenson, of the Australian ‘Senses of Cinema’:“…..one of the most daring sequences is the opening musical number, “Another Day of Sun,” in which a rich cross-section of Los Angeles residents break into song on the Judge Harry Pregerson Interchange. Shot on location and backed by awe-inspiring vistas of the city – apparently Chazelle wanted to capture the sheer scale of Los Angeles – it’s a wonderful revival of the freeway reveries that enthralled New Hollywood. Yet, as the film unfolds, that exuberance is somewhat soured by the sinking suspicion that this interchange is about the only place diversity can flourish in Chazelle’s city.” (Stevenson, 2017). In the densely problematic scene that contains the performance of ‘I Ran’, by a Flock of Seagulls, we see two interlinked issues that, admittedly, transcend the racial but are pertinent nonetheless. The first of these is the continuation of the Sebastian character’s continued presumption of naivete and cunning within Mia. The obvious misogynistic undertone of Sebastian objecting to the slightest exertion of power over his performance is congruous to the lack of autonomy that Mia is given in the film’s narrative. Alongside this, the fact that Mia is attending a party where Sebastian is the performer indicates a socioeconomic divide between the two, which, in combination with Mia’s relatively mid-century garb perptuates the theme of the naïve white woman patron of American music, and the contrast of Mia’s conservative and 1900s appearance with the rest of the attendees at the party furthers a subtle message of innocence projected upon her character. This helps show Sebastian’s valiance in ‘saving’ her from the pedestrian apathy toward jazz as the film progresses. In a film that is contemporary enough to the #metoo movement to know better, we see a further reduction of Mia’s autonomy as Refinery29’s Gina Lyons points out: “In the end, the only markers of Mia’s success are that she’s wearing a nice dress, gets recognised in the coffee shop where she used to work, and — in the most maddening signifier of “having it all” — she comes home to a man and a baby. This final development in the life of her character comes straight out of left field. In no part of the story do we ever hear Mia longing for a baby, or a husband. But there they are, showing viewers that this is what fulfilment and success look like for a woman. My stomach turned when she walks into her lovely house in her high heels to that gratuitous infant playing on the floor. Do we still have to signal a woman’s success with domestic fulfilment while a man’s entails ownership of his dreams?” (Lyons, 2017). Indeed, little more than a body and a prop does Mia seem to be, along with ‘Herman’ in the aforementioned scene where Ryan Gosling’s Sebastian breathlessly laments the past of his dying art form. We see Herman, the trumpeter in the jazz band, be a focus of one shot in the scene and that too only while his trumpet, his instrument, is in the foreground. As the scene progresses, the band’s music (‘Herman’s Habit’) crosses the diegetic line to thematically underscore Sebastian’s eulogy for the very craft that they are engaged in. This can be seen as both a literal interpretation and analogy of the imposition of Sebastian’s white puritanism upon an African American art form that he is convinced he is in the sole pursuit of. It would seem that this fictional instance of performative Black art under intense scrutiny from a (superior) Caucasian authority can be read as analogous to Pim Higginson’s reading of the climax scene of the movie Karmen Geï, “The deadly encounter between Karmen and Lamine takes place on the catwalk above the theater where Yandé Codou Sène is singing Kar- men’s praises. Significantly, the iconic stability of the locations in which Baker performs – the cage (in Zouzou), the boat, the sailor’s bar – helps consolidate the racial score by providing a disciplinary white interpretative grid over the scene. The boat-ride with Dar is a symbol of her desire at that moment for travel but also anticipates the restricted space (with her future husband) that is reserved for her. The bar represents a natural space of performance in which to sing her nostalgia for her ‘natural’ African origin (or again, the return to the symbolic space of the boat provided in the earlier ‘Rêves’). Karmen’s song instead takes place behind the scenes, in the space from which the illusion of stability is produced. The catwalk reveals the multiple ropes and lights that allow for the creation of the theatrical illusion in which Zouzou/Aouïna/Baker performs. Karmen’s refusal is thus simultaneously the rejection of the frame of the film in which she performs and of the possessiveness of Lamine, who likewise seeks to impose his frame” (Higginson). Much more blatant is the substance of the conversation in the scene itself, or rather, the part of the conversation that lacks substance. Mia evokes Kenny G and ‘elevator music’ with an ignorance that is far removed from the fact that she is also a practicing performer with a relatively deep insight into and empathy towards the arts. Apart from being a primer in the assumed and perceived role of the American White woman patron of music i.e. prosaic in engagement and ignorant in perception. This proves true historically as well specific to American music in Locke’s simple summation “Women’s work in and for music has gone underreported or else been ridiculed. Writers of a journalistic or satirical bent have delighted in ribbing women patrons of music for their foibles while leaving unmentioned their substantial accomplishments” (Locke, 1994). It is now blithely apt that one reviewer warns any interested parties to steer well clear of La La Land’s director: “If it has a message, it’s that nobody should ever date its virtuoso director Damien Chazelle: both La La Land and Chazelle’s previous movie, Whiplash, were about jazz musicians who thought they had to dump their girlfriends to achieve artistic success.” (Walker, 2017). This finds itself extremely current as well with Mia embodying Nathan Rabin’s manic pixie dream girl; which he defines as “a fantasy figure who exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures” (Rabin, 2007). Summarised elsewhere as “Boy meets Girl. Girl inspires Boy. Boy succeeds. Girl – who knows?” (Cohen, 2016). Considering that this scene contains both a deliberate limited visibility of Black music while also treating a cultured woman as little more than a cathartic love interest. This scene begins to outline the white-washed nostalgia Americana that wouldn’t be out of place in the fifties. The allusion to Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers now begins to seem more like longing for a segregated white-supremacist past and less an appreciative nod to musical cinema tradition. As useful as endless theorising might be, proof can lie squarely in the testament of African American journalist Soraya Nadia McDonald, because as the above begins to show us, sometimes it may be useful to just listen to a Black voice that has lived the Black American experience.“It’s debatable whether we’d even be discussing this were it not for the rise of Trumpism, in particular its distinguishing features of curdled self-referentialism and poison-tipped nostalgia that guarantees restoring a cultural hegemony centered around white supremacy. Trumpism has brought to the fore that which was always lurking, unleashed on a wave of populism that threatens to obscure its true mission to “Make America White Again.” The fact that it’s so foregrounded forces you to rethink what your eyes are showing you a little bit. It sets you on edge. It makes it more difficult to just let something like La La Land just passively wash over you when, however well-intentioned, the film hearkens back to a time when black humanity onscreen was deliberately hamstrung. It forces us to remember that what you don’t see is just as important as what you do. The golden age of Hollywood has come and gone. A golden age of black film has yet to dawn.” (Mcdonald, 2017). The ownership of Black performances by Black bodies is almost poetically highlighted in Pixar’s Soul. Considering that the film chooses to put front and centre a Black performer, in the form of Joe Gardener, one wouldn’t be remiss for feeling a sense of optimism. However, Joe’s soul is whisked away from his body quite early in the film and the Black performers body spends most of the film inhabited by a (presumably White) unborn soul, voiced by Tina Fey. From Tiana in The Princess and the Frog, the obsession of animation to put Black voices into small, blue-green bodies is almost grotesque. Troubling also is the appearance of Joe’s body, which appears to be a slightly polished take on the 1930s caricature of a bebop musician, with an often-seen garb who’s silhouette that bears a near uncanny resemblance to the ‘Zoot Suit’. Incidentally, it is widely appreciated that a man of Sebastian’s bohemian proclivities would most likely dress more like Joe Gardener than Joe Gardener would dress like Joe Gardener. This ties in with the theme of these aspects of Black culture granting legitimacy to the ‘hipness’ to their White patrons, while the same White patrons are paradoxically engaged in the critique of Black culture. It is very telling in how well Ingrid Monson’s account of White male patronage in bebop resonates with Sebastian’s persona:“The intersection of gender and racial stereotypes in the concept of hipness deserves some attention: for the “subcultural” image of bebop was nourished by a conflation of the music with a style of black masculinity that held, and continues to hold, great appeal for white audiences and musicians. The frequency with which white male musicians and fans emulated the style and bearing of their African American heroes has received much comment. The power of these stereotypes is such that white Americans in search of a bohemian experience often appear disappointed when their rebellious heroes fail to express sentiments in line with their reputations.” (Monson, 1995). With regards to music, we as viewers hardly ever see Joe play and are invited to be more inspired by the ‘zone’ the aforementioned abstraction of transcendence that serves as an easy out from acknowledging the toil of a struggling yet passionate Black jazz musician. It would seem however, surprise and outrage are to be expected to be received with La La Land’s black erasure by Black cultural icons such as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who wrote in the Hollywood reporter “Wait just a minute! The White guy wants to preserve the Black roots of jazz while the Black guy is the sell-out?” and former Vampire Weekend member Rostam who tweeted, “black people invented jazz but now we need a white man to come save/preserve it? sorry this narrative doesn’t work for me in 2016” (Abdul-Jabbar, 2017) (Rostam, 2016). However, surprise and outrage are instantaneous and help the White liberal media, and hence the White liberal populace, absolve themselves of the long-standing, deep-rooted nature of this phenomenon. This exploitation is most apparent in its American-ness in the history of the White Capitalist, profiteering off Black creation and Black performance. This stems back to the exploitation of the Black blues musician by wily record executives and in backroom copyright deals between White executives of Black artists through mid-century America (this would result in disproportionately small royalty shares and copyright values going to many Black RnB/Soul creators). Perhaps most famously in White performers profiting off Black music either by performing uncredited ‘covers’ or through mockery, like in minstrel shows (Greene, 1998). It is fitting that a nation founded on unpaid Black labour has a music industry also founded on unpaid Black labour. If this comparison seems harsh, consider that of K.J. Greene’s: “One might draw a parallel between Blacks in the share crop system to Black artists in the recording industry. The share crop system divested economic compensation from Black farmers who did not own capital resources (such as equipment, seeds, etc.), or maintain thefinancial records detailing who owed how much. Furthermore, many Black farmers were illiterate or semi-literate, reflecting a legacy of segregated and substandardeducational facilities. The result was pervasive exploitation of agrarian Blacks, despite the theoretical race-neutrality of the share-crop system. Similarly, agents of the recording industry appropriated intellectual property from these same agrarian Blacks who created the music which came to be known as the blues. Again, as in the share-crop system, white businessmen controlled the capital resources (such as record studios and publishing houses), as well as access to the expertise needed to secure legal protection. In the employment area, Blacks had been subject to rampant exploitation; the situation seems identical in the artistic area, in spite of, and to a degree perhaps because of, copyright law. Particularly in a multi-billion industry, such as the recording industry, it seems difficult to reconcile the fact that while Black-created music is omnipresent, the flow of dollars has only occasionally created Black millionaires.” (Greene, 1998). On the theme of black bodies and voices of color, it is interesting to note Connie, an Asian American character in Soul who plays the trombone and is greatly inspired by Joe Gardner to keep doing so. Unfortunately, the film doesn’t seem to want to allow this musical voice of color to be inspired by another musical voice of color, so where we see Joe fail to persuade Connie earlier on in the film, it is 22 in Joe’s body that convinces Connie to keep at it. This is a tertiary plot at best, but the passing on of the Jazz tradition through the generations is an important portrayal and would have been more suited to the arc of the one character in the film who is a teacher, a jazz musician, and Black. La La Land precedes the climax of the second act with a jazz fusion number called Start a Fire written and performed by John Legend. While metaphorically signifying the sparking of the flame in the protagonists’ relationship, which comes to an end shortly after, the piece and its context epitomise a larger problem within the film, the treatment of jazz in modern America and race relations in general. Nearing the end of the song, we see Mia, one of the protagonists, engulfed by the crowd’s hooliganism in adoration of her partner and his band mates. The sequence is supposed to signify the engulfment of Sebastian’s integrity, specific to jazz, by his commercial actions. However, the visual that opens this musical number interests me most. While I recognize that this was not the intention of the director, cinematographer or costume department, the silhouette of John Legend, adorned in a red jacket, with the hat, has the distinct misfortune of bearing quite a strong resemblance to Uncle Tom, a historically racist character in America. Again, acknowledging that this is a coincidence, I will not analyse this as much as use it as an analogy for the racial characterizations in this film, and the significant weight that this film’s singular significant character of colour is pulling. The vilifying perspective of the narrative towards John Legend’s ‘Keith’ character’s new world approach to jazz, is on the one hand, a clever subversion of which way the racial tide flows when it comes to the corruption of Jazz; On the other hand, it is a rather transparent grasp by writer and casting director alike to create a multiculturalism in the conversation around jazz that nearly erases the racial aspect. In a largely white film, this comes off as more than just a little noseblind. Keith’s deviancy, much like other raciallised jazz tropes in both these films, has a historical tinge to it as well. Another proponent of racist American iconography, Mark Twain once said that history never repeats itself, but it rhymes. We find the theme of the morally bankrupt jazz musician as a poster child for the segregationist culture war as far back as the 1920s, as portrayed best in the book, Young Man with a Horn in the 1930s, and later in the film adaptation in 1950 (Lopes, 2005). In this tale, we see a brooding, obsessive protagonist drive himself into a whole host of vices in the pursuit of Jazz. Having made clear the protagonist’s association with Black Jazz musicians, the leading man’s character is strongly implied to have been led astray by the already sordid world of (Black) jazz. We see the media and law enforcement attention in the direction of Narcotics use in Jazz circles in postwar America and cannot help but wonder why so much of the Black-focused narrative of Jazz has been of sin. We must also wonder why Damian Chazelle gets to be self congratulatory about the racial politics(or lack thereof in this film) when it is clear he is buying into and thus contributing to the tradition of these slanderous portrayals of the Jazz world. The aforementioned Kareem Abdul Jabbar takes note of this also: “This could be a deliberate ironic twist, but if it is, it is a distasteful one for African Americans” (Abdul-Jabbar, 2017). Soul and La La Land show two different levels of puppetry, with a white man pulling decidedly black strings. In soul we see the literal loss of black ownership over Joe Gardner’s body to a race-neutral character voiced by a white person(Tina Fey), where his pursuit of Jazz is slowly validated by 22’s discovery of it, culminating in her allowing Joe to reclaim his body so that he may finally achieve success as a member of Dorothea Turner’s(Angela Bassett’s) band. We see Joe, through the film forced to justify his need for jazz in general and the Dorothea Gardner audition in specific. His eventual success(not just professionally, but in his mother’s acceptance of his Jazz dream), although half-heartedly pushed to be a prominent plot-line finds itself as secondary to 22’s self actualisation. Returning to Pim Higginson’s analysis of Karmen Gei, where she alludes to the “paternalistic (read imperial or neocolonial) relationship that African filmmakers experience in making their films under the watchful eye of the French master for whom order (and hierarchy) are insistently and self-interestedly maintained”, which can clearly be seen in both films (Higginson).As illustrated above, Joe’s pursuit of jazz is shown as having led him to relatively little success, until it takes a (white) soul’s validation to allow his character to embark on a fruitful venture in that direction. However this white master gaze is most obvious throughout La La Land where the (liberated) black jazz musician in ‘Keith’ is shown to be morally dubious and weak in the face of greed and profit and the only black musician’s that Sebastian does not denigrate are those that accompany him or best serve his narrative, all relegated to underpaid bar musician roles. Further, Higginson illustrates “Perhaps the clearest example of this occurs when Samba beats out a simple rhythm with two rocks as Karmen dances. This joyful moment suggests a degree zero of music and language in which the body performs itself communally – even if this space is nevertheless cleared by the cinematographic apparatus that surrounds it. Significantly, as Lamine’s uncomprehending stare demonstrates, his possessiveness renders him incapable of participating in – or even understanding – this non-competitive aesthetic. Music clearly plays a fundamental role, from the very beginning of the film, in giving life to Karmen’s embodied performance” (Higginson). We can see a similar phenomenon in Mia’s doe-eyed admiration of Sebastian where his musical success is seen as diametrically opposed to her happiness or success and breeds resentment within her. Only when the performance of Jazz is relegated to a more scaled down venue that is literally underground, do we see her validate and appreciate it fully. On a related note, we see Higginson’s analysis of Josephine Baker’s character in the film of the same name, Princess Tam-Tam:“While many have noted how, within the movie, Baker serves as a muse who is returned to her place of origin as an unassimilable other of French identity, what is just as striking is how this also becomes the story of the racial score: music is given a foundational role through the figure of Baker, but it is ultimately writing that gathers up this powerful musical medium and transforms it into the manage- able coherence of a literary narrative. Or at least so it would appear. That is, to the extent that Baker appears in the film, or indeed, as the sole purpose of the film, it is as embodied musicality (itself, a concatenation of associated features cathected to race). As soon as that function has been fulfilled, her performance, radically divorced from the rational force of writing, is returned to the inexpressive natural world from which it came” (Higginson). This bears a heavy resemblance to Joe Gardner’s role in Soul, where his performatory function of inspiring 22 (much like the earlier Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope in Mia) is served and he returns to a slightly more successful life as his reward of providing an awakening for a white coded character that was seen to have been expected to reach those conclusions by herself. It is on the theme of conclusions that we come to ours: The films La La Land and Soul found themselves releasing in an era where American(but also all) film and music are both growing more racially conscious (with no little resistance). From the above, it may seem straightforward to call these errors those of omission; This may hold true as well. However, the benefit of the doubt can extend only so far. With the writing team for Soul happily admitting how jazz could have just as likely been switched out for science as Joe Gardner’s discipline, and also having a much-publicized team of cultural consultants for African American and jazz culture, including legend Herbie Hancock and the film’s composer Jon Batiste, the discourse around white portrayals of POC and especially black culture must raise the bar of consciousness expected of the storytellers.La La Land, similarly, is the second of (Docter & Powers) (Lee, 2018)Chazelle’s films to glorify the toxic pursuit of Jazz by a misunderstood white man, and there would not have been a second, had not the first been so widely lauded. This is not to say that the pinnacles of performance cannot be reached by white artists under the umbrella of black and black influenced musical cinema; But a more educated nod to the roots of the music and discipline represented might be in order Through the above analyses of scenes in both these films, I have looked to highlight the pressing need of racial equality to not be equated with race-blindness in the avenue of Jazz. I have also tried to bring forth larger issues in culture and cinema with regards to the racial implications of these errors.
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