Notes of a Hanging Judge, by Stanley Crouch
Bayles, Martha
S tyle and substance seem to be at odds in contemporary discourse, to the detriment of both. The dense, crackling, iridescent prose of which English is singularly capable is too often wielded in the...
...the latter expresses the cheap nihilism of an aggressively obnoxious popular culture whose depredations can no longer be distinguished from those of the so-called "serious" culture...
...Crouch is best known as a jazz critic —his next two books will be a collection of jazz criticism and a biography of the bebop saxophonist, Charlie Parker...
...For this reason alone, it's worth reading Notes of a Hanging Judge, a collection of political, literary, and cultural essays by Stanley Crouch...
...And he mourns the sacrifice of James Baldwin's "imposing gifts" to the "intellectual airlessness" of a literary career "sold out to rage, despair, self-righteousness and a will to scandalize" Or, in a formulation more typical of the pungent Crouch style, "Baldwin was a seminal influence on the subsequent era of regression in which Stokely Carmichael, Rap Brown, LeRoi Jones, and Eldridge Cleaver transformed white America into Big Daddy and the Negro movement into an obnoxious, pouting adolescent demanding the car keys...
...Except for the final essay, "Body and Soul," a celebratory travel piece about the Umbria Jazz festival in Perugia, Italy, Notes of a Hanging Judge does not focus directly on jazz...
...The dense, crackling, iridescent prose of which English is singularly capable is too often wielded in the service of stale and perverse ideas...
...Like the other arts, jazz spent the late 1960s and early 1970s stampeding off the cliff of what Jacques Barzun has called "artistic abolitionism...
...Given such convictions, it is hardly surprising that Crouch cannot abide the type of political leadership that defines black Americans as helpless, and excuses their destructive behavior as the inevitable fruit of racism...
...Ready on My Mind" does not just praise Jackson's speechifying style...
...Sometimes the change is subtle, as when a drier, brisker breeze starts filtering in, nudging the muggy stuff aside...
...The point to recall is that when the storm is over—and unfortunately, it's not over yet—Stanley Crouch will be among the few stepping out to greet the rainbow...
...For example, he mounts a scathing attack on the filmmaker Spike Lee, whose attachment to 1960s-style militance he describes as the sentimental indulgence of a privileged youth ill-informed about the real problems of the black poor...
...He excoriates the "tantrum politics" of the black power movement for having retarded black assimilation into the electoral process, and praises those politicians who have furthered that assimilation...
...Perhaps if Crouch had been able to witness Jackson's more recent performances at Stanford University and Harvard Law School, he would have added more than a postscript...
...Likewise, Crouch raps rap for being a creation less of the street than of "middle-class Negroes acting out their version of a 'gangster aesthetic.' " To some readers, there may be scant reason to compare a rising pop-cultural star like Lee, or the rappers, with a falling one like Michael Jackson...
...Like his mentors Ellison and Murray, Crouch mounts an unapologetic defense of the affirmative spirit of blues, gospel, and other strains of Afro-American music...
...Given the insularity of most jazz musicians and their admirers, to say nothing of the exclusionary attitude toward jazz that still exists among many intellectuals concerned with the survival of high culture, the question becomes: How is this possible...
...With very few exceptions, jazz musicians have never measured musical merit by the yardstick of race...
...The former belongs to an essentially affirmative tradition of black performing art dating back to the eighteenth century...
...standards is Crouch's vision of jazz as the musical embodiment of black Americans' "heroic optimism," their traditional "willingness to take the field, to do battle, to struggle up from the sink holes of self-pity...
...Originally appearing in the New Republic, the essay, entitled "Ready on My Mind," reveals Crouch's weakness as a political reporter—namely, his tendency to listen to the music rather than the words...
...In this respect, Crouch's essays arrive like the end of bad weather...
...politician...
...In the same spirit, Crouch reserves special scorn for the popular culture's tendency to amplify the most negative and apocalyptic strains in black life...
...But unlike the others, jazz has not been lyMartha Bayles is completing Dark Gods, a critical history of American popular music, for the Free Press...
...And, perhaps more to the point nowadays, there is also no such thing as affirmative action...
...On the contrary, he follows the example of such older jazz-based writers as Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray in using the music as a vantage point from which to scrutinize the rest of the world...
...It is regrettable that Notes of a Hanging Judge leads off with an essay on that particular would-be (or wouldn't-be...
...closely related to the question of...
...Crouch regards that era of regression, which began in the late 1960s, as having sent "not only black America but this nation itself into an intellectual tailspin on the subjects of race, of culture, of heritage...
...But Crouch's active participation in the recent rehabilitation of jazz seems to have immunized him against all sorts of pernicious nonsense, especially the racial kind...
...Here he echoes another elder, Harold Cruse, in counting the ways in which "cowardice or intellectual dishonesty among Afro-American intellectuals and commentators allowed for the sustained power of more than a few silly ideas...
...Instead, the efforts of musicians like Wynton Marsalis and critics like Crouch have enabled jazz to regain the high ground it occupied during and after World War II...
...Yet I suspect that Crouch's efforts at persuasion are also aimed at himself, because the essay ends with a postscript deploring the swiftness with which Jackson reverted to racial politics during the 1989 mayoral election in Chicago...
...ing at the bottom ever since, learning how to love its shattered "postmodernist" state...
...Much of what gets called "racism" nowadays is simply disgust with this stale mass of hot air...
...It also strives to persuade the reader that the candidate's "rainbow coalition" represented a definitive break with the politics of racial resentment...
...But as NOTES OF A HANGING JUDGE: ESSAYS AND REVIEWS, 1979-1988 Stanley Crouch/Oxford University Press/288 pp...
...In celebrating the greater expressiveness of Jackson's preacherly oratory over the dryasdust droning of his fellow candidates, Crouch overlooks the worrisome implications of what Jackson is actually saying...
...Picking it up and noting that the "hanging judge" in question is a black writer who spent ten years working for the Village Voice, one might easily assume that here is another case of the demented ravings of the 1960s refusing to dissipate, like a polluted atmospheric inversion...
...It's rare to find both verbal virtuosity and rational coherence in the same person, even rarer when that person is a journalist...
...And matters of substance are too often expounded in the monochromatic monotone of the average op-ed page...
...36 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1990...
...But, unlike the majority of jazz aficionados, Crouch does not retreat with his beloved music to a cultural island...
...As Crouch sums it up: "Instead of minstrel mugging, you have counterfeit thugging...
...With regard to culture, the timely if surprising answer is that jazz has been more successful than the other modernist arts at preserving and extending its traditional standards of excellence...
...Which brings us to Jesse Jackson...
...For example, he sizes up Louis Farrakhan as an incoherent ranter to whom "the past is silly putty...
...As he describes it, "the voice of the Negro . . . has provided us with the most sterling sense of tragedy and has long proven that human beings need not be reduced to lower forms of animal life by great suffering...
...For he claims to despise the "mirror-licking ethnic chauvinism" of black leaders and cultural figures who propagate half-baked myths about black culture and history...
...How can this problematic but undeniably modernist American art form illuminate the decay of cultural standards in general, much less the broad array of other topics tackled by Crouch, such as feminism, crime, prisons, city politics, the Third World, homosexuality, boxing, or the rise of black power from the ashes of the civil rights movement...
...22.95 Martha Bayles THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1990 35 Crouch points out, the comparison reveals how rapidly we are moving from benign to malignant forms of popular entertainment...
...More often, the change begins with an electric charge and a darkening of the skies, followed by a thunderclap, a blinding flash, and a torrent of words...
...In other words, there is a difference between Jackson's singing and dancing (not to mention his adventures in plastic surgery) and the increasingly violent and obscene antics of the rappers...
...Ironically, the current resurgence of pernicious racial nonsense in both culture and politics may bias the bookstore browser against Crouch's collection...
...On the most respected bandstands, there is no such thing as discrimination...
Vol. 23 • September 1990 • No. 9
