Conclusion: Feminine Soul of Black Critical Theory

In a piece originally published in the 1960s and entitled Perennial Fashion, Adorno directs specific disenchantment at jazz music. While most aspects of Adorno’s critique regarding the structural form of jazz apply generally to the 1941 On Popular Music—regarding the standardisation and pseudo-individualisation—Perennial Fashion contains several insights original to the African and American history of jazz. Adorno (1997) applies a reactionary archaeology of jazz so as to arrive at his usual termination of derision and discord with this genre of music. It is therefore unsurprising that he insists that the “African elements in jazz” although seemingly primitive and naturalistic, “was from the very beginning integrated into a strict scheme” (ibid. 121). He contends that this integration is not entirely the outcome of scurrilous marketing practices. For, it is his belief that the propensity of rigidification and commercialisation transpire from the genre itself. “The abuse of jazz is not the external calamity in whose name the puristic defenders of ‘real’ unadulterated jazz furiously protest; such misuse originates in jazz itself” (ibid.). Using, terms that contemporarily are perceived as offensive, although germane to the 1960s context when writing, Adorno identifies the roots of jazz in the transatlantic slave trade of the eighteenth and nineteenth century; and its attenuation with the rise of industrial capitalism. He uses this era’s formulation of the as a basis for the claim the commercial exploitation of jazz is rooted in jazz itself. Borne from the captivity of human enslaved people, jazz was a means of oral history to bear witness to the depravity and inhumanity of the capitalist-driven state sponsored capture and transportation of human beings. Adorno cynically deploys the role of music stating that, “The Negro spirituals, antecedents of the blues, were slave songs and as such combined the lament of unfreedom with its oppressed confirmation” (ibid.). The proposition being that jazz rather than a catalyst for agency merely is an expression in musical form of the experience of enslavement and unfreedom in a totalitarian system of inhumane exploitation. Furthermore, according to Adorno (ibid.) it is difficult to isolate the definitively “authentic Negro elements in jazz” this is because the White lumpenproletariat were also a ruthlessly exploited aspect of the capitalist driven slave trade as they were moved in and out of the lowest positions of the paid labour market in respect to its replacement by enslaved people and newly emancipated slaves. The total effective rendering of the Black experience as an authentic element of jazz according to Adorno is that of pseudo-individualisation. The latter relates to a situation in which jazz is marketed as “consumer art” created especially for the audience listening; it is “The particular effects with which jazz fills out its schema, syncopation above all, strive to create the appearance of being the outburst or caricature of untrammelled subjectivity – in effect, that of the listener – or perhaps the most subtle nuance dedicated to the greater glory of the audience” (ibid. 125).