[lbo-talk] Re: Black Music Makes History

Jon Johanning jjohanning at igc.org
Sun Oct 12 14:01:36 PDT 2003


On Friday, October 10, 2003, at 04:07 PM, BklynMagus wrote:


> It is as hard to turntable as it is to play the guitar. Both require
> a great deal of practice.

It doesn't look that way to me. But I play classical guitar.

(Well, I guess you probably had rock guitar in mind. That doesn't take much more skill than turntabling.)

Anyway, I find the whole attempt to correlate tastes in music and the other arts with political positions of individuals misguided and not worth the inordinate time some people spend on it. The arts are an extremely complex field in which judgments are made on all sorts of grounds; politics is often somewhat more clear-cut -- when the barricades go up -- but trying to relate the two just leads to all sorts of simplifications.

It's just not true that all lovers of classical music and classical jazz are reactionary -- I know lots of them at least as left as I am, and I think I'm just exactly left enough :-) (that too is a judgment call, of course). It's just as untrue, heaven knows, that all lovers of pop music (of whatever kind) are lefties.

Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________________ A gentleman haranguing on the perfection of our law, and that it was equally open to the poor and the rich, was answered by another, 'So is the London Tavern.' -- "Tom Paine's Jests..." (1794); also attr. to John Horne Tooke (1736-1812) by Hazlitt



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