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This article examines the pervasive and vehement antijazz crusade of the 1920s as a significant cultural phenomenon that reveals profound anxieties about race, modernity, and social order in post-World War I America. It argues that the widespread condemnation of jazz music by medical authorities, religious leaders, social reformers, and public intellectuals functioned as a proxy war against the rapid social transformations of the Jazz Age, with the music serving as a potent symbol for broader fears regarding racial integration, sexual liberation, and the erosion of Victorian morality. Through analysis of primary source discourse from the period, this article categorizes the…
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This article examines the Cotton Club, Harlem’s most notorious Prohibition-era nightclub, as a critical nexus of racial fantasy and cultural innovation in Jazz Age America. It argues that the club functioned as a hegemonic institution where white ownership meticulously crafted an exoticized “jungle” aesthetic for a wealthy, whites-only clientele, effectively commodifying Black bodies and artistry within a framework of primitivist desire. However, far from being a mere site of oppression, the club also became an unlikely incubator for Black musical excellence. Through a tripartite analysis of the club’s ownership and theming, the compositional strategies of Duke Ellington, and the politics…
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The cultural ferment of the Jazz Age in the United States was soundtracked by a deeply segregated music industry, which produced two distinct, parallel musical economies. This article examines the genesis and implications of this dichotomy, contrasting the mainstream, white-dominated popular music market with the niche-marketed “Race Records” industry. It argues that the commercial category of “Race Records,” while a product of exploitative corporate structures designed to profit from racial segregation, inadvertently created a crucial platform for autonomous Black artistic expression. By analyzing the aesthetic divergences between these parallel soundscapes, the role of the Black press as a curatorial force,…
Explaining History Podcast
Tag: Primitivism
Primitivism
/ Jazz era