American Popular Music

Gerald Early, professor of English and African-American studies at Washington University, in the July 15/22 issue of The New Republic.

Perhaps Americans, black and white, are discomfited by our popular music because it seems to serve no great ends except to make money and to provide momentary diversion. Perhaps whites are discomfited because our popular music, from ragtime to New Jack Swing, has been called by slang terms derived from its rhythm (ragtime, swing, rhythm and blues, disco) or by slang terms for copulation (jazz and rock ‘n’ roll). Perhaps blacks are discomfited because they cannot find in the African-American origins of American music a high and lofty object, an aspiration to artistic greatness. American popular music thumbs its nose at the respectability of art while yearning for nothing but that respectability. This contradiction is the source of its strengths, and of its imbecility, its cheapness, its nonsense, its incivility, its disregard of taste.

But music has many objects, serves many ends. And the story of American popular music is the story of American democracy at its best and its worst, a full revelation (in Ralph Ellison’s words) of America’s “rich diversity and its almost magical fluidity and freedom” as well as its “inequalities and brutalities.”