1967 Jazz & Pop Results (original) (raw)

John W has done us a solid:

“Here it is, Don (but the entire essay is worth seeking out); by all means, you guys should post the entire quote online:

… The bargain which seems to have been struck is that the whites have had to turn to the blacks for a clue on how to swing with the Body, while the blacks have had to turn to the whites for the secret of the Mind. It was Chubby Checker’s mission, bearing the Twist as good news, to teach the whites, whom history had taught to forget, how to shake their asses again. It is a skill they surely must once have possessed but which they abandoned for puritanical dreams of escaping the corruption of the flesh, by leaving the terrors of the Body to the blacks.

In the swift, fierce years since the 1954 school desegregation decision, a rash of seemingly unrelated mass phenomena has appeared on the American scene – deviating radically from the prevailing Hot-Dog-and-Malted-Milk norm of the bloodless, square, superficial, faceless Sunday-Morning atmosphere that was sufficating the nation’s soul. And all of this in a nation where the so-called molders of public opinion, the writers, politicians, teachers, and cab drivers, are willful, euphoric liars or zip-dam ostriches and owls, a clique of undercover ghosts, a bunch of Walter Jenkinses, a lot of coffee-drinking, cigarette-smoking, sly-sluck-assing, status-seeking, cheating, nervous, dry-balled, tranquilizer-gulched, countdown-minded, out-of-style, slithering snakes. No wonder that many ‘innocent people,’ the manipulated and the stipulated, some of whom were game for a reasonable amount of mystery and even adventure, had their minds scrambled. These observers were not equipped to either feel or know that a radical break, a revolutionary leap out of their sight, had taken place in the secret parts of this nation’s soul. It was as if a driverless vehicle were speeding through the American night down an unlighted street toward a stone wall and was boarded on the fly by a stealthy ghost with a drooling leer on his face, who, at the last detour before chaos and disaster, careened the vehicle down a smooth highway that leads to the future and life; and to ask these Americans to understand that they were the passengers on this driverless vehicle and that the lascivious ghost was the Saturday-night crotchfunk of the Twist, or the ‘Yeah, Yeah, Yeah!’ which the Beatles highjacked from Ray Charles, to ask these Calvinistic profligates to see the logical and reciprocal links is more cruel than asking a hope-to-die Okie Music buff to cop the sounds of John Coltrane.

So Elvis Presley came; strumming a weird guitar and wagging his tail across the continent, ripping off fame and fortune as he scrunched his way, and, like a latter-day Johnny Appleseed, sowing seeds of a new rhythm and style in the white souls of the white youth of America, whose inner hunger and need was no longer satisfied with the antiseptic white shoes and whiter songs of Pat Boone. ‘You can do anything,’ sant Elvis to Pat Boone’s white shoes, ‘but don’t you step on my Blue Suede Shoes!’

Then, as the verbal revolt of the black masses soared to a cacophonous peak – the Body, the Black Amazons and Super-masculine Menials, becoming conscious, shouting, in a thousand different ways, ‘I’ve got a Mind of my own!’; and as the senator from Massachusetts was saving the nation from the Strangelove grasp of Dirty Dick, injecting, as he emerged victorious, a new and vivacious spirit into the people with the style of his smile and his wife’s hairdo; then, as if a signal had been given, as if the Mind had shouted to the Body, ‘I’m ready!’ – the Twist, superseding the Hula Hoop, burst upon the scene like a nuclear explosion, sending its fallout of rhythm into the Minds and Bodies of the people. The fallout: the Hully Gully, the Pashed Potato, the Dog, the Smashed Banana, the Watusi, the Frug, the Swim. The Twist was a guided missile, launched from the ghetto into the very heart of suburbia. The Twist succeeded, as politics, religion, and law could never do, in writing in the heart and soul what the Supreme Court could only write on the books. The Twist was a form of therapy for a convelescing nation…

… and even through the opposition, gorging on Hot Dogs and Malted Milk, with blood now splattered over the white shoes, would still strike out in the dark against the manifestations of the turning, showing the protocol of Southern Hospitality reserved for Niggers and Nigger Lovers – SCHWERNER-CHANEY-GOODMAN – it was still too late. For not only had Luci Baines Johnson danced the Watusi in public with Killer Joe, but the Beatles were on the scene, injecting Negritude by the ton into the whites, in the post-Elvis Presley-beatnik era of ferment.
Before we toss the Beatles a homosexual kiss – saying, ‘If a man be ass enough to reach for the bitch in them, that man will kiss a man, and if a woman reaches for the stud in them, that woman will kiss a woman’ –let us marvel at the genius of their image, which comforts the owls and ostriches in the one spot where Elvis Presley bummed their kick: Elvis, with his unfunky (yet mechanical, alienated) bumpgrinding, was still too much Body (too soon) for the strained collapsing psyches of the Omnipotent Administrators and Ultrafeminines; whereas the Beatles, affecting the caucasoid crown of femininity and ignoring the Body on the visual plane (while their music on the contrary being full of Body), assuaged the doubts of the owls and ostriches by presenting an incorporeal, cerebral image.

The less sophisticated (but no less Body-based) popular music of urban Negros – which was known as Rhythm and Blues before the whites appropriated and distilled it into a product they called Rock ‘n’ Roll – is the basic ingredient, the core, of the gaudy, cacophonous hymns with which the Beatles of Liverpool drive their hordes of Ultrafeminine fans into catatonia and hysteria. For Beatle fans, having been alienated from their own Bodies so long and so deeply, the effect of these potent, erotic rhythms is electric. Into this music, the Negro projected — as it were, drained off, as pus from a sore – a powerful sensuality, his pain and lust; his love and his hate, his ambition and his despair. The Negro projected itno his music his very Body. The Beatles, the four long-haired lads from Liverpool, are offering up as their gift the Negro’s Body, and in so doing establish a rhythmic communication between the listener’s own Mind and Body.
Enter the Beatles – soul by proxy, middlemen between the Mind and the Body. A long way from Pat Boone’s White Shoes. A way station on a slow route traveled with all deliberate speed.”

–Eldridge Cleaver, selections from “Convalescence”, in part 4 of Soul On Ice