By Georgia Jackson, College of Arts and Sciences
About 30 minutes into the 2016 film “La La Land,” Mia Dolan (played by Emma Stone) confesses she hates jazz.
“I should probably tell you something now,” she says. “Just to get it out of the way.”
Her announcement stops Seb Wilder (played by Ryan Gosling) in his tracks.
“What do you mean you ‘hate jazz?’” Seb asks. He proceeds to take Mia to a jazz club, where he rattles off a brief history of the genre and tells her “what’s at stake” during a live performance. “You know, I just think that people, when they say that they, you know, hate jazz, they just, they don’t have context. They don’t know where it comes from.”
The scene inspired Andrew Berish, an associate professor in the Department of Humanities and Cultural Studies, to take Seb’s question — What does it mean when someone says they hate jazz? — seriously and to explore the complex and often polarizing emotions the music evokes.
“I’ve always been fascinated by the internal criticism of jazz,” Berish, who grew up playing the drums and, later, the guitar, said in an interview with community radio host Andrew Thomas of WORT. “Because, for all the people outside who say they hate it, there’s intense arguments within the jazz community about what constitutes the music. Is it a tradition? Is it a mode of exploration? What is it?”
When it comes to hating jazz, Berish, who teaches courses on jazz and civil rights, has heard it all. Chaotic. Boring. Formless. Difficult to dance to. Not melodic. Aimless. Self-indulgent. Too serious. Like eating spinach.
Berish's latest book "Hating Jazz" is out now.
In the 1920s, the music was criticized for leading to sexual deviancy, juvenile delinquency and social disease. At the peak of its popularity in the ‘30s and ‘40s, it was criticized for being mass produced. Later, the well-known German philosopher and musicologist Theodor Adorno called it a tool of mass deception and social control.
Some went so far as to call it fascist.
“There was a fear that the music was brainwashing people,” said Berish, whose book “Hating Jazz: A History of Its Disparagement, Mockery and Other Forms of Abuse” was published this year by University of Chicago Press. “That they were overcome with emotion and unable to think rationally. And in the context of the 1930s, this was of great concern.”
Ironically, the music was considered “degenerative” by both Nazi and Soviet regimes.
“Their attitude, rhetorically, might be really negative. It’s antisemitic, it’s racist. But in reality, they were quite pragmatic, and they would use the music if they felt it would build morale or further their cause,” Berish said of the Nazis.
By the ‘50s and ‘60s, the U.S. Department of State was paying jazz musicians to tour the world and promote American values.
The irony, according to Berish, was not lost on Black musicians.
“The musicians were fully aware of the contradictions of what this meant — living in a society that was still segregated, that was dominated by racial discrimination. And they’re supposed to be promoting American freedom,” Berish said. “It’s a good example of how the meanings of jazz can change and be used in different contexts."
It also illustrates why the question Seb poses to Mia in “La La Land” is, perhaps, more complicated than it first seems.
“Our response to music can be a social act to our historical moment and cultural context,” Berish said. “We react to music in certain ways because of who we are, where we are and when we are.”
In other words, it’s never just about the music.