The Voice of America Jazz Hour was broadcast on Voice of America beginning on January 6, 1955, and through 2003… As jazz was frequently banned in the Soviet Union and countries sympathetic to its views, Voice of America was often the only way people in those countries could listen to jazz, and Willis Conover's politics-free broadcasts are widely credited for keeping interest in jazz active in Soviet satellite states. [3]
en.wikipedia.org
William Gavin, a former official of the United States Information Agency, recently called the Conover show one of America's greatest foreign policy tools, since it attracts an audience that the Voice hopes will also listen to the freight - the expression of official American policies.
nytimes.com
Voice of America Jazz Hour
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Maybe the real lesson is that it's a bad idea to deprive people of culture since creates the feeling of being deprived
Not true at all. A lot of jazz came out of the Soviet Union and other parts of the warsaw pact. A lot of it was also really good and comperable to American jazz. check out Funked Up East youtube channel for some.
cringe & blue-pilled
fuck j*zz
Adorno 4va
Adorno is the leftist equivalent to a 16 year old complaining about rap on reddit.
Adorno's critique of jazz only really covers big bang, swing, Lindy hop. It makes no sense to extend it to Bebop forward.
Stalin banned it in the 50s for being bourgeois. Khrushchev unbanned it but it never regained popularity
Americas cultural warfare was supposed to make the west look cool and dynamic. Playing boring music that only elderly college professors listen to does the opposite. Gavin was a 5th Columnist who should be celebrated by the left for delaying the fall of the Soviet Union for a few decades.
Yeah, check out the movie "the Jolly Fellows." It's a funny Soviet jazz comedy.
this
i love adorno, but adorno’s criticisms of jazz are retarded and lack a material analysis
max roach, nina simone, the musicians of the AACM, ornette coleman, among many others were communists. bebop, post-bop, avant-garde jazz etc. are all genres which directly contradict adorno. it was a music of struggle originating out of blues and the hardships of its own times, and thusly a struggle against the colonized position of black musicians. also, many jazz radicals such as charles mingus were originally rejected from segregated orchestras (and thus the white bourgeoisie) for being black, which set them on the jazz course. get with the program
here's a nice jazz channel from the US/WP
youtube.com
*SU
Jazz was literally the music of the black proletariat u guys are dum dums
Came to post something about Funked Up East
really? I appreciate the good stuff Stalin did but for fuck's sake, if retarded stuff like this was never enacted the reputation of socialism wouldn't be as ruined as it is nowadays
This is extremely my shit
youtu.be
Listen to this mate.
Maybe the Soviets shouldn't have created an avenue for the west to posture itself by placing restrictions on the arts. I just hate this mentality among certain leftists that just because some piece of culture is supposedly, or actually, associated with the bourgeoisie, it's bad. It reeks of a romanticization of the stereotypical condition of the proletariat, which is supposed to be something that we aspire to uplift people from, not reduce everyone too.
Well I think 20th century Soviet socialism was also this utopian movement about the "New Man" and so on, and particularly during Stalin the idea was to "uplift" everyone to this higher state of being. And part of that was protecting the people from ideological "contamination." The stereotype we have of Soviet music is the Red Army Choir – military stuff. But that in no way reflects what actual music for most people was like. For Stalin-era music, imagine something like this:
youtube.com
A happy song about waking up cheerfully to a great new day of work, and greeting your joyful neighbors on the way to the factory as the nature itself wakes up too and brings good fortune to the workers. Like the ideal Stalin-era song would be something like "Let there always be sunshine:"
youtube.com
North Korean music such as the Pochonbo Electronic Ensemble is also like this (in addition to being fantastic):
youtube.com
I think these cultures really in my view deny that anyone is unhappy. But the flip side is that people are not too enthusiastic either. The ideal New Man is happy and polite but stoic. Where in the United States or something you get more extreme polarities. Anyways I'm kind of rambling and I don't think North Korea or something like that would be my scene, but I'm not trying to knock it and what I've heard from people I trust about the country is that the people are lovely, kind, generous and go about their lives in a dignified way quite unlike "ours."
Just stopping by to post this gem.
Socialism literally does do this though.
Capitalism has a better reputation?
Benjamin > Adorno