Hating Jazz

"As former New York Times jazz critic Ben Ratliff wrote, "Hatred of jazz, whether sincere or fashionable or reflexive, as a kind of sorry-not-sorry joke-runs strangely deep in American culture." A great deal of jazz writing has focused on its development into a respected art form. But this is only half the picture. By focusing on the rejection of the music, Andrew S. Berish says, we see more holistically jazz's complicated place in American cultural life. Like criticisms leveled at rock 'n' roll, country, and rap, the contempt for these forms has historically been a tangled mess of musical and social critique. Criticism of the music became inextricable from ideas about race, class, gender, and sexuality. Historically, jazz hate has run from mild dislike to angry denunciation and fiery contempt. Although it has its own logic, jazz hating has frequently been entangled in other kinds of hate, specifically racism and misogyny. Most importantly, the hatred of jazz is not an idiosyncratic product of an individual encounter between listener and music; it is, instead, a meeting of social, political, historical, and individual factors. Berish organizes his discussion thematically: negative evaluations based on taste discrimination, humor and satire, and genre definitions and boundaries, arguing that hating jazz, despite its many shades and variations, is above all an intense affective engagement with the music. Although affect may seem immediate-a biological reaction to the environment-is always social, historical, and material: we react to music in certain ways because of who we are, where we are, and when we are"--