Re: What Is Jewish Music?

[Kame'a Media <media...>]

Klezcorner (at) aol(dot)com wrote:

> In a message dated 6/23/99 6:05:19 AM, media (at) kamea(dot)com writes:
>
> <<
> > I would be interested in a justification
> > of the CD "Great Jewish Music: Burt Bacharach" on Tzadik.
> > >>
>
> THERE IS NO JUSTIFICATION FOR THIS CD!

Right on, Simon.  Thank you for your candor.

For decades in America,  Jewish entertainers went to great pains to hide
their Jewish origins, changing names and noses in their quest for the
"bitch goddess" Success.

With the ascendency of the Jewish upper middle class, it's now cool to be
Jewish.  But not "too Jewish".  That would tend to make  audiences
uncomfortable because it would demand an awareness and cultural literacy
beyond the "bagels and lox" <yidishkayt>  being marketed by the
multinational corporations that control the culture industry;  those that
foist and strongly promote the "big sellers".

The grandchildren of those who abandoned their culture flock  to "Jewish
Music" programs, hungry to fill the  bottomless void of having grown up
in the plastic, shake 'n bake,  cultural and spiritual slums of monied,
privileged suburban America.

What Sartre so elegantly called "nostalgie de la boue" (literally:
nostalgia for mud).

 For  the  Bacharach CD to actually be presented in the marketplace as
"Jewish Music" is an  insult to the intelligent.

Since the recently-departed Mel Torme, a Jew, wrote "The Christmas Song"
("Chestnuts roasting on the open fire...")
this fact would make that song "Jewish Music", too, since the writer was
Jewish and an "outsider".  Please.

Does the expression "reductio ad absurdum" come to mind?


Wolf Krakowski
www.kamea.com

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            Salvador Dali











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