Re: demand for "authentic" ethnic

[Robert Cohen <rlcm17...>]

Hey, I don't know, Skip, Piaf's hard times seemed to enhance her appeal in 
France.  But I'm hardly an expert on these matters, and there _is_ no doubt 
something of a (politically/artistically correct?) victimology thing going 
on in some of the arts and/or in arts criticism--most conspicuously 
addressed in The New Yorker in re, I think, a Bill Jones dance production, I 
think in Brooklyn, which the magazine's reviewer considered to be victim (=, 
here, gay/AIDS) art, which couldn't otherwise stand on its own merits. I'm 
even less of an expert on country music, but, fwiw, Dylan just avowed in an 
interview that he thought Hank Williams the greatest songwriter ever--rlc


>From: Velaires (at) aol(dot)com
>Reply-To: jewish-music (at) shamash(dot)org
>To: World music from a Jewish slant <jewish-music (at) shamash(dot)org>
>Subject: Re:  demand for "authentic" ethnic
>Date: Fri, 7 Jan 2000 17:49:28 EST

>I call it the Buena Vista Social Disease, wherein only people who had a 
>hard
>life can get the spotlight.  It's an American Syndrome.  Look at it this 
>way
>-- Lefty frizell was probably a more influential country music singer than
>Hank Williams.  certainly the most imitated.  But, because Hank Williams'
>drinking and wife were so notorious, he gets mythologized.  Now, surely HW
>was great.  But Lefty Frizell's influence is still reckoned with at least 
>as
>much (often second hand via Merle Haggrd's influence, and Merle is right 
>out
>of Lefty).  But when a human interest angle is popped in there -- via
>NPR-type publicity and concentrating on hardship rather than music, you get
>this special disease.  ironic, in that music is supposed to be a voice that
>transcends that sort of journalism by becoming a journalism of the strength
>of the human spirit, not a laundry list of litany.  And most of all this
>holds true for Jewishness.  yes, the Holocaust was the most terrifying
>watershed faced by a people.  But Jews and Jewishness have totally proven
>that "Jew" does not mean victim.

>sh
>
>

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