White Privilege

Music-oriented meme accounts litter social media spaces. These are populated with images that pair a visual subject with a short text that-due to the oblique, ironic, or unexpected juxtaposition of the image and accompanying text-results in something humorous, clever, absurd, critical, wise, etc. Endlessly iterable, the in-jokes that inform the humor of memes function as shibboleths among cultural insiders that establish, normalize, and maintain the beliefs and values of a community. This paper investigates a recent event wherein meme culture engaged with a recurring crisis around the term "jazz"; a crisis whose stakes reach beyond the aesthetic into racialized power dynamics associated with Black American Music.


As have many prominent musicians before him, trumpeter Nicholas Payton has identified the term "jazz" and its attendant industries as constructs whose persistence manifest contemporary forms of blackface minstrelsy. In December of 2019, an Instagram meme account popular among "jazz bro" culture (a subculture informed by demographics and values of institutionalized jazz education) meme-ified Payton, lampooning his criticism of "jazz" and naming him a "jazz" musician. While the perpetrators of this act painted it as celebratory and light-hearted, Payton-himself engaged in social media spaces-responded: "To suggest they have the power to call me 'jazz' despite what I've said, reflects a colonialist mindset and is racist…tantamount to calling me the N-word." Mixed responses to Payton's reaction demonstrate that the political and aesthetic dynamics informing it are ill-understood by many people invested in contemporary "jazz" culture - particularly along color lines.


My paper agrees with Payton and works to unpack his claim that the meme-ification of great black artists is engaging in exploitation as much as celebration. The tone deafness of memes that deny sponsorship of white supremacy while uncritically implicated within artistic histories of love and theft demonstrate a crucial disconnect; a larger culture of supposedly post-racial neutralization that reconstitutes raced histories of performativity and spectatorship. This paper examines ways in which connections between educational institutionalization, markets, and isolating silos of social media sometimes unwittingly engage in the normalization of racialized exploitation in their presentation and maintenance of "jazz." 

In 1970, a television-show dance contest in a small California town ended abruptly when the studio was briefly plunged into darkness because of an apparent power failure. The media coverage of the event eventually helped uncover criminal activity at the studio; over the course of this reporting, the narrative was accompanied by select genres of music, mostly popular, which became noticeable for their signification of the contest's participants as young, urban, white teens. In reviewing earlier footage of youth-focused events from the same source, it is clear that the studio engaged in a practice of both identifying and catering to specific demographic groups through the use of select musical genres and forms of music in the service of creating a single, demographically-limited "look" and "sound" of California youth. A representative sample of this coverage provides a case study on the ways in which television music directors and arrangers denoted race, age, gender, and other demographic and cultural identities in a microcosm of the televisual medium. I focus on several instances from the 1970s in which music was used to suggest preferred, "normate" class, age, and race in several California cities and towns: media coverage of Chinese New Year, showing white youth engaging (at times problematically) with Asian cultural practices; a segment on rural livestock rustling; a cultural feature on Hawaiian music in the community; and the dance contest described above. Using methods drawn from sound and media studies and comparative musicology, I will outline the systematic use of pleonastic and selective scoring techniques in the media, as well as the effects of the media's use of metadiegetic, nonsimultaneous, and acousmatic music and sound in creating cultural and ethnic profiles of both individuals and entire cultures and ethnicities. I demonstrate that despite national and local attempts to be inclusive in covering cultural diversity, the cultural environment of the news media in the late 1960s and early 1970s was one in which difference and Otherness was not only marked by cinematography and broadcaster language and speech bias, but also by deliberately anempathetic music that privileged middle and upper class white youth culture.

This paper documents shifts in jazz pianist and composer Joe Zawinul's autobiographical narrative, as presented in interviews in _Down Beat_ and other prominent music magazines, and shows how his self-image changed from the 60s to the 70s. A reception history of Zawinul's American career also reveals how his persona and music was framed differently by the white and the black press in the U.S. Initially, he downplayed his own whiteness and Austrian nationality in favor of a universal musical aesthetic and a politics of musical assimilation. Later, he constructed a cosmopolitan "gypsy" heritage from which he sought to forge racial solidarity with African Americans, and he toyed with stories of reverse racial passing (from white to black).


The paper builds on recent work on race and genre in jazz and popular music studies (Brackett 2016; Hamilton 2016; Brennan 2017) to show how Zawinul's improvisation and composition cultivated a "soul jazz" persona in the 1960s through the use of essentialist black musical tropes (most prominently "soul" and "blues") and how he, in the 1970s, sought to position fusion jazz as authentically black against the perceived sell-out and whiteness of rock music. White critics dreaming of a post-racial world in the wake of the Civil Rights Era, used Zawinul as an argument for colorblindness and as an example to hold up against black nationalism. However, my research also shows that black critics and musicians accepted Zawinul's "soul." They did so, not because Zawinul proved that jazz was racially universal or colorblind, but because he exemplified the anti-anti-essentialist (Gilroy 1993) power of black music and aesthetic markers like "blues" and "soul."


The paper highlights the necessity for a more sustained engagement with critical whiteness studies in jazz scholarship and musicology. Ultimately, I argue that Zawinul's politics and practice of race shows the fluidity and instability of race that goes beyond essentialism, but nevertheless mobilizes race through appropriation and the privilege of whiteness.