[Dixielandjazz] Beethoven vs. 1920's Jazz.

[Steve barbone]

Here's H.L. Mencken in 1925 implying that those who like jazz are inferior
beings. And opining why Beethoven will survive and by inference that Jazz
will not. (because jazz is too popular among the masses)

Written in June 1925, Baltimore Sun Newspaper, it is from one of his
articles on the famed Scopes Trial.

HL Mencken was perhaps the most provocative writer and journalist of his day
in the United States.

How times do change . . . or not.

Cheers,
Steve

Homo Neanderthalensis ‹ HL Mencken (Excerpted)

The inferior man¹s reasons for hating knowledge are not hard to discern. He
hates it because it is complex ‹ because it puts an unbearable burden upon
his meager capacity for taking in ideas. Thus his search is always for
shortcuts.  .  . (snipped, no musical content to) . . .

Politics and the fine arts repeat the story. .  . The arts, like the
sciences, demand special training, often very difficult. But in JAZZ there
are simple rhythms, comprehensible even to savages.

What all this amounts to is that the human race is divided into two sharply
differentiated and mutually antagonistic classes, almost two genera ‹ a
small minority that plays with ideas and is capable of taking them in, and a
vast majority that finds them painful, and is thus arrayed against them, and
against all who have traffic with them. The intellectual heritage of the
race belongs to the minority, and to the minority only. The majority has no
more to do with it than it has to do with ecclesiastic politics on Mars. In
so far as that heritage is apprehended, it is viewed with enmity. But in the
main it is not apprehended at all.

That is why Beethoven survives. Of the 110,000,000 so-called human beings
who now live in the United States, flogged and crazed by Coolidge, Rotary,
the Ku Klux and the newspapers, it is probable that at least 108,000,000
have never heard of him at all. To these immortals, made in God¹s image, one
of the greatest artists the human race has ever produced is not even a name.
So far as they are concerned he might as well have died at birth. The
gorgeous and incomparable beauties that he created are nothing to them. They
get no value out of the fact that he existed. They are completely unaware of
what he did in the world, and would not be interested if they were told.

The fact saves good Ludwig¹s bacon. His music survives because it lies
outside the plane of the popular apprehension, like the colors beyond violet
or the concept of honor. If it could be brought within range, it would at
once arouse hostility. Its complexity would challenge; its lace of moral
purpose would affright. Soon there would be a movement to put it down, and
Baptist clergymen would range the land denouncing it, and in the end some
poor musician, taken in the un-American act of playing it, would be put on
trial before a jury of Ku Kluxers, and railroaded to the calaboose.