It is, apparently, International Jazz Day. Why jazz needs an International Day, I have no idea. But lots of things have National and International Days and Weeks, and even Months, so why shouldn’t jazz, I suppose? So go on, then, enjoy your Jazz Day if you love your jazz. Go on, honk if you heart jazz, go on--honk! Go on! And toot and parp and then honk some more. Let's hear some random honking, tooting, and parping for International Jazz Day! Yay! These noises are, after all, perfectly fitting onomatopoeic tributes to your horrendous musical taste. I, however, have decided to mark International Jazz Day with a mean-spirited polemic against jazz and, more importantly, what jazz sometimes represents. The following is, I should say, some reheated bile that I once spewed on Facebook. Anyway, brace yourselves, and here we go.
Me, I cannot stand jazz. For me, jazz is to music what warts are to the human face, what camels are to the animal kingdom, what fruit and vegetables are to eating. Insults: ugly, hideous insults. Of course, this is just a matter of personal opinion, and I acknowledge that you cannot help liking jazz any more than you can help having a hideously warty face. But what really gets me about jazz, and this, admittedly, is not the fault of the genre itself, or its practitioners, but what really gets me is when jazz gets used as a cultural signifier by people who don’t actually like the music but like what they think is its image and what they therefore think their artfully constructed love of jazz says about them. Of course I know some people actually like jazz, genuinely like it, and fair enough. With all its jolly honking, tooting, and indeed parping, jazz is bound to appeal to some people in the same way that bright colours, spinning bow-ties, and clowns appeal to some people, and you, genuine lovers of jazz, are entirely exempted from the hate-filled claims I am about to make. Thing is, though, let’s face it, far too many people claim to like jazz for them all to be telling the truth. So what are they playing at, these fakers of a love of jazz? It seems to me that in “liking” or “loving” jazz, they’re trying to show that they like and appreciate vernacular cultural forms, that they can relate to the alterity of it all, yeh, so they’re cool, man, kinda groovy, freethinking yeh, a little bit *alt.*, little bit rad, despite being a solicitor by day, while at the same time their appreciation of jazz demonstrates their impeccable aesthetic taste and intellectual discernment. In other words, they’re trying to be non-stuck-up and non-conformist, and yet unwittingly, and indeed witlessly, they’re doing it in a totally stuck-up and conformist way. In these ways, jazz is just a meme, and not a musical one, but, for Jazz-love-fakers, a cultural one, and is thus the opposite of what they think it is, and it says the opposite about them from what they think it does. These people live in Islington in the late 1980s and early 90s. They probably “love” contempowawy darnce as well. And they're posh too, and talk all lah-deh-dah, like “Yah, Tarquin and I are gaying to the Montreux Jizz Festival.” The idiots.
If you don’t believe any of the above, check out the YouTube video below of a pair of appalling drongoes doing some “Experimental Jazz” in front of a small crowd of precious gumps pretending they’re enjoying what they’re watching and hearing. I mean look at them. Listen to them. That tool can’t play a trumpet any more than I can, and the drummer’s even worse. Sounds like an avid vegan's arse blasts at the wrong end of International Mung Bean Day.
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