The Break
A thank-you note to readers awaiting the final installment of Scott Timberg's "Origins"
I want to extend a heartfelt thanks to the small readership of The Third Ear—for indulging me. Most of you are friends and family, many of whom have busy lives and little time for words. Yet you’ve given me an audience, and with that, an impetus to build.
Last week, the Ear managed to attract the attention of someone whose work I promote and greatly admire; apparently, he appreciates mine.
Dan Stone, founding editor of Radio Silence, gives his compliments to The Third Ear.
Some of my favorite authors, critics, and musicians wrote for that short-lived rag—so I consider this praise from Caesar indeed.
Stone will be on Substack soon, writing as Hey Pop. I’ll inform readers who are interested when that publication is up and running.
I’m told it’s set to begin with a podcast interview with Dana Gioia—Ted Gioia’s older brother. The former Poet Laureate of California, and chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, who started life as a marketing exec for Jell-O pudding.
Yes, you read that correctly. No one ever told Dana Gioia, “Don’t quit your day job”—if they did, he didn’t listen. If he had, he’d be the president of General Foods right now instead of a State poet and public intellectual. (Don’t worry, he’s doing just fine moonlighting as an “Information Billionaire.”)
Dana has a fantastic essay on the “Butterfly Effect” that sci-fi novelist Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451) has had on twenty-first-century culture, as well as an interview he conducted with the author in 2005, in Issue Number 02 of Radio Silence.
I wish I could share it with readers here in its entirety, but due to fair use copyright laws, I can only publish snippets and summaries—perhaps I will, later.
The editor of Radio Silence has already been permissive enough to allow The Third Ear to reproduce segments of Timberg’s “Origins.” It’s my hope that one day, enough readers can convince RS to resurrect its entire print-and-online archive here, on Substack. And perhaps begin publishing new issues—there’s no overhead here but time and effort.
I’d been pestering Mr. Stone, editor of Radio Silence, for Scott Timberg’s final “Origins of the Creative Class” article. He was generous enough to provide me the master file of Timberg’s articles, which have since disappeared from the internet, along with the rest of Radio Silence’s online archive.
Unfortunately, the version of Timberg’s final article on the Radio Silence master file did not suit my recollection. It’s clearly a first or second draft, which only covers the history of the “Creative Class” up through Imperial Rome. Great stuff—but I recall the critic taking readers up to Bohemian Paris in the nineteenth century and beyond.
For the third homage to Timberg’s “Origins,” The Third Ear will have to improvise from memory, and what I’ve learned elsewhere.
In the tradition of jazz and blues, I find myself at the “break.”
In the blues, the first two lines are a refrain.
In the blues, the first two lines are a refrain.
The third line it is different, while the first two are the same.
After the third line comes the turnaround, where the artist noodles his way back to the familiar chord structure of the next verse. At some point, in between the familiar AAB rhyme scheme and the I-IV-V chord progression of the verses—the player comes to the “break.”
In jazz and blues, the break is where you find out what you’re made of. It’s the point of improvisation, where the artist is in free-fall, in between verses, stumbling to come up with something new that jives with the old. As Albert Murray, one of the most important jazz and literary critics of the twentieth century put it, in Stomping the Blues (1976):
Customarily there may be a sharp shot-like accent and the normal or established flow of the rhythm and the melody stop, much the same as a sentence seems to halt, but only pauses at a colon. Then the gap, usually of not more than four bars, is filled in most often but not always by a solo instrument, whose statement is usually impromptu or improvised even when it is a quotation or a variation of some well-known melody. Then when the regular rhythm is picked up again (while the ensemble, if any, falls back in) it is as if you had been holding your breath.
As he added in The Blue Devils of Nada (1996):
Nor is the break just another mechanical structural device. It is of its very nature, as dancers never forget, what the basic message comes down to: grace under pressure, creativity in an emergency, continuity in the face of disjuncture. It is on the break that you are required to improvise, to do your thing, to establish your identity, to write your signature…
Murray described the break philosophically in The Omni-Americans (1970), as well:
The blues-idiom dancer like the solo instrumentalist turns disjunctures into continuities. He is not disconcerted by intrusions, lapses, shifts in rhythm, intensification of tempo, for instance; but is inspired by them to higher and richer levels of improvisation. As a matter of fact (and as the colloquial sense of the word suggests), the “break” in the blues idiom provides the dancer his greatest opportunity—which, at the same time, is also his most heroic challenge and his moment of greatest jeopardy.
For Albert Murray, the blues in general, and the “break” in particular, were his central metaphor for coping with the human condition.
A primitivist of sorts, Murray suggested that “interpretations of human behavior in the raw,” and “the study of ritual might be a means of coming to terms with some of the ambiguities of human nature and conduct,” in contemporary society.
[When the] dancer or musician swings the blues, he is fulfilling the same fundamental existential requirement that determines the mission of the poet, the priest, and the medicine man. He is making an affirmative and hence exemplary response to…la condition humaine. Extemporizing in response to the exigencies of the situation in which he finds himself, he is confronting, acknowledging, and contending with the infernal absurdities and ever-impending frustrations inherent in the nature of all existence by playing with the possibilities that are also there. Thus does man the player become man the stylizer and by the same token the humanizer of chaos; and thus does play become ritual, ceremony, and art; and thus also does the dance-beat improvisation of experience in the blues idiom become survival technique, esthetic equipment for living…
For Albert Murray, black American music, like literature of all kinds, was not just an aesthetic triumph, alchemizing pain into joy—it was a survival mechanism. And it triumphed through style.
The human organism must be nourished and secured against destruction, to be sure, but what makes man human is style. Hence the crucial significance of art in the study of human behavior. All human effort beyond the lowest level of the struggle for animal subsistence is motivated by the need to live in style…Man’s primary concern with life is to make it as significant as possible, and the blues are part of this effort.
And crucially, in a book called The Omni-Americans, underscoring the common humanity beneath America’s hysterical obsession with race, Murray adds: “Nor is any other attitude towards experience more appropriate to the ever-shifting circumstances of all Americans or more consistent with the predicament of man in the contemporary world at large” (emphasis mine).
For Murray, author of The Hero and the Blues (a study of the trickster-figure in world literature and its relation to musical improvisation), this attitude toward experience—a blues philosophy—was nothing less than heroic: resilience through improvised, creative style.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr.—the Harvard literary critic and host of “Finding Your Roots” on PBS, also notable for addressing a racial incident between himself and a white police officer who arrested him outside his own home (the professor and the arresting officer talked it out over suds, in a widely-publicized “beer summit” with President Obama in 2009)—wrote the foreword for the latest edition of Albert Murray’s Omni-Americans.
Here is Professor Gates informing former Black Panther Angela Davis—the Rolling Stones’ “Sweet Black Angel” and John Lennon’s “Angela”—that she had ancestors on The Mayflower.
Needless to say, as a black identity-politics activist, Davis was a little taken aback to learn firsthand that, as Albert Murray said, the American people are incontestably mixed-race. It’s worth watching Davis’ reaction here, at The New York Post. (I’d link to Gates’ Twitter video, but due to Elon Musk’s temper tantrum over Substack’s new Notes feature, Substack writers are no longer allowed to link to Twitter—the reason Matt Taibbi abandoned Twitter.)
Albert Murray was an extracurricular mentor to Henry Louis Gates while he was a sophomore at Yale in 1970, a time when, Gates says, he was encircled by campus “black ideological bullies” wishing to enlist him in Black Nationalist and militant movements.
Around the same time, Gates began researching what would ultimately become his pioneering study of African American literature, The Signifying Monkey—the book from which The Third Ear takes its name, as a mediator. (Basically, I take the “third ear” in Gates’ book to mean an inter-cultural interpreter—a critic.)
The Signifying Monkey is a New World variation of an old African trickster character. He’s derived from Esu Elegbara—the West African messenger god, and folkloric inspiration behind the devil in Robert Johnson’s “Crossroads.” The Monkey appears in African American folklore, as well as music, outwitting other animals—especially the Lion, whom he often tricks into ill-fated confrontations with the Elephant.
In African American folk tales, The Monkey survives by his wits and unmatched skill for improvisation—much like Albert Murray’s hero in the blues—by playing with the meaning of words: he’s Gates’ symbol for the African American literary tradition, which is always improvising, always changing the meaning of its own folk tradition, as well as altering the European literary tradition. Taking the traditions of the past, and “signifying” on them by altering their meaning, to create something new.
To this day, most of the popular novelties in American English—slang—come from black vernacular innovation.
The novelist Ralph Ellison, a close friend of Albert Murray, called this “changing the joke and slipping the yoke”—changing the meaning and spelling of the word “n**ger” to “n**ga” is one of the most prominent and controversial examples, but there are myriad others that have been readily adopted into the mainstream American lexicon.
The “break” is central to Gates’ introduction to The Signifying Monkey—as the source of sampling, or riffing on another artist’s work.
To the uninitiated—normal people, outside the pretentious world of academia—Gates’ “Theory of African American Literary Criticism,” The Signifying Monkey, is a dense tome of literary critical theory.
Yet it begins with a refreshingly accessible, pop culture-oriented introduction called: “Hip-Hop and the Fate of Signification.”
“Hip-hop was still in its adolescence when The Signifying Monkey was published in 1988,” Gates introduces his book. “In fact, my first serious engagement with hip-hop came in my defense of the First Amendment rights of 2 Live Crew, a group being censored (and arrested) for obscenity in Broward County, Florida, in 1990.”
Gates was summoned as an expert trial witness, after he published an op-ed in The New York Times showing various examples of lewd language in a long tradition of African American “signifying” (playing with words and concepts to overcome adversity), as well as in “the dozens” (the African American boasting and ribbing tradition, such as we hear in “Yo Mama” jokes, and so-called rap battles today). He also mentioned the erotic conquests of the blaxploitation character Dolomite, as another example of sexual “profanity” akin to 2 Live Crew lyrics like “Me So Horny” (a song which appropriately enough, samples Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now—the film examined in The Third Ear’s “Primitive Introduction”).
After The New York Times piece, Gates was summoned to testify:
I was asked to explain signifying and, in doing so, placed 2 Live Crew within a “very old and venerable tradition” of the vernacular-as-art, stretching from “Chaucer and Shakespeare” to “the dozens,” which I testified uses “great teasing and, cajoling, renaming people,” and, yes, “graphic descriptions of sexuality” to parody stereotypes and thus “blow them up.” There was a reason you couldn’t listen to one of the 2 Live Crew songs played during the trial without “burst[ing] out laughing,” I remember saying, while cautioning against taking their lyrics—like the dozens—literally, for that was to miss the point of this art form entirely.
Gates was proud to exonerate 2 Live Crew, who were acquitted, and “would happily serve as an expert witness in a similar ‘obscenity’ trial again. The tradition has a right to voice itself, even if some of us aren’t comfortable with its content. As I’ve said before, censorship is to art as lynching is to justice, and is just about as abhorrent,” Gates says in his introduction to The Signifying Monkey…
But the truth is, for me, aesthetically—a self-confessed Old School devotee, and quite proud of it—hip-hop as a genre had nothing on rhythm and blues, Motown, and soul music of the late fifties and sixties, not to mention America’s most original, most sublime, and most sophisticated contribution to world civilization, jazz. Jazz is the classical music of twentieth-century American culture, and as I state in this book [The Signifying Monkey], it is based on the art of riffing, on repetition and revision, the very definition of signifying in the tradition. All the jazz greats, going back to Jelly Roll Morton, had “quoted” other compositions and solos, making improvisation one of the highest American art forms. But through “sampling”—quoting and riffing off the original R & B and soul recordings of songs my friends and I had cherished in our adolescence, hip-hop took signifying to a new and electrifyingly original level.
The esteemed literary critic and Harvard professor, and PBS host, goes on to cite many, many examples of the black and white music that contributed to early hip-hop sampling—including the Jefferson Airplane’s “Today” and the Doors’ “Five to One”—marveling at the fact that the same year The Signifying Monkey was published (1988), marked the beginning of a new era in musical history, with the release of Public Enemy’s “Rebel Without a Pause”—a song that “not only signified upon James Dean’s Hollywood but introduced Chuck D’s lyrics through a reintroduction of James Brown’s ‘Funky Drummer.’”
He quotes the artist 9th Wonder, who was not only Gates’ colleague at Harvard but “a star producer in his own right,” describing the musical equivalent of the literary signifying tradition that Gates examines in the pages of The Signifying Monkey.
According to Gates, 9th Wonder described signifying in music as, “hip-hop producers, DJs, and rappers [using] records from the seventies to create new sounds and to build the most unconventional bridge to our past.”
But this wasn’t just black music history appreciation class or a loving exercise in archeology. This was something new: literal quotation as formal innovation. Artists…were returning to the grittier seventies to mine, literally to dig through crates of old vinyl records, in search of that one perfect moment, that scintillating, inimitable break, which they could then mix and match to repeat and thereby create the underbelly of a new lyrical form…a creative process that puts everything up for grabs, that makes it possible, compositionally and technologically, not only to honor canonical songs by repeating key segments of them, but to become part of them as they become signal parts of the new composition. This was something quite innovative in the history of African American music.
That one perfect moment in an old song, the “inimitable break,” was precisely what was imitated, or copied, then altered, to improvise something new—mimesis and alterity, the backbone of artistic innovation. As often as not, the section of a song that was copied and altered was the actual “break” that Albert Murray poeticized in his criticism—the moment when an artist free-form improvises during an un-choreographed section of a jazz or blues, funk or soul song.
Adopted and altered by slowing down a record or changing its pitch, or tweaking it with effects pedals and sound-level adjustments, the blues “break” became the basis of hip-hop melody, and soon after, the inspiration for “break” dancing.
The roots of this phenomenon stretch back forty years to the Bronx, in New York City, where the Jamaican immigrant Clive Cambell, a.k.a. Kool Herc, spun James Brown and “Bongo Rock” in vinyl at his and his sister’s mythical parties, where, by switching back and forth between two albums, he created an extended break, one long loop, birthed entirely new sounds out of familiar grooves—and kept company dancing…
For it is in the break and its repetitions that signifying upon musical forms that came before both sustains and alters what was said—how it sounded then and how it sounds today—just as signifying does in literary texts.
So—this is all a longwinded, grandiose, but, I hope, informative way of saying that without the complete edition of Scott Timberg’s final “Origins of the Creative Class” article, The Third Ear will have to go to the “the break.”
“It is on the break that you are required to improvise, to do your thing, to establish your identity, to write your signature,” as Albert Murray said.
I’ll have to perform a similar feat for the third movement of “Origins,” and ideally, innovate something new and exciting, sampled from something old and great.
It will take time to prepare my version of the history of the “Creative Class”—from Imperial Rome to the twentieth century, riffing on my memory of Timberg’s—so readers will have to be patient. Consider it the third line of a blues stanza—it’ll be different, but still rhyme with the first two.
In the meantime, expect the next installment of “The Imitation Game: A philosophy of American popular music” this Friday, where The Third Ear examines another chapter in the history of New World musical mimesis—American blackface minstrelsy.
Thank you to Dan Stone and Ted Gioia, to the late Scott Timberg, and many thanks to my readers.