May 1, 2016 08:47 PM
http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comm...sentialism
EXCERPT: [...] I read the rest of the review, because I’m interested in James McBride and his work, but I never got over that lede. Moody’s point—there’s no other way to read it—is that race endows writers and critics with an extra dose of perceptual acumen. We hear James Brown with our ears, our heart, our imagination, our muscles, but also with the color of our skin, and there are essential qualities in James Brown’s music (Moody never says what they are) that a listener who is not black like Brown simply can’t pick up.
In Moody’s defense, one might say—this is the best one can say—that we respond to music, as to all art, out of our own experience, and that, in America, racial identity is experience. Both points are true, so true that they’re truisms—but, like most truisms, they don’t get you very far. In fact, they lead you down a dead-end street and into a sinkhole. The implications are so radically limiting that what looks like a compliment is more of a pander concealing an insult. Crouch, George, and McBride are supposed to be flattered that a part of their critical talent—maybe the crucial part—stems from being born black Americans. Watch out: a few more steps and you’ll find yourself saying they sure do have rhythm.
Think of Moody’s proposition in reverse: Mozart can be fully appreciated only by people of European background. You can take the most sophisticated, gifted, industrious nonwhite critic—sorry, he or she is just going to miss some crucial things (“penetrating insights and varieties of context”) for not having been born into the racial lineage of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, with its cultural prerogatives, its particular refinements. No one would dare say such a thing; it’s unthinkable—until you run across the story of Ryan Speedo Green....
EXCERPT: [...] I read the rest of the review, because I’m interested in James McBride and his work, but I never got over that lede. Moody’s point—there’s no other way to read it—is that race endows writers and critics with an extra dose of perceptual acumen. We hear James Brown with our ears, our heart, our imagination, our muscles, but also with the color of our skin, and there are essential qualities in James Brown’s music (Moody never says what they are) that a listener who is not black like Brown simply can’t pick up.
In Moody’s defense, one might say—this is the best one can say—that we respond to music, as to all art, out of our own experience, and that, in America, racial identity is experience. Both points are true, so true that they’re truisms—but, like most truisms, they don’t get you very far. In fact, they lead you down a dead-end street and into a sinkhole. The implications are so radically limiting that what looks like a compliment is more of a pander concealing an insult. Crouch, George, and McBride are supposed to be flattered that a part of their critical talent—maybe the crucial part—stems from being born black Americans. Watch out: a few more steps and you’ll find yourself saying they sure do have rhythm.
Think of Moody’s proposition in reverse: Mozart can be fully appreciated only by people of European background. You can take the most sophisticated, gifted, industrious nonwhite critic—sorry, he or she is just going to miss some crucial things (“penetrating insights and varieties of context”) for not having been born into the racial lineage of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, with its cultural prerogatives, its particular refinements. No one would dare say such a thing; it’s unthinkable—until you run across the story of Ryan Speedo Green....