ABSTRACT
Inevitably, many of the propositions in the Introduction are generally borne out in the foregoing articles: the importance of mass media, of the local politics and its relationship to the United States, the history of national identity, the economics of the entertainment industry, postcolonial dynamics, gender issues. Framing them all is the proposition that both jazz and totalitarianism emerged during – and are in significant ways emblematic of – the twentieth century, and together they embody its contradictions. One pulls towards freedom of expression, the other towards regulation and homogeneity. Of all music genres up to the appearance of rock in the mid-twentieth century, if any music carried a message that challenged that political vehicle of modernity – totalitarianism – it was jazz. And the ideal citizen of the totalitarian state recalls T. E. Lawrence’s description of the soldier, who ‘assigned his owner the twenty-four hours’ use of his body; and sole conduct of his mind and passions’ (Lawrence 2000, 551). All these at least according to their mythos, if not always effectively in their practice. When the two converged, they dramatised the central tensions of modernity, between the cult of individualism and the pressures of mass culture. To a greater extent than any other musical form, in the first half of
the twentieth century jazz was the Aeolian harp sounding the harmonies and discords of the complex winds of modernity. Similarly, wherever it manifested itself, the push towards totalitarianism was a major experiment in modernisation, an ‘alternative modernity’.
