Tuesday, July 16, 2013

Before and after Jazz


It’s a picture of Quetzalcoatl eating a bloke. I’ll get round to why you might want to look at this slightly unpleasant, slightly manga-phallic image later on. To take you there here’s an overlong anecdote about the 2001 UK census. Enjoy!
 
Here in the UK (that’s UKOGBANI’s informal name btw) it is mandatory at 10 year intervals for all adult citizens to truthfully complete a census so that the government is able to form a realistic picture of for whom they are to devise policy. Amongst the information compiled on employment and marital status etc is a section devoted to religious identity. Now when I filled my 2001 UK Census, where I should have ticked the ‘No Religion’ box I instead started to fill out the ‘Others: Please specify’ box (if that indeed is what it is called, I can’t really remember). I got as far as the letter J then stopped abruptly as I quickly re-thought out, not my deeply-held religious beliefs of which I had none but my relationship to this entire human insitution. I had intended, like many others like me, to write ‘Jedi’ in that box as we believed that if enough of us wrote that we subscribed to this fictional monastic martial discipline then the authorities would then have to include ‘Jedi’ as a box on its own alongside Christianity and Hinduism and that lot on the next census form in 2011. Perhaps we were too immersed in our science fiction belief system to realise that the authorities were not some giant unthinking machine that would easily allow our student prank to slip through its logic programs or whatever.
 
Anyhoo I wrote the letter J and then I thought about what I was doing. Even if I had no religion, was I to be so dismissive of thousands of years of human culture? Even classical Marxism, where religion is viewed as part of the structure of oppressive class-based society and therefore to be abolished, acknowledges that religious writers have been a positive and progressive force in advancing human society and that in many ways the Communist Parties that followed Marx’s lead were inferior tribute acts of the institutions of Christian collectivism that had sustained stable (if violent and violently unfair) societies for hundreds of years. Plus I fucking hate Jedi’s. Actually that was the main reason. Yes, the only reason. I think Marxism had been pretty much debunked even in my slow-witted 20th century brain by then. Don’t worry. It’ll be back.
 
So I was left with this useless letter J and it was irrevocable. I had to find another religion quick and it had to begin with J. I could have gone for Jainism which is a perfectly good religion but given my general ignorance of it and failure to even begin on the Jainist path, it seemed a little dishonest. In the end I plumped for Jazz. Now I’m well aware that Jazz is merely a kind of music but it did seem to offer at the very least a lifestyle and a set of core values that aren’t entirely dissimilar to a belief system. There is a vague notion of personal freedom, of living for the moment and the ambition to achieve states of extra-normal ecstasy and self-abolition through immersion in the music. None of this applies to Trad-Jazz of course. You know, the straw hat thing. It’s nice and everything but….you know what I mean. Even you Trad-Jazzers out there.
 
It was a bit thin I’ll admit but it was nonetheless mine uniquely and this was before I’d even heard Coltrane play. I felt pretty smug then about the 2001 census I can tell you but somehow knew in my heart of heart of hearts that even that pure evocation of whatever you humans call spirituality was not going to see me through to 2011. Jazz had pointed the way but to what? I followed its path through the dark times after the emancipation, emerging in its recognisable form between the wars and infecting late industrial culture changing everything it touched, merging with pre-existing folk culture creating hybrid forms glowing with colour and freedom  that continue to proliferate and evolve into forms beyond even my understanding.
 
The Afro-European cultural renaissance with Jazz at its core altered our visual as well as our audial culture which provides me with a thin veneer of continuity with which to explore my next religious awakening. Now I’ve probably talked about it enough in this blog and elsewhere so to cut a long story short, in the 2011 census I filled in the ‘Others: Please Specify’ box with the word KOOSISM. Which, as we all know, is the worship of the trans-dimensional rainbow lizard whose appearances in the 90s cartoon show DEXTER’S LABORATORY are like beautiful 2D shadows of the multi-dimensional reality human apparatus cannot yet perceive. (Dexter’s Laboratory of course was an allegorical drama of the eternal conflict between order and chaos played out in the texts of many a human religion). The Rainbow Lizard in the form of the serpent was venerated on the continent of Australia by the pre-European population, as was Quetzalcoatl the feathered serpent in Mesoamerica (or QC as he likes to be known) and another cold-blooded friend still makes an early appearance in the holy texts of the Abrahamic faith who fail to acknowledge that he rightly calls out their invisible deity as a big liar and frees the new human race from his direct enslavement, ultimately setting them up as masters of the Earth. We still debate the rightness of that policy, you know.  

It did occur to me that my conversion from to Jazz to Koosism was also a happily alphabetical progression that I intend to continue in the next census assuming by that point I haven’t succumbed to proper faith or orthodox atheism. Next time I intend to write LAGOOPINISM in that box which is of course an extremist and currently heretical form of Koosism. It will be the job of you, my one follower (thaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaanks!) to at that point assume the leadership of mainstream Koosism and try to erase my influence in the development of that one enlightened religion while I spend 10 years working out what I can believe in that begins with the letter M. If I and UKOGBANI are still going in 2161 I’ll finally give in to a proper religion like Zoroastrianism or Zurvanism which are kind of where it all began anyway, especially in terms of the still currently dominant monotheism. It is dominant too and will doubtlessly remain so as long as I live regardless of the disrespect I continue to show it. If I am entirely wrong and there is one God then he can practice what he preaches and bloody well forgive me. He wouldn’t give a shit anyway, surely? If there is an entity which created all of this do you think any human mind has the power to comprehend what it might be up to? As I have stated elsewhere you might as well throw cheese down the well to appease the thing as it makes as much sense as anything you do. Or you might just try and be nice to your fellow life-possessors as Koosism teaches.

Well that was a long and pointless ride wasn’t it? Well heres some music that is as the title suggests an ancestor of and a descendent of Jazz. Firstly there’s this instantly recognisable melancholy classic from Erik Satie and secondly there’s a cracking song from the first album from Firehose whose punky-jazz influences are probably more evident on other tracks on this album but this is my absolute fave. Hear me!
 
 

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