Ragtime Revisited

Jon Savage, the author of "England's Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock, and Beyond" -- one of the best books on the Punk Scene of the 70s and ... beyond -- sends his thoughts further back in time for another cultural epic, "Teenage -- The Creation of Youth Culture."

Hard to imagine there was a time when the term "teenager" did not even exist, but Savage here attempts to open our eyes to that period, beginning with the late 19th century, when the most-famous disaffected youths were either murderers or poets. It's still a little hard to imagine more than merely coldly intellectually as, unfortunately, Savage's text, a couple of hundred pages in, feels mighty dry. Perhaps "England's Dreaming" burned a little brighter with emotional context because those years chronicled were experienced first-hand by his younger self, whereas these years he could only dig up from some pretty old works. Savage reportedly steps up the emotional content later in this book along the way, but in the meantime, there's much to learn here for my original topic, ragtime.

Savage wrote (p. 56-57):

Staffed by recent immigrants and the children of the lower middle class, the popular music industry readily struck a chord with its core audience, being unafraid of raw emotion, sentimentality, and heart-wrenching scenarios.

However, for many young Americans, lachrymose weepies like "After the Ball" did not fit the bill. They wanted something that better accentuated their sizzling synapses, and they began to find it in the new music that was all around them, even if it was still ignored by the music industry. In "Maggie," Stephen Crane's heroine and her gangster lover enter a downtown saloon where an "orchestra played negro melodies and a versatile drummer pounded, whacked, clattered and scratched on a dozen machines to make noise." The drifting sound of the music "made the girl dream."

Stephen Crane's 1893 novel, "Maggie: A Girl of the Streets" (which can be read online here ) is a horrifyingly descriptive tale of growing up in the multi-cultured slums of the day. The seemingly-noisome pounding, whacking, clatter, and scratch of the music described above made a terrible and beautiful kind of sense: Terrible in its reflection of their everyday life, beautiful in that they were able to make something artistic and moving from its chaos. If you consider ragtime making a new beat out of old songs, putting a different kind of rhythm to the generic waltzes and marches, then it's not difficult to see the music as a reflection of the status quo as filtered off of a broken dirty mirror.

Savage continued:

Popular music provided one way that blacks could begin to enter American society. … life for most Negroes was grim. The lynching statistics – over one hundred a year during the 1890s—were only the tip of the iceberg. "Most had no future nor hope of acquiring any," writes Louis Armstrong's biographer James Lincoln Collier. "They could look forward to nothing but work, poverty, disease and death. A philosophy of carpe diem [was] the only sensible position in such circumstances."

A hard core concentrated on pleasure, on the heightened sensations of the moment, in the red-light areas to be found in cities all over America: Chicago, St. Louis, Kansas, New Orleans. During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the spread of these districts provided regular employment for the large pool of traveling musicians. Playing in the saloons and clubs became a viable rite of passage for many young black men and women. The wider American public's taste for Negro music had already been whetted by the popularity of minstrelsy, and by the late 1890s, it was ready for something less ersatz.

Therefore, the black artists of the day (like the punks of the 70s) saw “No Future” written on their possibilities and said, “Nothing tomorrow? So let’s see what we can do -today-, then…” The spontaneity necessary to feel alive could not be bound by notes on a page, it could only be freed by the rampant rhythm of their hearts – by the never-before-heard melodies only hinted at by Sousa and Strauss.

The youth of the day, in looking for the Reality behind the masks they saw their parents wear and prepare for their own future, their years-ahead all planned out like more notes on a page, found ragtime.

More to come after I've finished the book, but in the meantime a tangent question:

If ragtime put new beats to old music, have hip-hop and sampling brought us full circle -- with old beats put to new music?