Jason Sheesley

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Everyone arguing about this fails to address the real point. Jazz exists at the furthest end of a spectrum between repetition and discordance. It is the inevitable byproduct of what happens when musicians master their instruments and music theory. You can see it very clearly if you’re a guitarist or friends with one. Once they learn basic chords they go insane hearing them over and over in popular music. Their taste in music evolves and if they cannot come to terms with associating what was formerly an abstract emotional experience into a coded language, they spiral into complexity. Guitarists in particular will start making technically dense riff filled music which can be good but often becomes a cacophonous circlejerk really only appreciated by other guitarists. This dynamic exists for every instrument and is why jazz came about. It is a constantly accelerating level of progression which ends in unsatisfied insanity or death. Every form of creativity plays with death. It is the end state of art itself. All ideas and inspiration come from the same dimension in which God and the afterlife exists. Attempting to create something is to play God, mimicking His process of creation. Even basic bitch routine creative work for money can suck you into an unsteady realm. Learning how to do simple graphics in Adobe Illustrator suddenly breaks the world down into a combination of shapes, trying to be a writer or obsessing over film making can reduce life into a constant collision of story structure and character arcs, even being a line cook in a kitchen can have you applying food metaphors to everything. The divisive tone of this topic is also due to a fundamental issue with how art, music, and all creative work is processed. Human beings were not meant to have the same level of access to different forms of media. Before the internet, it was much easier to keep entertainment and art within the class it was created for, both in terms of wealth and knowledge. Art, music, and fashion has always been a code which signifies tribe identity. The ancient folk dresses of various cultures across the world contain specific stitching patterns which quite literally identify which state, village, and family you come from. From the Tartan Skirts of Celtic nations to special women’s belt buckles in Balkan villages which contained calendars tracking the wearers menstrual cycle. Everything you consume signifies what tribe you belong to, especially songs. The proliferation of media has muddied tribe from a distinct alignment of ethnicity, geographic location, and culture into something which becomes more of a personal choice. While there are stereotypical factors which steer certain types of people into a certain “tribe” it’s always a personal choice. So what is the jazz tribe? Is it mostly black heroin addict musicians? Is it white hipsters who fervently defend their genre from swaths of statue heads? I can’t generalize it fully, but I can most definitely assert that jazz is made by people who spent a lot of time mastering an instrument and made for people who spent a lot of time listening to music. I don’t say this as an implicit compliment, I find it somewhat pretentious and arrogant to discard the value of an instinctual baseline reaction. I marvel at the think tanks in California that have quantified the human reflex of opinion into an efficient formula, one which evolves with itself as people become acclimated to the meta. I have more sympathy to the boomer who gets genuinely excited to hear the same Rolling Stones slop garbage song for the 90,000th time in the past 40 years than I do the haranguing audiophile who screams at you why you need to love Miles Davis. Loving any form of media too much is childish, it exists as an accoutrement to life not a focus. Besides, the greatest music on earth is just one good high BPM repetitive acid techno beat on a loop for 4 hours to listen and not pay attention to while you’re working. Grow up.

There’s no gold medal for “quietly dealing with life’s bullshit.” Speak up. Tell people what you expect and need. Be okay with the consequences.