Saturday, February 22, 2020

Cantaloop – Loopy Artists, Wake Up!


by Joe Siano




The Manhattan Transfer just came to town.. Their set included a performance of Cantaloop.



Their Cantaloop is a four-part vocal harmony adaption of the Us3 1993 hip-hop appropriation of Herbie Hancock’s 1964 Cantaloupe Island.






This evolution of this piece is an example of how ideas grow, morph and are enhanced in a free society. Edmund Burke nailed it by observing that society is “a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.”

Great ideas in art, culture, technology and commerce coalesce though trial and error and are continually refashioned and retooled over the course of centuries and millennia. Hayek calls this “emergent order” and “distributed knowledge”.  No one person or community has all the answers.  New knowledge and ideas are invented in the daily struggle of living and vetted in the marketplace of ideas.

However, the totalitarian mind does not work that way.  Socialists, Fascists and all other Utopians latch on the teaching of a Great Man. A visionary.  A messiah.  Once in charge, it's his way or the highway, Or the gulag. Or the grave – which is often best.

In the West, the artistic community typically purports to be freedom’s defenders.  They rightly demand that the State steer clear of touching their work.  However, it is also the artist who are most ardently insists that this same State lord over every other facet of such as– education, commence, healthcare, food, farming, childcare, housing, family life – you name it.

But the State’s Elites are no dummies, they understand that the arts speak louder and cut deeper to the heart than speeches, policy papers and scholarly diatribes.  The arts pluck the emotional strings.  They hypnotize and in doing so, blunt reason and rationality.

Consider the Twentieth Century’s great experiments in central planning.

To be published in the Soviet Union required membership in Soyuz Pisateley, the official writer’s union that censored content and mandated style.  Free expression could only be achieve only through tortured underground networks.


In Maoist China, the government “sought to modernize China across all aspects of society, a process that included suppressing or destroying much of traditional culture. The government also sought to create a new visual culture to communicate its goals and ideology to the Chinese people.” 
 Permit me me to quote further from the same article:

“Artists were encouraged to create art that reflected the evolutionary spirit of the time, in Mao’s words, to create art for the people. The impact of this directive on artists and art making was enormous. Oil painting in a socialist realist style replaced ink painting which had been one of the most revered art forms in China for over one thousand yearsas the preferred painting style. Revolutionary heroes, such as workers, soldiers, and peasants replaced traditional subjects such as landscapes, birds, and flowers.

…..senior artists, especially ink painters, were subjected to public humiliation and sometimes torture, and their homes and artworks were seized and destroyed

Hitler, himself an aspiring but failed artist, appreciated the power of symbolism to command his nation’s soul.  The Third Reich’s official architect Albert Speer built garish monumental structures that extolled the supremacy of the State versus the insignificance of the individual.

As in other the other socialist states, the Nazi Germany oversaw all forms of creative expression including films, photography, sculpture, painting poster art and even children’s books such as The Poisonous Mushroom.  Its message:  "Just as it is difficult to tell a toadstool from an edible mushroom, it is often hard to recognize the Jew as a swindler and criminal."

Castro’s artistic repression killed the Cuban mambo music industry.    Cuban music dominated the charts worldwide in the ‘50s and early ’60s.  Fidel saw it to be ant-revolutionary and put a lid on it.  This opened the  way for Jamaican reggae to upstage Cuban music within a decade.

Here in the U.S., the Thought Police are tearing down public art, banning unpopular opinion from campuses and mandating pronoun usage.

The State corrupts art just as it corrupts everything it touches. No one saw this better than George Orwell, whose dystopian new order included Ministries of Love, Peace, Plenty and Truth to control all that citizens, think, say and do.

Whether  the State be called Socialist, Fascist or Progressive, nearly all modern states are subject to Managerial Control.  So says James Burnham in The Managerial Revolution.  He maintains that the all of the aforementioned ideological labels are thinly veiled rationalizations.  Ideology, Left or Right, lulls complacent sheeple to turn over the keys to unseen elites. 

The cult of personality personifies ideology and makes submission to the Great One, a personal conversion experience.  Statist art is the spoonful of sugar that that helps the medicine go down.



Artists wake up!  Neither the State nor its messiah du jour will set you free.  It will only enslave.



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"Half the people are stoned and the other half are waiting for the next election.
Half the people are drowned and the other half are swimming in the wrong direction."
 
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