Perennial Fashion—Jazz

Abstract

As with fashions, what is important is show, not the thing itself; instead of jazz itself being composed, "light" music, the most dismal product of the popular-song industry, is dressed up. Jazz fans—short for fanatics—sense this and therefore prefer to emphasize the music's improvisational features. The surrealists, who have much in common with jazz, have appealed to this level of experience since Apollinaire: "Ici meme les automobiles ont lair detre anciennes." Traces of this have been unconsciously assimilated by the perennial fashion; jazz, which knows what it is doing when it allies itself with technique, collaborates in the "technological veil" through its rigorously repetitive though objectless cultic ritual. To the masses of young people who, year after year, chase the perennial fashion, presumably to forget it after a few years, it offers a compromise between aesthetic sublimation and social adjustment.

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