[The Soup Nazi]

 

This is hardly news, as Dean Blunt's Free Jazz performance at Cafe OTO happened last April and it was later on Soundcloud (doesn't seem to be there anymore, though). Also, as "guest" here pointed out, Blunt uploaded a track called "Kim Gordon" to that site (that one you can still listen to). And finally, the article from which I'll quote was published in The Wire three issues ago (hey, I just got it, whaddayawant from me ). But since apparently none of this has been discussed here, well, here it goes. Now, I don't know what the fuck is up with this guy. Both his answers AND his music sound like COMPLETELY half-assed HORSESHIT to me. Here's the extract:

But what about a title like Free Jazz? I prod him. You can't pretend you're not deliberately tapping in to all of the cultural and historical baggage that phrase comes with. Otherwise why call it that? "Well, why not?" Blunt retorts. "That wasn’t a reclaiming. That was just me doing free jazz." Oh, it's certainly not a reclaiming, I tell him. Free jazz is a living tradition, it doesn't need you to reclaim it. But clearly you are deliberately using different contexts, different black genres in order to explore the associations that they throw up with your own work.

"Once again I don’t know or care or think what people think, because I don't know about the history of free jazz," he insists. "Unfortunately we have to disagree. This is where we have the thing of why would someone just do something? What a question! I just wanted to play free jazz with some bad boy musicians. And I wanted to hear a certain rage according to a certain text that I wrote that they all understood. That text was about Kim Gordon and LL Cool J and Chuck D. You know the song 'Kool Thing' [from Sonic Youth's 1990 album Goo]. Free Jazz was a thing in itself so I can't really speak of it as reappropriating anything."

Well, using terms like black metal or free jazz operates on a lot of different levels. "But that’s not for me to deal with," he explodes. You started it, I tell him. "And then I walk away, no? Then I walk away."

And while we're at it, why pick on Kim Gordon, of all people? She is largely credited with introducing Sonic Youth to free jazz, which contributed in part to the music infecting so many other genres and arguably your ability to even reference it. Is it Gordon's critique of notions of black machismo in "Kool Thing" that you're getting at? "Kim Gordon very easily critiquing black machismo," Blunt maintains. "And, you know, a very comfortable approach of feminism to jump onto a black cause that was very cool, very radical at the time. I don't want to go too far into it because Free Jazz kind of said it all. I wanted to hear those instruments, the saxophones and piano, and I wanted to hear that snare with the reverb on it. I wanted to hear specific things and all those things I heard. Exactly." He pauses to catch breath.

"Do you know how the whole Sonic Youth 'Kool Thing' came about?" he continues. "Initially they wanted LL Cool J to do it and LL Cool J wanted no fucking thing to do with it. He had no idea who Kim Gordon was. His idea of rock music is fucking Bon Jovi, and the disappointment to that was Chuck D was working in the studio next door and Chuck D was unfortunately a gimp and said yes to a lot of stupid things, a lot of kids, like their cause was dying out and it's like, 'let's jump onto this', and there's Chuck D like an idiot in his Minor Threat T-shirt, 'Yeah we’re down with them,' get the fuck out of here mate! NWA were way more... they pushed it a little further than Public Enemy."

Come on, Ice Cube is a bigger caricature than any of them. "He became a parody, yes," Blunt admits, "but I just think that Chuck allowed a lot of shit to go down. Let's just say he should have listened to Griff a bit more." What? Professor Griff comes over as a paranoid anti-Semite. "Oh, not that Griff said some stupid shit," Blunt shoots back, "but Chuck should have listened some more to what Griff said about how he was being used. Ultimately Public Enemy were American radical, you know. Give me a break. American radical is not radical. American radical is still American, which is why when there is anything that invokes the black struggle, like 'Kool Thing', it has always annoyed me, because when it's coming from America it will always be American radical."