Who will be the Charles Mingus of our age, “post-truth,” the “international word of 2016”? What will equate to ‘Fables of Faubus’ – with or without the spoken word – re-invented for our dangerous times and remain powerful as satire reclaiming through art the last bit of the hyphenate, the difficult bit? 

Perhaps that person will be a jazz musician, perhaps a hip-hop star, someone probably not one of the usual suspects, surely, perhaps an actor, scientist, painter, conceptual artist, someone from technology or the groves of academe, even stakeless citizens not defined by their occupation yet creative as all humans all. Instrumental music is as powerful as the words of a song when people know how to gloss the language via consensual thought and their ears (!) (and yes, the wisdom of crowds) and jazz people know their language and how much of a universal means of expression it is when words are often lost in translation or filtered away. 

Will there be a Swift, a Hogarth, a Zola, or a Kurt Weill, a Maya Angelou, Naomi Klein, Michael Moore, or a composite of all these remarkable writers? Or will there be a specialist polemicist, a protester, an anarchist or again all of the above and express everything in music even choosing not to cheapen the perceptible sanctity of music as art by being quite so direct and political?

Obliqueness works too when nothing else can and may serve as a mystic allegory or yes, a fable. Who will play their anti-Trump card best or at all? Who can feel the implied short- or possibly long-term imposition of silence most effectively in what may well be a difficult period for human kind? There is no shortage of material, that is for sure.

An important caveat to all of the above and what the truly creative artist will never forget in the process is provided in this quote from a Noam Chomsky pamphlet where it is part of a wider discussion (click for source and context): “Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.” SG