by Sidney J. Furie and starring Diana Ross as Billie Holiday The book: Lady Sings the Blues, cowritten by Billie Holiday (Sphere - 30p)
The great jazz singer, Billie Holiday, suffered in her short life almost every form of oppression and exploitation that American capitalist society has to offer - from the illegitimacy of her birth, the poverty and insecurity of her "childhood" and the humiliation of her early life as a prostitute and domestic servant, through the racism and commercial exploitation of the music business, to her slow death of heroin addiction.
The film, Lady Sings the River, despite its sympatbetic pose adds to all this oppression, posthumously. Bibe is presented as a talented artiste who happens also to be black. Her fight to "the top is shown as a long fight against racial discrimination over which she and her talent triumph. She and her faithful supporters make it to the Carnegie Hall in the But racial discrimination and the more bizarre in the scene where she is nearly lynched by the Ku Klux Klan) are topics which any contemporary American film can treat with absolute safety. In so far as racism is an obstacie to 'talent" it is an irrational waste of human, expioilable capital. The ideological representatives of US capital in the film industry have every reason to moralise about these more obvious aspects of racism.
What is totally ignored in the film is the way in wluch not just Billie Holiday's wreer but her whole artistic production - like that of any other black artist suffered from the poisonous combination of cultural racism and capitalist exploitation. Fortunately we have other evidence on this not least in Baile's autobiography which, although partly written by a ghost-writer, telb us a thousand For example, in a comment on the origins of 'modern jazz, Bibe pives us an insight into the way black music has been persistently plagiarised and diluted by the entertainment industry in the USA, real musical innovations getting some kind of recomition only after RULES FOR RADICALS by Saul D their assimilation by whites: 'By the time the offays got round to copping swing' a new style music was already breaking out all over uptown. Ten years later that became the newest thing when the white boys downtown figured how to cop it."
Bille's re mark is equally true of the carliest period in jazz-history, the first jazz-band to I Cord - original (sic) Dixieland Jazz Band' was of course a group of white imitators It's also true of the most recent period, when virtually all the ideas of any interest in so-called "progressive rock and pop music are borrow ings — watered-down, deprived of their original significance and rendered acceptable to the requirements of the market - from the great advances made by black musicians in the last What is the explanation of this persistent cultural oppression" For an answer to this ques tion it's neoessary to look at the whole cultural history of blacks in America, From the days of slavery blacks have again and again produced cultural form ideas, ways of speaking and thinking, lifodesperately to replace dogma by relativism he erects relativism as a ... doema! Thus he writes on the one hand, truth is relative and changing and activists should be "political relativists;" whilst in the next paragraph he argues one has a conviction that people will ... reach the right conclusion and that they will nove abead in / their ideological monopoly. political ideologies, religious ded by Judeo-Christianity elaborate on it! styles, arl-forms, modes of organisation and so on - which have always been distinctive, The Blues. always in tension with the dominant (European bourgoos) culture, and sometimes in open un tagonism to it, If you lake pole of this fact, and combine it with the virtual absence of uny independent ideological and political threat from the while working class in recent A merican history, it becomes obvious why the suppression andiot inoculation of independent black culture is a major poonty for the American ruling class. It seriously threatens position.
As if the combination of racial oppression and capitalist exploitation were not cough, Billie was also a victim of sexual oppression - her carly years were spent as a maid and as a prostitute, whust later on she was exploited sexually and financially by a swarm of parasites. Particularly revealing on this is Bille's achievemenes description of her relationship with promoter John Levy. In stark contrast to the reality is the tilm's treatment of Bike's relationshope with men. Her film-life is domination by the standard Hollywood tear-jerker: the strong.
their eternal search(?) for those values propounAnother consequence of this vacillation between dogmatism and relativist is an understanding of capitalism as only authority relations (ie, the 'Haves" boss around the 'Havenots. I Seen this way the Have-nots only impetus to the revolution is what Alinsky calls the 'Great law of change.' This "law" is so obvious that he does not think it necessary to Diana Ross and Billy De Williams in Lady Sings handsome, Joyal husband whose sole aim in life is to save her from herself and from a ravenous outside world.
In short, Billie's a cree? life was a microcosm of all the conflicts and oppressions of Americun society. In dealing with only one aspect of one of those conflicts the filmi gives the clue to the secret of its silence on ull the others: its class Diana Ross us Billie struggles bravely with some had material, and musically surpasses all reasonable expectations. She manages to suggest something of a Bille Holiday perfor. mance without ever falling into the trap of imitating the inimitable, Significantly, though, we are given no clue as to her seal musical not a word abour her association with the Basic band, with the grear Lester Young, Teddy Wilson, and the rest The book, at least, is well worth a read!
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THERE WiLL BE NO WOMENS LIBERATION REVOLUTION