Langston Hughes and the "Nonsense" of Bebop

In terms of current Afro-American popular music and the sources from which it has progressed—jazz, ragtime, swing, blues, boogie-woogie, and be-bop—this poem on contemporary Harlem, like be-bop, is marked by conflicting changes, sudden nuances, sharp and impudent interjections, broken rhythms, and passages sometimes in the manner of the jam session, sometimes the popular song, punctuated by the riffs, runs, breaks, and disc-tortions of the music of a community in transition.—Langston Hughes, Introduction to Montage of a Dream Deferred

That is where Bop comes from—out of them dark days we have seen. That is why Be-bop is so mad, wild, frantic, crazy. And not to be dug unless you have seen dark days, too. That’s why folks who ain’t suffered much cannot play Bop, and do not understaind it. They think it’s nonsense.—Langston Hughes, “Bop”

Langston Hughes’s 1951 book-length montage of “contemporary Harlem” concludes with a motif that recurs throughout the poem and throughout his career: “Dream within a dream / Our dream deferred.”¹ Hughes locates this African American “dream deferred” within a geography of broken promises, a geography both separate from and contained within the social inequities of Manhattan and, by extension, the national postwar world. In mapping the social geography of a Harlem that was still suffering from the economic impact of the Great Depression, a Harlem that had become a national symbol of black urban unrest after 1943, Hughes underscores the necessity for a critical memory responsive to its historical moment. As his introductory statement to Montage indicates, the musical form he chose to render this critical memory was the still controversial jazz sound of bebop. While Montage invokes a polymorphous African American musical tradition familiar to readers of Hughes’s earlier blues and jazz poetry, it summons this tradition through bebop’s more defiant postwar mood. Hughes’s introduction anticipates a readership divided in its understanding of bebop. On the one hand, he can assume an identification of bebop with Harlem in explaining how the poem’s dissonance relates to the social world it represents; on the other, the academic, even bureaucratic sound of “a community in transition” appeals to a public less familiar with Harlem than, for example, the African American readership of his weekly Simple columns in the Chicago Defender. Such a conflicted sense of his audience, figured more blatantly in the contrasting language of the introduction to Montage and that of Simple’s rendition of “bop,” is symptomatic of the struggle that occupied Hughes throughout his postwar writing: the struggle to negotiate conflicting formations of a progressive black public sphere, from the multiracial ideal of social democracy associated with the Popular Front to more militant black nationalist alternatives. Because bebop evinces this discord in both its performative practice and its reception, it is an especially compelling mode for Hughes’s “disc-tortions” of postwar Harlem. It is this relationship between bebop and its public that I will address in the following pages, examining in particular the significance of bebop in Montage for reclaiming Harlem as a site for both black cultural pride and militant anger, a site of memory that recalls the utopian promise of the Harlem Renaissance but also appeals to the postwar skepticism of a younger generation of black artists.²

Montage exemplifies the ongoing importance of what Houston Baker has defined as “critical memory.”³ In his essay in the 1995 Black Public Sphere collection, Baker discusses recent pluralist formulations of the public sphere that take into account subordinated social groups excluded from the dominant bourgeois public. He cites in particular feminist social theorist Nancy Fraser, who emphasizes the importance of both identity politics and the mass media for the formation of “subaltern counterpublic spheres.” Counterpublic spheres constituted by such subordinated social groups serve two important functions: they provide spaces for the invention and circulation of counterdiscourses, and they offer bases for critical action within broader public spheres [End...