Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club: Popular Music and the Avant-Garde (review)

In Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club, Bernard Gendron sets out to provide nothing less than "a genealogy of the cultural empowerment of popular music" (3-4). Rejecting from the outset the triumphalist postmodern reading of cultural history, in which postmodernism heroically and single-handedly demolished the opposition between elite and mass culture, Gendron nevertheless maintains that postmodernism did mark an irrevocable shift. Postmodernism, in Gendron's account, emerges as the moment when popular music is validated as an "art" and "high culture's monopoly over cultural capital" is broken (7). The hundred years between the friendly colonization of popular song in the avant-garde cabarets of Montmartre and the attempts of the "punk" painters and filmmakers of New York's Mudd Club to "hitch" their art to the new wave music scene witnessed "the cultural triumph of the 'popular'" (320). And despite the postmodernist account, it turns out to have been modernism, with its panoply of avant-garde experiments and border crossings, that made this sea change possible.

In this extraordinary work of cultural history and aesthetic theory, Gendron focuses on five decisive episodes, beginning with the development of the European artistic cabaret and the adoption of jazz by Jean Cocteau's avant-garde circle at Le Boeuf sur le Toit. With the third episode, the book reaches what Gendron considers the crucial moment when 1940s jazz, by transforming itself into an avant-garde art form, inaugurated the "postmodern era in high/low interactions" (121). The book here undergoes several important changes of its own: two decades have passed since the previous chapter; the scene has shifted permanently from Paris to New York, where "the postmodern turn first manifested itself and was carried through most thoroughly" (12); and most importantly, it is no longer avant-garde incursions into the popular that concern Gendron, but the struggles of popular genres themselves to gain legitimacy. Since critical and journalistic prose was "the dominant medium" in which this battle was fought out, Gendron's method, from here through the book's penultimate chapter, becomes a scrupulous, almost microscopic examination of the discourses emanating from and surrounding the popular genres under consideration (122). The terms of these legitimating discourses, Gendron argues, were products of "the various European avant-garde and modernist discourses" that had defined the cultural field in the preceding decades (140). The fourth episode comprises the "very rapid rise up the cultural hierarchy" of 1960s rock music, led by the Beatles (162). In the fifth, punk and new wave rock, building on the preexisting discursive formations, "successfully operated on the tense boundaries between pop and the avant-garde, without doing injustice to either" (227).

One of the original contributions of this book to the study of the early modernist avant-gardes is its insistence on treating the "secondary" aesthetic practices of the artistic cabarets—the leisure and consumption activities that marked the artists' aestheticization of life—with a seriousness normally reserved for such "primary" products as paintings and poems. "Traditional scholarship," Gendron claims, has "greatly underestimat[ed] the importance of secondary aesthetic practices to the development of modernism" (32-33). Secondary practices such as flâneurie, public provocations, and eccentric enthusiasms (e.g., for jazz in 1918), he shows, "participated quite significantly in determining the public reception of the 'primary' modernist products, and hence in the constitution of their public meanings" (31). This insight pays dividends not only in Gendron's chapters on the artistic cabarets but in, for instance, his discussion of Milhaud's jazz-inflected composition, La Création du Monde. Though well received, La Création failed to be heard as the composer wished because of the public context Milhaud himself had helped to create for it: "his intention to appropriate jazz formally as serious art music ran squarely against the avant-garde construction of jazz...