Posted on 09/17/2020 11:32:36 AM PDT by Hojczyk
Stanley Crouch died yesterday at the age of 74. Crouch is best known as a great jazz critic. His biography of Charlie Parker is a classic.
But Crouch was also a literary critic and a critic of our culture. Here are some gems from his criticism:
On rap: It is “either infantile self-celebration or anarchic glamorization of criminal behavior.”
On Toni Morrison:
She has a certain skill, but she has no serious artistic vision or real artistic integrity. “Beloved” was a fraud. It gave a fake vision of the slave trade, it didn’t deal with the complicity of Africans, and it moved the males into the wings.
On Spike Lee: He’s “a middle-class would-be street Negro,” whose films reflected “fantasy” versions of Black communities and “the fundamental shallowness that you get from a propagandist.”
On Malcolm X: He was “the chief black heckler of the civil rights movement.”
On the civil rights movement: It aspired to a “complex vision of universal humanism” and cultural understanding before it was “hijacked by radicals.”
On Louis Farrakhan: He’s “our most highly respected racist and all-purpose lunatic.”
On his African American critics:
I’ve been applauded by black bus drivers, subway drivers, mechanics, various people who have come up to me and said, “I’m sure glad somebody is saying it.” That’s enough for me. I don’t care what some trickle-down Negro Marxist says.
On his education:
If you came in there and said, “I’m from a dysfunctional family and a single parent household,” they would say, “Boy, I’m going to ask you again. What is 8 times 8?”
When I was coming up, there were no excuses except your house burned down and there was a murder in the family.
Crouch’s no-nonsense education produced a brilliant enemy of nonsense. RIP.
(Excerpt) Read more at powerlineblog.com ...
I use to read his column in the Village Voice. It was never boring.
I liked the guy. I believe he was a common sense liberal with some conservative leanings.
I’ve been applauded by black bus drivers, subway drivers, mechanics, various people who have come up to me and said, “I’m sure glad somebody is saying it.” That’s enough for me. I don’t care what some trickle-down Negro Marxist says.
RIP.
RIP.Mr Crouch RIP.
Wonder if he was related to Hondo Crouch, the owner of Luckenbach, Texas.
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