Mick Hartley

We went to see La La Land last night. I have nothing particularly profound to add to the debate. I enjoyed it, but not perhaps with the passion that so many people seem to feel. The music, I thought, was forgettable, and that dancing scene on the freeway at the beginning didn't blow me away as promised. But yes, it's fun, and it's clever and moving, and Emma Stone in particular is wonderful. I thought she carried the movie.

It is, of course, an easy film to criticise from what we might call a progressive viewpoint, along the lines of: its exclusive concern for its wealthy white cast, its nostalgia, and, in particular, its take on jazz. Ryan Gosling's Seb is a jazz snob – a purist. Accusations of white appropriation of black music are inevitable. This piece by Geoff Nelson pretty much covers it – The Unbearable Whiteness of La La Land:

What Gosling’s Seb and Stone’s Mia share is a commitment to the past—a place where, supposedly, dreamers dream their dreams awake. But which dreamers dreaming what dreams? Why do white Americans (in politics and film) often so wistfully return to the era before federally mandated desegregation, voting and civil rights? (Would La La Land ever have been made with two leading actors of color? Obviously not.) The film only functions as an ode to a lost era of white supremacy, and its viewers, consciously or unconsciously, participate in the delusion. The film’s politics of nostalgia and whiteness are inextricable.

La La Land contains other more explicitly problematic politics—in fact, Gosling’s “white jazz savior” narrative has been unpacked well by MTV’s Ira Madison III. John Legend’s Keith is cast as a sell-out to “pure jazz,” which Gosling promises to successfully save by the movie’s end. The movie concludes with Gosling taking over the piano from a black musician: The erasure of black art is complete.

Much of this criticism is, I think, answered in the film itself. John Legend's (black) Keith character leads a jazz group which he invites Seb to join. They're old friends. The band becomes successful, and we see one of their concerts, with backing singers, dancers, all the rest. It's exciting. In fact it's the most exciting music in the film. By Seb's standards this is indeed a sell-out. He's obsessed with the old-style purist jazz of small smoky clubs, with Bird and Monk and all the other legends of the past jamming on stage. But, as Keith tells him in a particularly telling scene which Nelson here ignores, jazz is a revolutionary music. It's essence is change. To keep it the same – to embalm it, as Seb wants to do – is to kill it. You're a pain in the ass, he tells Seb. You're good, but you're a pain in the ass.

Now you can see that scene as Keith trying to justify what Seb sees as commercialisation. But this is in a way the story of jazz. In fact it's pretty much the story of Black American music. It has been, in general, the white folks who want to keep the music pure – whether its Blues, or Jazz, or Soul. They discover it: they think it's wonderful and exciting and different and, above all, authentic. So when new musicians come pressing for change, it's more often than not the white listeners and critics who want to stop what they see as the commercialisation of the authentic Black experience – which is, it turns out, playing in clubs to a white audience, and not making much money. Whether it was Charlie Parker blowing away the old easy rhythms of swing, Miles going electric, or the Jazz-Rock innovators, it was, nearly always, the white purists who wanted things to stay the same - to stay authentic – and the black musicians who wanted to move on and try something new. Dixieland to Swing; Swing to Bebop; Bebop to Fusion or whatever, the whites would declare that the true spirit of jazz was being killed, while the black musicians just went on ahead and kept the jazz revolution going.

These are generalisations, of course. It was never quite as clear cut as that. But I think there's enough truth in there to be able to say that director Damien Chazelle had thought about this, and that Keith's speech was specifically put there to provide some kind of response to precisely these concerns. The idea of a young white musician wanting to preserve a particular style of jazz, being a snob about it, opening a jazz club for that purpose, while his black friends go off and make new music, does I think have some kind of truth about the dynamics of race in the American experience of jazz.