“Any musical movement that claims to be all-embracing is probably lying, both to the outside world and itself.” — Kelefa Sanneh, Major Labels (p. 236)
There’s a short story by a writer who died before you could hear about him. Henry Dumas. Gunned down by a cop in a New York City subway station at 33. Championed posthumously by Toni Morrison. Musically inclined offspring of Baldwin and Baraka. The story’s called “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” It’s about a crew of white musicians who try to get into the Sound Barrier Club, a jazz joint featuring Black musicians and an all Black audience. At the door, the bouncer warns the intrepid white hipsters that they enter at their own peril. Sure enough, when they do, the music proves too potent. A power they cannot process. It kills them.
They were warned.
I won’t tell you we need gatekeepers because music can kill you. Unless it’s played at a volume that would make CIA torturers cower, I’m not sure music alone can kill you. Among the many things Dumas’ story says about music— access, privilege, understanding, and history—it speaks to the necessity of gatekeepers as guides. Those who can provide passage to places we’ve never imagined. Those who can give context to the things we’ve yet to mentally metabolize. Those who can tell us we’re not ready yet. Or those we disagree with, who enable us to form our taste in opposition. Gatekeepers are not just cool kids or elitists to be mocked, they’re essential elements of a healthy commercial art ecosystem. Without them, we lose ourselves in a contextless drift.
Lack of trust defines our era. Tides of doubt—for institutions, for authority, for older generations, for foreigners, for truth—ripple back to the roots of American society. Suspicion became our default in the nuclear age. The love and peace movements of the 1960s gave way to the dark 1970s, the “greed is good” 1980s, the mainstream pessimism of the 1990s.
By the early 2010s, digitally-driven information and social media revolutions transformed the ways we confronted the world. Changes first appeared net positive: the ability to connect with lost friends, the potential to foment socio-political change from the ground up, the democratization of music distribution and conversation.