Hugues Panassié contra Walter Benjamin: Bodies, masses and the iconic jazz recording in mid-century France

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Perchard, Tom. 2012. Hugues Panassié contra Walter Benjamin: Bodies, masses and the iconic jazz recording in mid-century France. Popular Music and Society, 35(3), pp. 375-398. ISSN 0300-7766 [Article]

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Official URL: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0300776...

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As Walter Benjamin, domiciled in Paris, wrote and then in 1936 published his famous essay on the revolutionary potential of mechanically reproduced art, the right-wing French jazz critic Hugues Panassié – Europe’s foremost authority on the music before WWII – was theorizing the new black American form as an agent of “traditional,” sacralized social re-organization. Resituating these writers’ works in the volatile French and European political contexts of the 1930s, and then going on to examine Panassié’s post-war organization of the Hot-club de France, this article examines the question posed mid-century by these radicals of the right and left: how could the relationship between individual and society be transformed both practically and politically in front of art’s mechanical reproduction?

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Article

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https://doi.org/10.1080/03007766.2011.567912