Den förbjudna musiken - Kritiken mot Sveriges tidiga jazzscen

Sammanfattning: Almost all kinds of music and art has initially been criticized and exposed to some degree of hate, at least early on in its development. At the same time, it has been proved to be an effective way to oppress other cultures by criticizing and attack its art and music. To say that the rituals of a foreign culture is dirty or not hygienic is to put one’s own culture above the foreign one and es-tablish an oppression. Those rituals can be a lot of things, but the most common ones are of course the dance and music of a culture. European colonizers during the colonization of Africa and South America used that way of oppression by calling the colonized peoples religious and sa-cred dances dirty. By doing so they could more effectively spread their own culture and their own rituals, the Cristian ones. The thesis of this essay is that this is nothing unique, it happens to all cultures and all kinds of new music and art. It is a repeating process that maybe never will finish. In that process, it is in-teresting to examine why and who it is that usually oppress others music, and the easiest way to find out is to look at how. Every kind of music genre deserves its own investigation of this sort, but for practical reasons this essay is focused on the critic against the early Swedish jazz-scene. Only the critic against Swedish jazz in the twenties and thirties is interesting for this essay so therefore the picture of Swedish jazz in the text is not balanced, it may seem dark. The most common way of the criticizing jazz in Sweden in the years 1915-1945 was to com-pare it with an infectious disease which would spread all around the county, infect anyone who danced to it and slowly kill them. Another way of attacking jazz was to worry about the women who encountered the new music. In Sweden, the twenties were an important time for women’s liberation, and for a lot of women dancing to jazz became a way of breaking the patriarchal chains.