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Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club: Popular Music and the Avant-Garde. Bernard Gendron. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Pp. x + 388. $55.00 (cloth); $20.00 (paper).
Reviewed by David Chinitz, Loyola University Chicago
In Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club, Bernard Gendron sets out to provide nothing less than "a genealogy of the cultural empowerment of popular music" (34). Rejecting from the outset the triumphalist postmodern reading of cultural history, in which postmodernism heroically and single-handedly demolished the opposition between elite and mass culture, Gendron nevertheless maintains that postmodernism did mark an irrevocable shift. Postmodernism, in Gendron's account, emerges as the moment when popular music is validated as an "art" and "high culture's monopoly over cultural capital" is broken (7). The hundred years between the friendly colonization of popular song in the avant-garde cabarets of Montmartre and the attempts of the -punk" painters and filmmakers of New York's Mudd Club to "hitch" their art to the new wave music scene witnessed "the cultural triumph of the 'popular... (320). And despite the postmodernist account, it turns out to have been modernism, with its panoply of avant-garde experiments and border crossings, that made this sea change possible.
In this extraordinary work of cultural history and aesthetic theory, Gendron focuses on five decisive episodes, beginning with the development of the European artistic cabaret and the adoption of jazz by Jean Cocteau's avant-garde circle at Le Boeuf sur le Toit. With the third episode, the book reaches what Gendron considers the crucial moment when 1940s jazz, by transforming itself into an avant-garde art form, inaugurated the "postmodern era in high/low interactions" (121). The book here undergoes several important changes of its own: two decades...