Bono, The King of Ireland

The other thing that I’m thinking about right now is the bizarre version of American culture that gets transmitted to countries abroad. Please forgive the general naïveté of this. This is my first extended trip abroad, and I’m trying not to have too many, “Oh gosh, this gives me such a new perspective on life in America” moments. But I will say a few things.

At least in one of the cafes that I often go to in order to mooch off their free wireless internet (and electricity), they play awful, horrendously bad music. I’m talking things like “My Heart Will Go On” and lame covers of tunes like “Wonderful Tonight,”—and this is when they’re not playing smooth jazz. (And by the way, do you remember how ploddingly slow “My Heart Will Go On” is? The song seems to last for about an entire year.)

If all people in other countries know about the U.S. is George W. Bush and crappy music, I can understand why we have a bit of an image problem now. In the 1950s, the state department sent jazz musicians to various countries to convince them to remain loyal to the United States during the Cold War. This history is detailed in Penny von Eschen’s excellently-titled book, “Satchmo Blows Up the World.” But for those of you who haven’t read it, it was especially important that the U.S. send over African-American jazz musicians to counter ideas that black people were being treated poorly: the Cold War also being the era of civil rights agitation. One of the Soviet Union’s propaganda tools was to insist that America’s constant harping on freedom was hollow since it didn’t treat African-Americans as equal citizens. The sight of Dizzy Gillespie and Louis Armstrong and an American flag on the same stage was supposed to counter this idea. Also, the musicians were supposed to just present a positive version of America, an America where great music and great culture were being produced.

It seems to me, at least, that we could use a contemporary jazz ambassador program to counter some of the negative images of America that exist abroad. I guess the parallel now would be to send Muslim Americans abroad to stump for the country, but I honestly don’t know of any prominent Muslim American musicians. (And do tell me if I’m overlooking someone obvious.) And jazz itself has taken something of a downturn in popularity since the 1950s (in relative, if not in absolute terms—and this is a key point to remember. More people than ever buy and listen to jazz and classical music. It’s just that elite culture—which, by roughly 1960, jazz had become—has lost its claim to being the sole arbiter of good taste and the only product available in the marketplace. So when people talk about the decline of jazz or classical music, this is what they’re really talking about: the fact that their preferred music no longer sets the standards by which other musics are judged.).

So for maximum effect, the U.S. probably shouldn’t be sending out jazz musicians. But if things turn around for my country in January, I do think that one of the steps toward improving our standing around the world might be to send people like Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, John Legend, Erykah Badu, Norah Jones, Wilco, and others on goodwill tours around the world. Let people know that there’s more to America than the one-dimensional view they get from television and crappy music in cafes and bus stops.