The musical moment that made Aldous Huxley “ashamed” to be a member of the human species
We rely too much on technology. That’s not a judgment; that’s just a fact. Whether it’s to do something harmless, such as listen to our favourite Black Sabbath, or whether it’s to engage in hours and hours of pointless scrolling, the fact remains that we too often have a screen in front of our eyes that has warped our vision of reality. Not only that, but it has also changed the way that we perceive art and the way artists create it.
Far Out has touched upon this previously. In our article, Do we live inside a parody? Samuel Beckett’s 40-second plays and the perils of social media, we discuss Beckett’s quote, “Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness,” while also exploring how art itself has changed so that the consumer is brought into the creative process and has a very hands-on role.
“We don’t have to go to a record store to buy an album; we don’t have to go to the cinema to watch a film; we don’t have to; we don’t even need to leave our house to socialise and engage with the communicative aspect of art,” the article reads. “Everything is available on our phones and our TV screens. Slowly, art has moved from something the artist creates and the consumer engages with to something that the consumer will engage with and that an artist can facilitate the creation of.”
These criticisms can be found in plenty of places throughout the artistic world. With this in mind, and given how far technology has come since the 1920s, it’s interesting to think that something such as adding words to moving pictures could have once been considered controversial. It is now such a normal part of everyday life and hardly something that people are concerned with. The fact that it caused such uproar when initially created is hard to believe, yet it’s true.
The Jazz Singer was one of the first global successes to have sound and talking over moving pictures in cinema. Many consider it a classic and love it. However, others thought the film was the starting point in what would prove to be a devastating blow for the human race. One of these people was American philosopher and author Aldous Huxley.
It’s safe to assume that Huxley wasn’t a fan of the movie. He despised it and the advancement made by introducing talking pictures. He called the film “the latest and most frightful creation-saving device for the production of standardized amusement.”
One of the moments in the film that he hated most was the scene in which Al Jolson donned blackface and started to sing ‘Mammy’. He despised it so much that it made him ashamed to be a member of the human race. “My flesh crept as the loudspeaker poured out those sodden words, that greasy, sagging melody,” he said, “I felt ashamed of myself for listening to such things, for even being a member of the species to which such things are addressed.”
When you consider the premise of his book, Brave New World, it’s understandable why Huxley was so against the idea of talking pictures. The highly regulated world he creates within his novel, where behaviour is controlled by pleasure, feels somewhat closely connected with what we get by the constant scrolling and binge-watching that we’re susceptible to these days. Huxley’s comments on the dangers of a film with sound may appear exaggerated now, but they initiated the slippery slope that we currently find ourselves on with no chance of stopping.
