114 The International jew

 

having thrown the mantle of contempt over all counter-active moral

 

agencies-you can turn out nearly the kind of public you want. It takes

 

-Just about a quarter of a century to do the job.

 

In other days the people sang as they do now but not in such doped

 

fashion nor with such bewildered continuity. They sang because they

 

wished to, not as an uncontrolled habit. They sang songs nonsensical,

 

sentimental, heroic, but the "shady" songs were outlawed. The old songs

 

come readily back to memory. Though years have intervened since they

 

were the fashion, yet their quality was such that they. do not die. The

 

popular song of last month-who knows its name? But there are songs of

 

long ago whose titles are familiar even to those who have not sung them.

 

What margin did these songs leave for the suggestive and for the

 

unwholesomely emotional? Sentiment ~as not lacking, _but it was

 

unobjectionable sentiment. Then came the Jews; the popular song

 

underwent a change. An entirely new crop of titles appeared dealing with

 

an entirely different series of subjectS than the songs they displaced.

 

Talented singers, tuneful singing vanished. The Jew and the African

 

period, being the entrance of the jungle motif, the so-called "Congo"

 

stuff, and other compositions which swiftly degenerated into a rather

 

more bestial type than the beasts themselves arrive at. Running alongside

 

this swamp strain .was the "ragtime" style of music which was a

 

development of the legitimate Negro minstrelsy. Lyrics disappeared

 

before the numerous "cak~-walk" songs that deluged the public ear.

 

Seductive syncopation swamped the harmony of the real song.

 

Minstrelsy took on a new life; glamorous youths mutter ·dirges in low

 

monotones, voluptuous females with grossly seductive gestures moan

 

nasal notes no real musician can recognize. "Piano acts" were made the

 

rage; "jazz bands" made their appearance. By insensible gradations now

 

easily traceable through the litter of songs with which recent decades are

 

strewn, we have been able to see the decline in the popular song supply.

 

Sentiment has been turned into sensuous suggestion. Romance has been

 

turned into eroticism. The popular musical lilt slid into ragtime and

 

ragtime has been superseded by jazz and crooning. Song topics became

 

lower and lower until at last they are the dredges of the slimy bottom of

 

the underworld.

 

The first self-styled "King of Jazz" was a Jew named "Frisco." The

 

general directors of the whole downward trend have been Jews. It needed