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ragtime has been superseded by jazz and crooning.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