Party Rocking: the Modern Jes Grew

Recently in class, Mr. Mitchell gave us a prompt revolving around Papa LaBas and Earline's conversation at the very end of Mumbo Jumbo.

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Recap of conversation (Reed 204): 

Earline: Is this the end of Jes Grew?

Papa LaBas: Jes Grew has no end and no beginning...We will miss it for a while but it will come back, and when it returns we will see that it never left...We will make our own future Text. A future generation of young artists will accomplish this.

(These are selective points I highlighted from LaBas's paragraph answer.)
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LaBas' answer induces the question of how Jes Grew has continued and manifested in the current day. Reed presents a detailed account of Jes Grew, beginning in Osiris' ancient Egyptian dominion. He then takes the story to Europe and connects it to the main Jazz-age context in Mumbo Jumbo. Although there is no real-life correspondence to Mumbo Jumbo's 1920's Jes Grew event, documented dancing pandemics are a real thing in history. (Caroline wrote a post about these occurrences in Europe.) But records of these dancing plagues has stopped since the seventeenth century, and indeed we don't have these dancing pandemics today.


However, just by Reed's introduction of Jes Grew in the first few pages of Mumbo Jumbo, of people doing " 'stupid sensual things,' in a state of 'uncontrollable frenzy,' wriggling like fish, doing something called the 'Eagle Rock' and the 'Sassy Bump'," I had immediately formed a connection between the Jes Grew in the novel and a real-life, modern day counterpart (4-5).

In the form of a one-time, pop-music hit song that took America by storm in 2011: LMFAO's Party Rock Anthem ft. Lauren Bennett, GoonRock

"Party Rock Anthem" is a straightforward, blatant, and non-convoluted song promoting things related to partying, dancing, and having fun. But in the context of Mumbo Jumbo's Jes Grew, the song and music video become newly interesting.

At the opening of the music video, a black screen shows with the words "On March 1, LMFAO's Redfoo and Sky Blu slipped into comas after excessive party rocking," introducing the apocalyptic setting of the music video. We see Redfoo and Sky Blu wake up from their comas to a deserted hospital; going outside, the streets and cars are in disarray and also deserted.

The apocalyptic presentation of the world and the infectious nature of party rocking is the premise of the music video. We see one man at 2:06 get surrounded by party-rockers while trying to escape the dancing mania and subsequently become infected with it. The portrayal of party rocking as a "physic plague" and "spreading infection" is exactly how Jes Grew is also introduced (17).

However, in Mumbo Jumbo we quickly start to distinguish between the two views of Jes Grew. Seeing Jes Grew as a spreading disease, a pandemic that needs to be contained, is the Atonist viewpoint; LaBas, Black Herman, Harlem, and the promoters of Jes Grew see it as an "anti-plague," something that "enlivens the host" and is the "delight of the gods" (6).

In the music video, we also begin to see a distinction between attitudes toward party rocking. The individuals who are scared of party rocking are presented as typical adherents to respectable, stiff, rule-following society. Notice that the man at 2:06 who gets surrounded and infected makes the sign of the cross and prays before dashing into the open. The main anti-party-rocking character is the man at 1:07 who tries to keep the dancing mania away from Redfoo and Sky Blu by giving them earplugs. His appearance, in contrast to everyone else's brightly colored, fantastically printed clothing, is that of a typical, respectable office worker in a collared white dress shirt, pants, and tie. His fearful description of party rocking, saying that "It'll get into your bones" and "They've been Shufflin' ," is reminiscent of the Atonist way of describing Jes Grew as an 'uncontrollable frenzy' and calling out dance moves such as the 'Eagle Rock' and 'Sassy Bump' in a comically serious and frightened manner.

In contrast, everyone in the music video who is actually party rocking is having a good time, enlivened and dancing with smiles on their faces. The point of this, being the same point of Jes Grew, is to promote letting go and allowing natural expression. Jes Grew at the core is not rooted to Harlem or a single culture; it spreads anywhere--Egypt, Europe, America--with the purpose of shedding oppressive society and allowing people to follow their desires and natural inclinations.

Jes Grew in Mumbo Jumbo's Jazz age promoted black expression in America. Jes Grew in the current day as presented by "Party Rock Anthem" and similar media would perhaps be promoting something such as freedom against rule-stricken, pressurized, American worker society. Partying, flaunty clothing, the party-rock infected nurse dancer included in the music video I think are all bits and pieces pointing toward this idea. As LaBas said, "We will make our own future Text. A future generation of young artists will accomplish this." Aside from the power of the internet and catchy nature of the song, it's interesting how a release such as "Party Rock Anthem," quite shallow on the surface, was able to hit and spread virally all across the nation.

Killing off Tateh

It's been a few days since we've finished Ragtime, but I wanted to make this last point before we jumped into Mumbo Jumbo. One of our final topics in class discussion was, naturally, the ending of the book. We looked at Tateh and Mother's reinvented family as possibly the largest, and perhaps only, beacon of optimism in the sea of violent character-death. Although it is a refreshing point, I can't help but hold a particularly cynical view of this idea. In Ragtime's finale, the Tateh-Mother ending is the most off-putting for me--more so than the deaths.

Father, although dying in a violent explosion on the Lusitania, is taken in a fitting fashion. We discussed in class that Father's traditional nineteenth century character simply couldn't survive into the new age, as earlier began to show from the rift between him and Mother--Father's character finally crumbles while he significantly is still holding onto his firearms, the symbolic constant of his life work.  

In this case, we contrasted the progressive nature of the Tateh-Mother family versus the immobile condition of Father's mentality. The ones who changed were able to poke through the modern era, while the unchanging character was left behind. In class, we proposed to view the situation of the Tateh-Mother family as a ray of hope in modernity compared to Father's bleak ending. This pulls on the core assumption that the progressive changes in the reinvented family are a superior development over Father's constancy--an assumption I find controversial.

As earlier analyzed, the death of Father at the end of the story, although violent, was not unfitting. Father was a character who remained steadfast in following his beliefs and work to the end, an individual who held onto his identity. This lends reason to why the brash character-death doesn't feel more off-putting, just also a bit pitiful, despite the tragic setting.

In contrast, there is something continuously disconcerting about Tateh's success story. The full-blown and ironic manifestation of Baron Ashkenazy is definitely something to point out. Doctorow is blatantly dancing around the American success story, what with the high-end but meaningless connotations of "Baron" and Jewish presentation of "Ashkenazy." The new identification, although a splotch in the seriousness of Tateh's evolution, isn't much to completely overturn the good feeling of Tateh's success. No, it's something else.

At the beginning of chapter 34, I was shocked when Doctorow casually dropped the bomb on the Baron's identity. Although there were plenty of signs in the previous chapter of who Baron Ashkenazy was (his daughter, film-making, ethnicity, etc.), I had been unsuspecting of his identity as Tateh and aligned him as a new character Doctorow was introducing to the story. The main reason for this is the apparent difference between what the story had established to us as the character of Tateh and Baron Ashkenazy; the "flamboyant, excited person [with] eyes darting here and there, like a child," is too much of a contrast between the serious, white-haired, and grim character of Tateh (254). It is as if these are two completely different people and is also what I think the root of the problem.

En route to success, it seems as if Tateh was forced to lose himself in the process. Baron Ashkenazy has consumed his existence. The name is one thing, but Doctorow also decides to do a complete 180 on Tateh's character, and that is what makes this success story off-putting. The happiness of the Tateh-Mother family and the film-making success itself is not disputed. The push of Tateh into a different identity and then into someone else's (Hal Roach, producer of the Little Rascals) identity completely is my point of contention. By finalizing "Tateh" as someone who has, in actuality, a completely different background then Tateh's origins in Ragtime, there is a falseness to the whole bright ending of this situation.