Sinister Ball

“… jazz only works if we’re trying to be free and are, in fact, together. Rock-and-roll works because we’re all a bunch of flakes. That’s something you can depend on, and a good thing too, because in the twentieth century, that’s all there is: jazz and rock-and-roll. The rest is term papers and advertising.”

— from Dave Hickey’s “The Delicacy of Rock-and-Roll”, an essay that starts at an art film screening in Austin in 1967 and spirals out to propose jazz and rock-and-roll as the dual tendencies of 20th-century American art. It’s available in Air Guitar: Essays on Art & Democracy.