Essence-Blasting Hits of the Seventies/History
HISTORY:[edit]
The 1920s: Smooth Alien Jazz, White Bleeding Horror[edit]
The Great War put paid to a lot of the Tune Exalted of the 19th century - the romantic conception of warfare, as exemplified in the operas and arias of theater, was barely able to affect the harsh reality of an artillery barrage, or sweep away the poison gas that rotted the lungs of soldiers where they stood. The worst came when the Operatic Exalted's power worked, creating epic sweeps of pagaentry that invariably came apart under gunfire. Glittering armor and braces of cherubim proved poor protection against a steel-jacketed bullet. The war was ultimately decided by force of arms, which then lead to bloody stalemate, eventually ending in 1918 after American intervention. Europe, bled white by the Great War, tried to continue with a pale imitation of the Exalted vs. Exalted operatic duels that had given it its strength in the 18th century, but only succeeded in falling into greater and greater decadence. The strength of the music passed over the Atlantic, to America, where it blossomed into jazz and the blues. Both were similar in composition, but their outcomes would be remarkably different.
Jazz's Exalted took off from the impact of Prohibition, drawing its energy from African-American culture intermixing with white society for the firs time; the blues had always existed, but it began to produce its own Tune Exalted without having a significant audience behind it. But while the blues stayed relatively obscure, jazz swiftly became the music of the flappers, of the endless boom of the Twenties. Bluesmen dealt with lesser demons and devils at dusty crossroads, or in the middle of stagnant swamps; jazzmen played their music in speakeasies, used their powers to aid bootleggers in running their goods from state to state, put another electric current into a society that had already had enough.
