BEER:
WHY PEOPLE LIKE COLD BEER
The worst beer I’ve tasted recently was an
ale I had at a local craft brewery. A mouthful offered empty disappointment,
the only feeling coming from the carbonation.
How did a good beer turn out so bad? Was it
old? Nope. Poured carelessly? Not that I could tell. Served in a dirty glass?
No. The problem was that the beer was too damn cold.
I’d ordered the beer at a good restaurant
with a good beer selection, but the beer was stored too cold and worse, poured
into a frozen mug. Drinking it was meaningless, disrespectful even. A new,
room-temperature glass and my patience slowly defeated the chill and renewed
the beer. But it’s sad to think that anyone trying a craft beer for the first
time at this restaurant would experience something no more interesting than a
cheap mass market beer and wonder why they were paying a couple bucks extra for
it.
There’s practically no beer worth drinking
that should be served below 40 degrees Fahrenheit. Some types of beer, like
double IPAs and British bitters, are at their best around 55 degrees. But walk
into any bar, even one serious about craft beer, and you’re likely to be served
beer that’s close to freezing, often in a chilled mug.
Where did this practice of deep freezing
beer come from? While the cold destroys the taste of good beers, it hides the
problems of flavorless mass market beers. So, it’s no surprise that the
corporate brewers who make Budweiser, Miller, and Coors fill their advertisements
with images of frosty mugs, snowy peaks, and bikini women playing in fake snow.
My friend, the sensory scientist Sue
Langstaff, makes a living thinking deeply about how our foods and drinks look,
taste, and smell. She taught me the science behind the problems of cold beer: since
key aromatic compounds cannot volatilize at lower temperatures, they won’t
release their scent into the gas above the liquid. To put it clearly, the smell
the brewer wants you to experience is suppressed; any fruity or floral
flavor is literally frozen.
Drinks lose carbon dioxide as temperature
increases, so the cold also increases the tingle of the carbonation. Freezing
cold temperature is therefore ideal for the thin, tasteless beers flowing out
of large breweries. The big brewers know their beer has little flavor or aroma,
so their marketing stresses ice-cold refreshment. If the drink can’t provide
taste, at least drinkers can feel something on their tongues when it’s
hyper-chilled.
The need to serve different beverages at
different temperatures is widely understood when it comes to wine and spirits.
Even the dumbest waiter wouldn’t put a bottle of red wine in an ice bucket. But
that knowledge just isn’t there, among servers and drinkers alike, when it
comes to beer. And it’ll likely take some time to overcome the advertising
showing beers stuck in ice chests and poured in cold mugs.
American Mass Culture
Week 4
The Jazz
Age and the transmission of American
• But first……
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJE-onnw2gM
What is Jazz?
Key elements of Jazz
•
Improvisation (即興)
– in classical music, the
performer tries to play the music as written –
in Jazz, no performance of the music is the same
•
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOh8kpuQuy4
What is Jazz?
Key Elements of Jazz
•
Call and response
structure: common in folk music all over the world –
the first musician calls, a second responds
•
Africa http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yrzZDDfPte8
•
Jazz: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sq19BZRKmLI
•
Rock and Roll http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_FZVD5lsAw
What is Jazz?
Key Elements of Jazz
•
Polyrhythm
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qknrJthBZk
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YoMs_8iduss
What is Jazz?
Key Elements of Jazz
• Syncopation
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9QnepxnMNU
What is Jazz?
Key Elements of Jazz
•
The swung (swing) note
•
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9Kir1KAm8Y
Growth of Jazz
• 1920s was when modern
American culture was formed
• Explosion of technology
transformed daily life: cars, home appliances, radio, phonograph, big sports,
movies… and American popular music as global phenomenon
Growth of Jazz
• Prohibition 1920-1933
• Explosion of underground
bars needing music
• Jazz suited “The Roaring
Twenties”
Growth of Jazz
Jazz
comes from the music of African slaves transported to North America
Growth of Jazz
• Late 19th
century – Habanera music from Cuba influences New Orleans music: rag and blues
• Jazz grows directly out
of the Blues and Ragtime (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMAtL7n_-rc)
• Habanera: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3cJRiwf0Xo
• Blues:
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-YwCk6ANY4 (1926)
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rsIATGsPZ4o&feature=related
Growth of Jazz
• 1920: Mamie Smith
releases "Crazy Blues." The record became a sensation, selling 75,000
copies in a month and a million copies in seven months.
• Starts the Blues craze.
• Bessie Smith “the Empress
of the Blues”
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Who6fTHJ34
Growth of Jazz
• Word “Jazz” first used
around 1912
• First Jazz album 1917
• 1920s known as “The Jazz
Age”
• Duke Ellington wrote the
first extended jazz compositions;
• Louis Armstrong
popularized "scat" (singing of nonsense syllables);
• Big Band Jazz and Swing
Duke Ellington
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FvsgGp8rSE
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0FDymSl4aw
Louis Armstrong
• Scat: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZvqvNYJmC4&feature=related
• Ole Miss:
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7JHkAEh8Ds&feature=BFa&list=FLHT_rv15p2bYqB7xO9lY_7Q
Big Band/Swing
• Louis Prima song “Sing
Sing Sing” performed by the Benny Goodman Band: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2S1I_ien6A
• Swing Dancing
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EsxtGBMQGq4&feature=
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myJj0mNNe1Y
• 1930s Jazz Club
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chFQ4BPJQ6U
• The Talented Mr. Ripley – 1950s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXtxR1gHZIk
Spread of Jazz
• During WWI first black jazz
groups performed in Europe
• After the war thousands
of Americans, including many famous writers, musicians, and poets, lived in
Paris, spreading American music in clubs and bars in France
Spread of Jazz
Spread of Jazz
• French at first rejected
jazz, it was African and American
• But later French
musicians began to incorporate Jazz into their performances
• First French Jazz bands
in 1930s
Spread of Jazz
• UK – first US band plays
in UK in 1919. Jazz bands from 1930s, widespread popularity in the 1940s with
WWII / US troops in UK
Spread of Jazz
• Germany – first
experiments in 1920s but Germany too poor for wide development of leisure
culture.
• 1920s and 30s Germans saw
Jazz as supporting freedom and democracy.
• After 1932 strong
conservative pushback against Jazz. 1930s US performers begin to leave Germany
due to widespread racism and growth of Nazi power. By 1939 Jazz was forbidden
Spread of Jazz
• African-Americans often
saw Jazz as a response to White, European Power
• Europeans saw it in two
ways:
-
lens of racism: expression of the primitive, African, black, mixing of races
-
American and Modern: “jazz came from the same country as Henry Ford” seeing
jazz as “American” helped make it more acceptable (White and mainstream)
EX:
Jean-Paul Sartre: ‘Skyscrapers were the architecture of the future, just as the
cinema was the art and jazz the music of the future’.
Spread of Jazz
• “I think many Europeans
feel today that they have created a form of so-called jazz music which is
equivalent to African-American jazz music. That’s another danger in using the
term ‘jazz’ because if we call it ‘African-American music’ it localises it, it fixes
it, its ours. So now they ask me when I go to Europe what I think of ‘Polish
Jazz’ which is like asking me what I think of Polish slavery. Because that music they call ‘jazz’ grew out
of slavery. It grew out of our suffering, it tells our story, but nobody wants
to look at it like that because that is too political.” (Archie Shepp in 1980,
quoted in Menter 1981, 220)
Spread of Jazz
China:
•
Du Yue-sheng ( 杜月笙), notorious head of Green
Gang, orders formation of first Chinese Jazz band in 1935
•
Communists banned Jazz in 1949
Spread of Jazz
Japan
• American bands played in
beginning in 1920s
• Major influence: Filipino
bands spread Jazz in Japan in 1920s. By 1924 Osaka had 20 dance halls.
• Gov’t and conservatives
hated Jazz, foreign and black and American
• 1930s – Japanese
musicians create own style of Jazz using Japanese folk and theater music
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJB5vziPmLA
Spread of Jazz
Conclusions
-- Globalization of American Culture is
experienced as American cultural hegemony
(霸權) in other countries
-- Locals respond by indigenizing (土著化). Take inspiration from local
music and from each other rather than continually returning to US well (井)
-- Similar process today: music comes out of
African-American world as “cool” and is then mainstreamed. Then localized –
Indian rap, Chinese rap, Taiwanese rap, Japanese rap
No comments:
Post a Comment