“It was the first time, I realised, that I had ever clearly seen a jazz-band. The spectacle was positively frightening…

“Oh, those mammy-songs, those love-longings, those loud hilarities! How was it possible that human emotions intrinsically decent could be so ignobly parodied? I felt like a man who, having asked for wine, is offered a brimming bowl of hog-wash. And not even fresh hog-wash. Rancid hog-wash, decaying hog-wash. For there was a horrible tang of putrefaction in all that music. Those yearnings for Mammy of Mine and My Baby, for Dixie and the Land where Skies are Blue and Dreams come True, for Granny and Tennessee and You – they were all a necrophily. The Mammy after whom the black young Hebrews and the blond young muffin-faces so retchingly yearned was an ancient Gorgonzola ; the Baby of their tremulously gargled desire was a leg of mutton after a month in warm storage ; Granny had been dead for weeks ; and as for Dixie and Tennessee and Dream Land – they were odoriferous with the least artificial of manures.”

Aldous Huxley, Do What You Will (1929)