The wild years

                                                                   

                                                                 The wild years

In the United States, it was all about ‘The Jazz Age’, in France the ‘Les années folles’. The 1920s were the wild years. The time of restless youth.

The catchy and popular jazz music was controversial. In the US, it was associated with the ‘lost generation’ – young people who grew up in the aftermath of the First World War. Above all, it was a symbol of multicultural society, which had many gloomy critics.

“Negro music” was the racist epithet that jazz received. The Norwegian economy professor Knud A. Wieth-Knudsen called it “one of the many future degenerations”. Jazz testified that man was on his way back to the animal stage of evolution, he said.