Daily Inspiration Quote by Maxim Gorky

Gorky takes a word that had been sold as glittering modernity and flips it into a labor report. In his mouth, "jazz" stops being a sound and becomes a workplace: low pay, long nights, hostile rooms, and a public that wants the thrill of Black artistry without any obligation to Black artists. The scare quotes around "jazz" do the first hard bit of work. They signal that the term is already compromised, a label imposed and monetized by others, less a genre than a marketing stamp that travels easily across borders while the musicians themselves remain trapped inside prejudice.

The sting is in how he yokes "working conditions" to "cultural prejudice" as if they are the same machine. That pairing refuses the polite separation between aesthetics and economics. Gorky is saying: you cannot praise the music and ignore the social arrangement that makes it profitable. When he writes that the term has "come to mean" abuse, he’s also indicting the audience and the institutions that define taste. Language is not neutral; naming is ownership. Once a culture gets to name your art, it gets to set the terms of your employment.

Context matters here. As a major Russian writer and public moralist, Gorky was predisposed to read art through class struggle and exploitation. His condemnation also carries the era’s anxieties about American mass culture: jazz as export, spectacle, and commodity. But the sharpest subtext isn’t anti-jazz; it’s anti-alibi. If "jazz" can be celebrated while Black musicians are degraded, then the celebration is part of the degradation.