Much recent scholarship about bebop--a form of jazz characterized by fast tempos, virtuosic improvisation, and harmonic complexity--focuses on the social context that surrounds its birth and suggests that the formal qualities of bebop mirrored simultaneous transformations in African American life, attitudes, and politics during the Second World War (1939-1945) . Such analyses suggest that by creating a new music, adopting a renegade style, and demanding to be treated as artists, young African American musicians forged a cultural politics that challenged the banality of popular swing music, the complacency of older musicians, and a system of exploitation by White executives in the business, thus creating a subculture that purposefully distinguished itself from the mainstream. For example, Amiri Baraka has argued that bebop music represented an "anti-assimilationist" rejection of Black middle-class and White society. Scott DeVeaux, however, argues that bebop's emergence stemmed less from the political orientation of its practitioners than from a series of aesthetic and career decisions made by young, professionalized African American musicians inspired by a variety of artistic challenges and frustrated by an industry that provided some opportunities but was also rife with discrimination. Eventually, these tribulations led many musicians to forgo the restrictive atmosphere of the swing bands for the relative artistic and social freedoms that bebop afforded.