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Jazz musician Wynton Marsalis says rap and hip-hop are ‘more damaging than a statue of Robert E. Lee’
“My words are not that powerful. I started saying in 1985 I don’t think we should have a music talking about n*gg*rs and b!tches and hoes. It had no impact. I’ve said it. I’ve repeated it. I still repeat it. To me that’s more damaging than a statue of Robert E. Lee.”
Wynton Marsalis covered all the bases. Race. His role in New Orleans’s removal of Confederate statues last year. His deep antipathy to rap and hip-hop. And the damage he believes the genres inflict on African Americans. “I feel that that’s much more of a racial issue than taking Robert E. Lee’s statue down,” Marsalis told me in the latest episode of “Cape Up.” “There’s more ******s in that than there is in Robert E. Lee’s statue.”
Marsalis was the first jazz musician to win the Pulitzer Prize for music in 1997 with “Blood on the Fields,” a vocal and orchestral rumination on slavery. It came 12 years after the release of “Black Codes (From the Underground),” which won two Grammy Awards in 1986, and 10 years before “From the Plantation to the Penitentiary.” Marsalis will add to his collection of commissions that blend his fluency in jazz and matters of race with the debut of “the ever-funky lowdown” on June 7. Actor Wendell Pierce, another New Orleans native, will serve as narrator.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...=.46954eaadb43
“My words are not that powerful. I started saying in 1985 I don’t think we should have a music talking about n*gg*rs and b!tches and hoes. It had no impact. I’ve said it. I’ve repeated it. I still repeat it. To me that’s more damaging than a statue of Robert E. Lee.”
Wynton Marsalis covered all the bases. Race. His role in New Orleans’s removal of Confederate statues last year. His deep antipathy to rap and hip-hop. And the damage he believes the genres inflict on African Americans. “I feel that that’s much more of a racial issue than taking Robert E. Lee’s statue down,” Marsalis told me in the latest episode of “Cape Up.” “There’s more ******s in that than there is in Robert E. Lee’s statue.”
Marsalis was the first jazz musician to win the Pulitzer Prize for music in 1997 with “Blood on the Fields,” a vocal and orchestral rumination on slavery. It came 12 years after the release of “Black Codes (From the Underground),” which won two Grammy Awards in 1986, and 10 years before “From the Plantation to the Penitentiary.” Marsalis will add to his collection of commissions that blend his fluency in jazz and matters of race with the debut of “the ever-funky lowdown” on June 7. Actor Wendell Pierce, another New Orleans native, will serve as narrator.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...=.46954eaadb43
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