(cinemablend.com) “Wynton Marsalis has been called jazz’s most recognizable name, which doesn’t say much about the genre if you haven’t heard of him. However, after more than a dozen classical albums and more than 30 jazz albums, Marsalis is making perhaps the biggest splash of his career with his new politically charged album, From the Plantation to the Penitentiary, due out March 6.
The title track is actually not about bananas being served to convicts in prison, but is a message about how America has gone from one type of slavery to another–from the enslavement of Africans to the booming prison trade. Sounds like someone is taking his car’s license plates for granted.
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Marsalis expresses a desire for the “return of romance” in the modern music industry. In the song “Love and Broken Hearts,” he writes, “Oh safari seekers and thug life coons/ You modern day minstrels and your songless tunes” verbalizing his disdain for rap music, which he finds degrades African-Americans.
“Rap has become a safari for people who get their thrills from watching African-American people debase themselves, men dressing in gold, calling themselves stupid names like Ludacris and 50 Cent, spending money on expensive fluff, using language like ‘bitch’ and ‘ho’ and ‘n**ger,’ “…(more)
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It is never hard for me to defend rap music against it critics not as fan but as a creative person. I despise jazz. I think that it is a jumbled mess and is at times annoyingly messy. But I don’t take away from Marsalis’s talent. He and others like him blow me when they talk about rappers. What about Clarence Carter and “I be stroking” Ior songs like “brick house” I will be glad when people stop taking pot shots at rappers and begin looking at the bigger picture of creativity.
Rhyming nigga with nigga is creative? Jazz is jumbled? Messy HA! HA!
HAAAAAAAAAA!
Pot shots about Pot hitters? or about Hit men?
Jazz is highly complex. It requires tuning an instrument. Tinkering with motifs. Struggling to harmonize with other partners. As in life outside the jam session. Jazz is so beautiful… there is fast, frenetic, slow, concerted, wow…Jazz is the APEX of Black artistic talent in America.
A microphone and a sound machine dose not creativity produce.
I’ve tuned a French horn…so I’ll toot mine, as it were.
Oh, wait, This just in…Rap has been at times a rhetorical front for abhorrent behavior, for soulless, selfish murder, no less. There are BAD MEN in its midst. Some rappers encourages silence by intimidation, by assassination. This is mainstreamed! A bloody body? now THAT’s messy. Crack kills and so have crack dealing rappers. Killed the music it profits from.
Dead people tell no tales, paint no pictures, sing no songs…
DEAD PEOPLE DON’T CREATE.
Opinions are like….. well you know the rest. It is MY personal opinion. And yes Jazz is complex I never said that it was not. But lummping all rappers and its listeners into a box is unfair and just plain ignorant. I am not sure if you have ever watched Def Poetry jam but check out an episode with DMX and tell me that he is not one of the most creative souls on earth. Why must you put down one form of self expression in order to lift another. And if you think that jazz has not sold out. Young black men are out of control. If many of todays rappers are young black men then what else do you expect.
Today’s hip hop is mostly garbage, but that doen’st give Marsalis the right to be a hypocrite.
Knowing Marsalis, I know he’s got a similar reaction to commercialized jazz, AKA ’smooth jazz’. It’s not ‘jazz’ by a stretch; it’s jazz-ish. His disdain for all things non-traditional is well documented. Miles Davis once called Marsalis, “… a nice young man, only confused.”.
I can imagine how fast folks giving him dap right now for ‘Return to Romance’ will drop him like a hot potato once they hear ‘Super Capitalism’.
I’m not agaist rap…I’m not against rappers…but you must know what I’m up against…All orchards have bad apples…but lets not keep feeding diseased trees, ya feel me? Lets not keep giving the bard his money for what amonts to conscious hypnosis and a sense of escapade as is produced. Many “conscious rappers” are great entertainers, and live life on it’s terms without being uterrly corrupted by the trappings of “thug” life. Thug is a Hindi word derived from Thugees, a cultlike group in India centuries ago; also means ‘thief’.