Wynton Marsalis Won’t Be Invited To The Source Awards Anytime Soon

Brian Raftery | March 5, 2007 1:25 am
wynton.jpg

Jazz composer Wynton Marsalis–whose last major beef was with Miles Davis–is picking some pretty big targets in his campaign against hip-hop. In an interview with the U.K. Guardian, the 46-year-old lashes out against Messrs. Jackson and Bridges:

Wynton Marsalis is 10 minutes into an angry denunciation of hip-hop and he’s just hitting his stride. “I call it ‘ghetto minstrelsy’,” he says. “Old school minstrels used to say they were ‘real darkies from the real plantation’. Hip-hop substitutes the plantation for the streets. Now you have to say that you’re from the streets, you shot some brothers, you went to jail. Rappers have to display the correct pathology. 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 or 50 Cent, spending money on expensive fluff, using language like ‘bitch’ and ‘ho’ and ‘nigger'”….

“[Sampling] just shows you that the drummer has been replaced by a loop. The drum – the central instrument in African-American music, the sound of freedom – has been replaced by a repetitive loop. What does that tell you about hip-hop’s respect for African-American tradition?”

Oddly, Marsalis anti-hip-hop stance hasn’t prevented with closing his new album with a rap, one that includes such couplets as “You got to speak the language the people are speakin’/’Specially when you see the havoc it’s wreakin'” and “”The rap game started out critiquing/Now it’s all about killin’ and freakin.” No word on whether it’s spit on top of an 808 beat.

Shock of the new [Guardian Unlimited via Spine Magazine]