Wynton Marsalis says rap/hip-hop ‘more damaging than a statue of Robert E. Lee’

In the jazz community Marsalis' opinions are generally regarded as elitist and regressive and often times he will go on TV, radio etc trying to speak as the voice of a tradition that heavily disagrees with him.

Many of his peers and people who have played in his bands have been active participants in the hip hop community for decades.

If you look at what jazz as a method of social activism and a way to speak about the state of life in black america in the past century, thats really what hip hop is doing now.

Hip hop talks about drug use/violence etc because its whats happening in the communities that the music comes out of.

Jazz at its most important points in history was often fraught with musicians who were heavily addicted to drugs, abused woman, caught up in violence etc (just look up the issues some of the greats dealt with like Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, etc)

Hip hop and jazz are fundamentally two extremely similar traditions of music born out of the same realities of the black american experience and for Wynton to being making comments like this is extremely disappointing

Watching what happened to Tupac seems to prove the point that rap and thug culture can be toxic. Prison could not have helped either.

He went from social activist rapper to rapper-gang member and it got him killed.

That doesn’t mean that it’s the music itself but the effect it has on the culture. And anyone arguing that music doesn’t affect culture is clearly wrong.

Movies do it too. A movie like “Zero Dark Thirty” that glorified torture is hurting the culture too. People in the military watch it and it changes their outlook for the worse.

It’s a hot button issue but that doesn’t mean your impulsive reaction is correct, just because you didn’t let the movie or music damage you directly.

Hip hop and rap music is one of the worst things that happened to culture. It appeals to most lowly desires and it's hedonism in music form. Track 1 of a rap CD can address how minorities are supposedly discriminated against yet Track 2 is filled with criminal intent and mysogyny. I am still in my twenties but I do not allow either my siblings nor myself to listen to it or I at least frown upon it.

You may say not all rap is this way but the truth is that most popular rap is this way.

So is he saying that all of rap/hip-hop is more damaging than a single statue of Robert E. Lee? If he is, then... well, okay, but that's not much of a statement. One statue, or one confederate flag, has only a limited ability to cause harm, versus taking all of the negatives from an entire, large, body of music.

On the other hand, it's also a useless comparison. Because there isn't just one statue of Lee. Comparing the damage from all of the confederate memorials, and confederate flags, and confederate holidays, and everything named after slave owners... well, suddenly that's not quite so clear a comparison. But a whole lot more relevant.

And then when you look at the opposites—what's the sum benefit from rap/hip-hop? And then compare that to the sum benefit of everything in this country that praises slave-owners—or those that killed Americans in defense of slave-owning—that's not even close anymore.

surprises me since Marsalis led the band https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckshot_LeFonque

who had a few rappers, albeit not mainstream or crass ones

As a musician, if you feel the need to publicly shame people that sing your lyrics, you might have a problem.

Marsalis is a brilliant musician, but I hope we can all agree that statement is patently absurd.