i’m looking at jazz heads respond to andre 3000 doing ambient/experimental forays into the genre. andre just released a piano album. and who woulda thought that the genre that black musicians created would give rise to such an antiblack community lol. it makes sense because the world likes to colonize black people’s creations and then alienate the originators from it. people love to use our art and bleach out the blackness from it, then they like to appoint themselves the arbiters of what we create despite having no historical knowledge, and they hate giving us credit and acknowledgement. which is something no other ethnic group experiences to this extent. the ballroom scene, jazz, our slang, u name it. we are everywhere yet no where.
white jazz heads and black jazz heads with low self esteem are actually claiming that andre is “delusional,” they are even calling his morals into question and saying he’s an “asshole,” they are calling him “illegitimate,” and “disrespectful” for wading into the waters of a genre his own ancestors made. critiquing the music is all well and good, but i was totally flabbergasted reading this stuff about his character lol. not even hip hop heads are this racist.
i wondered what could possibly provoke this kind of response and my analysis leads me to the conclusion that, well, rap is a blackity black genre. try as they might, white people haven’t been able to bleach it to the extent of other genres we created. since they’ve failed to dissociate rap from blackness thus far, white rap “fans” have created a culture of a two-tier system of sorts—between “real rap” and whatever epithet is in vogue at the time, like “trap” or “mumble rap.” black rap fans have engaged in this too, in order to attain some sense of legitimacy from spectators who hate niggas. the message from this kind of white-centered ethos about rap is, see, what *i* like is dignified and respectable, and what *those* nignogs like is just a bunch of stinky booty gorilla noise from the jungle. and the kind of rap that often gets dismissed as jungle noise is the kind of rap that is alienating to everyone but black people—the kind that isn’t appealing to the mythical idea of a traditional, respectable “90’s hip hop” that has never ever existed. “90’s hip hop” is only “respectable” because white listeners feel less threatened by the myths surrounding those sounds rather than, say, the t-pains and the gucci manes and the bankroll freshes of the genre. the reality is that “90’s hip hop” was often dismissed as crime-riddled jungle noise in its heyday.
which leads me to why jazz heads think andre is the devil. andre is one of the most famous rappers on earth. rap is still primarily associated with blackness, much more than jazz is today. and black musicians who do Black Genres™️ that are alienating to the masses are viewed as less musically skilled no matter what, they are viewed as less appreciative of music as an art, they are viewed as dumb and crass, they are seen as less intellectual. when rappers experiment within the genre, they are dismissed and degraded until white people approve of them. and how dare a rapper smear his blackity black rapper hands over a genre that has been sanitized of its association with lowly blacks? it’s not just that andre is a black man doing jazz-adjacent stuff, it is that he is a black man who is known for making nigger noise smearing his black rapper hands over a now-respectable genre. he is morally wrong for not staying in the back of the bus, he is an “asshole” for not staying in his lane where the other rappers are. rappers don’t make music, after all, well, until white people say they do.
it’s funny because andre has experienced this within rap before—he was seen as an experimental rapper in his prime and the old guard of traditionalists hated him for playing around with the then-current boundaries of the genre. white people like outkast now so he’s now regarded as a “real rapper” despite the fact that he was seen as the opposite. now he’s experimenting across genres and they’re accusing him of doing disrespectful fakery again. man, i love the fact that black people existing is so contentious lol.
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