Cornel West Quotes

I'm a bluesman moving through a blues-soaked America, a blues-soaked world, a planet where catastrophe and celebration - joy and pain - sit side by side.

The blues is a mighty long road. Or it could be a river, one that twists and turns and flows into a sea of limitless musical potential.

The blues is nothing but a story... The verses which are sung in the blues is a true story, what people are doing... what they all went through. It's not just a song, see?

You literally cannot deny the fact that rock and roll was born because of blues, and blues is black man's music.

The blues has been the foundation of all other American music since the beginning.

I wanted to know everything about the blues. I think it constantly changes for me.

The blues? Why, the blues are a part of me. They're like a chant. The blues are like spirituals, almost sacred. When we sing blues, we're singing out our hearts, we're singing out our feelings. Maybe we're hurt and just can't answer back, then we sing or maybe even hum the blues. When I sing, 'I walk the floor, wring my hands and cry -- Yes, I walk the floor, wring my hands and cry,'... what I'm doing is letting my soul out.

The blues are the roots and the other musics are the fruits

The music is just so rich and part of the culture there. I suddenly felt like I needed to go on this mission to make sure we save New Orleans because - not that I can save anything - but it's so much part of what this country is, this whole mix of people coming together and doing this thing.

There's probably more in the American tradition than people give the place credit for.

For a while I had a blues band in L.A., but I realized I was too optimistic to play the blues. I did not have the misery in my heart that the blues required.

White folks hear the blues come out, but they don't know how it got there.

The anger that Uncle Junior has comes from my background. My father was the son of an Italian immigrant, and I've seen the fire of the Italian temperament. It can be explosive sometimes in ways that are both funny and tragic.

Jazz is a very accurate, curiously accurate accompaniment to 20th century America.

Well, I grew up on the blues, man!

When I started to make music at the end of the '90s, I saw myself highly influenced by hip-hop and techno, but I wanted to apply these ideas to something from the local sound; something that had identity, that would say who we were and where we came from.

I don't think I'm really so unique. If every black person looked at their life they would quickly discover that they have been influenced by every type of music prevalent in America.

I've always loved the blues, ever since I was a kid. It has a depth to it that a lot of contemporary music doesn't have. It has pain and suffering in it, but funny stories, too. And it is built on storytelling, which is something I really love.

American movies and music deliver themes of freedom, innocence, and power that appeal to others - partly because America itself was put together out of a multiplicity of national traditions.

The blues style - moody or rollicking or boastful or bashful - developed in the Delta around 1900 and was, for a time, exclusively African-American. That isn't the case anymore.

As far as I'm concerned, blues and jazz are the great American contributions to music.

Most white Americans only discovered the blues with the British invasion.

A nation creates music. The composer only arranges it.

People don't want rap to be anything other than it is. But genres expand. My contributions, no matter how they sound, will always be rap, because they'll always be black.

I think the blues is the best literature that we as blacks have created since we've been here. I call it our 'sacred book.' What I've attempted to do is to mine that field, to mine those cultural ideas and attitudes and give them to my characters.