Miles Davis Quotes

Jazz is a word they use to sell our music, but to me that word does not exist.

I grew up watching people and companies commercialize Black History Month. I watched old McDonald's commercials, and they'd blacken up the commercials for 28 days then go back to normal in March. It got annoying to me.

For the first four or five years I was in Korea, I took a lot of direction from my management and label in terms of what people want. I found myself trying to fit into that thing I never felt comfortable with because the critique I got was that I was too American, and too sophisticated and polished in terms of my musicality and it won't sell.

When 'Jelly's' went out on tour, no one really wanted it. It was undersold. And I knew if I gave 'Noise' to someone else, they would sell it as 'Stomp' with little dancing black boys.

You can usually tell when people aren't being authentic, but that goes for every artist, not just white artists.

That's why I called my record Devil Without a Cause - I'm a white boy who's so sick of hearing that white kids are going to steal rap.

Australia has a thing where apparently it's fine for me to dress up as an Asian woman. No one has questioned that.

To most white people, jazz means black and jazz means dirt, and that's not what I play. I play black classical music.

Shoot, there's a committee to tell you everything at a record label. You definitely have to know who you are if you want to look like you at the end of the process. We've all seen people get record contracts, and by the time they're spit out by the machine, we don't even recognize them.

People are so confused about race and hip-hop that people didn't even consider the Beastie Boys one of the greatest rap groups of all time because they were white.

There's this great thing called the 'Chitlin' Circuit,' which I started my shows on and back in the day when, you know, Ray Charles and Billie Holiday and Duke Ellington, they couldn't get into white establishments, so they went on this circuit and toured. They were huge stars in their own community, you know, and that's pretty much my same story.

I'm a country musician. I know how to play jazz, and I can play rock. But I've had to fight my entire career to get a little respect from people who don't understand where I come from.

It's really weird how the rock world is quickly becoming like the jazz world. How if you do OK, or get a tiny bit of success, that's considered a sellout, whether you did anything different or not.

I've seen a lot of Black content creators calling for white folks to stop using the voices of Black folks to make TikToks because it's like digital blackface. That's valid.

Becoming a commercial scene? I don't think people in grime would be happy about that.

I understand that, because there are so many musicians, you have to make artists into brands, but I sometimes feel like I have to be some kind of non-human icon in order for people to listen to my music.

With country, it's hard to penetrate the thick layers of commercialism that have been applied like shellac coatings over the real thing.

You know how Mexican restaurants always have "border" in the name: Border Grill, Border Cafe. You wouldn't do that to black people: Kunta's Kitchen or Shackles. They don't do it to white people. You don't see the Honkey Grill, the Cracker Barrel... oh, nevermind.

I come in with this rock 'n' roll-oriented music, and it's not black enough . . . I've always had to deal with this black-white thing.

Jazz is the favorite music [of America]. It is a type of music invented by [American] Blacks to please their primitive tendencies and desire for noise.

When I started making music, I figured the name Rico Nasty would give a background of who I am.

The funniest thing in the world to me is the idea of a white guy in his thirties going, 'Wait - I'm going to go into hip-hop.'

I'm one of not even a handful of British Asian popstars who are maninstream. Of course I was always tagged as British Asian singer Jay Sean as opposed to pop R'n'B singer Jay Sean.

Not that long ago - in my parents' lives, in fact - actors in minstrel shows wore blackface to mimic and mock African Americans. These performances were based in contempt and gave people an opportunity to act out their prejudices.

"Country" has become a marketing term. I see myself as a songwriter.