African American Expression Quotes

You have Vampire Weekend who have more African references musically than most African-American artists.

American music culture is black culture.

My own thinking has evolved. You find Africanisms in American speech. You find an African influence on United States culture. There are all kinds of Africanisms in America, as you would expect, if you really thought about it... That whole thing is much broader; the influence is much broader than I first understood.

There is no monolithic black culture. It's completely different for someone born in Harlem to someone born in Houston or London with one exception, which is that people contributing to black culture have the experience of being black.

Black culture - we dance and sing. We're entertainers. James Brown said it best: the things we are make people want to be like us.

I viewed black musicals before 'Jelly' as a form of cultural strip mining. The exterior remained, but all the culture that signified where the people had come from and their connection to the earth was absent.

Jazz, to me, is one of the inherent expressions of Negro life in America: the eternal tom-tom beating in the Negro soul - the tom-tom of revolt against weariness in a white world, a world of subway trains, and work, work, work; the tom-tom of joy and laughter, and pain swallowed in a smile.

The blues are important primarily because they contain the cultural expression and the cultural response to blacks in America and to the situation that they find themselves in. And contained in the blues is a philosophical system at work. And as part of the oral tradition, this is a way of passing along information.

When I first heard rap, I wasn't quick to be critical. I couldn't understand what they were saying, but I had a feeling it was a reflection of what's been happening in the ghetto.

I'm also a blues musician, and all blues artists can trace their pain to the slavery fields of the Mississippi Delta.

Before many black singers were still labouring under that problem of God; it was often 'God will save us'. But right through the blacks were singing directly and immediately about their pain and also about sex, which is why I like it.

My audience went, 'Wait, why is she singing jazz? What's going on?' And then they went, 'Oh, because she can. Because she loves it.' And jazz, a music invented by the African-American community, is the greatest art form, I believe, to have ever come out of this country.

Slaves and the descendants of slaves created world pop culture. Let's keep it real and be very respectful about that.

America is deeply rooted in Negro culture: its colloquialisms; its humor; its music.

You've got to appreciate the things that come from the art of the Negro and from the heart of the man farthest down.

All black art is always judged to illuminate our experience and prove that our stories and our history and our lives matter. And that goes back to Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston - take your pick.

I think I was drawn to black culture by the same things that have been drawing the entire world to it since the days of Richard Wright, Josephine Baker and Louis Armstrong. This culture is original, potent and seductive.

As a child, I experienced black culture as many people did in America: on the TV, radio, and stages.

You can't just say in one sentence what is blackness or what is black culture or what makes you who you are.

Harlem's streets lead backward, into history, straight to a work such as 'This Was Harlem.'

My biggest inspiration is black America and what they've done in the arts. I have always felt like an outsider in America, and what black Americans have done to add their chapter to this book called the American dream, and to be so unapologetic and true, and have added so much to art and culture in the world.

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

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.

Jazz is known all over the world as an American musical art form and that's it. No America, no jazz. I've seen people try to connect it to other countries, for instance to Africa, but it doesn't have a damn thing to do with Africa.

The music [of America] must be founded upon what are called the negro melodies …. These beautiful and varied themes are the product of the soil. They are American.