I always give the example, if you turn on the radio today, black radio, Lenny Kravitz is not black. Bob Marley wasn't black: in the beginning, only white college stations played Bob Marley.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the intersection of race and music, pointing out how perceptions and ownership of music often transcend racial boundaries.
Spike Lee's quote reflects on the complexities of racial identity in music, particularly how artists like Lenny Kravitz and Bob Marley, despite their black heritage, have been received and played in contexts that often overlook their race. It emphasizes the broader cultural impact of music that transcends racial divisions and challenges listeners to reconsider traditional associations of race with musical genres.
In practice
In a discussion about the evolution of popular music genres at a cultural event.
I think that anyone who lives in New York, who's lived here, who's spent any time here, knows that it's basically a love-hate relationship, you might say. Even though I still think it's the greatest city in the world and I wouldn't live anywhere else, there're still things about it one doesn't like. The love far outweighs the negative.
There's an unwritten law that you cannot have a Jewish character in a film who isn't 100 percent perfect, or you're labeled anti-Semitic.
The truth is I've been doing Kickstarter before there was Kickstarter; there was no Internet. Social Media was writing letters, making phone calls, beating the bushes.
It gets dangerous when you start allowing people to validate your work.
All directors are storytellers, so the motivation was to tell the story I wanted to tell. That's what I love.
Because many advances have happened, we've lost the urgency (and that's just human nature) that we had before, when we couldn't vote, couldn't use mass transportation, or drink from the fountains.
It's not that the creative act and the critical act are simultaneous. It's more like you blurt something out and then analyze it.
You try to be as original as you can be without thinking about statistics. You just go from the soul and from the heart.
I probably get a deeper satisfaction of having taken a very good photograph than of having written something very good, a very good story. Maybe it's because the element of magic is so present in a good photograph - luck and magic, but also hard work and being ready and all that.
They swayed about upon a rocking horse, And thought it Pegasus.
Producing is a way of finding a great script that nobody's making, and believing in it, and doing what you can to get it made. It lets you work with your friends, people you really love to do something with.
Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.