Hip-hop, which is my generation's blues, is important to the characters that I write about. They use hip-hop to understand the world through language.
Interpretation
Hip-hop serves as a vital means of expression and understanding for the characters in my writing.
In this quote, Jesmyn Ward emphasizes the significance of hip-hop as a cultural touchstone for her generation, paralleling it to the blues of earlier times. She suggests that hip-hop provides a unique linguistic framework through which her characters navigate and interpret their experiences in the world, thus highlighting its role not just as music, but as a vital form of storytelling and self-expression.
In practice
In a discussion on contemporary music's influence on society, you could quote this to emphasize hip-hop's cultural importance.
I always understood my ancestry, like that of so many others in the Gulf Coast, to be a tangle of African slaves, free men of color, French and Spanish immigrants, British colonists, Native Americans - but in what proportion, and what might that proportion tell me about who I thought I was?
In the South, there is more overt racism. It's more willfully ignorant and brazen. But it's not as if by moving I'm going to be able to escape institutionalized racism. It's not as though my life won't be twisted and impacted by racism anymore. It will.
The ugly heart of the South still beats with this idea that one group of people is worth less.
Katrina silenced me for two years. I wrote a 12-page essay on my experience in Katrina, and that's it. I didn't write anything for, like, two, two and a half years after Katrina hit because it was so traumatic.
With all the main characters that I write, it's always very important to me that they have good and bad aspects of their personality. It's important to me that they're complicated and that they're human.
I think people make certain assumptions about what they're interested in reading or what others would be interested in reading, and when they think of poor black people in the South, they don't think people are interested in reading about those people.
I still feel like I have a lot to learn in the realm of sound experimentation, and I think I would like things to get noisier and weirder and more distressed and more aggressive, but I don't know if that's something that would be suitable for public consumption.
Much of songwriting is simply a mystery.
Creating a poem is a continual process of re-creating your ignorance, in the sense of not knowing what's coming next.
The old idea of a composer suddenly having a terrific idea and sitting up all night to write it is nonsense. Nighttime is for sleeping.
Once I started working with generative music in the 1970s, I was flirting with ideas of making a kind of endless music - not like a record that you'd put on, which would play for a while and finish.
I think it's important, if you are an artist, to use your music to stand up for what you believe in.
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