DAMN. And the Consumption of Black Art

That’s one of the unspoken prerequisites at this conference: You must overtly love whatever music seems the most detached from your own personal experience. Apparently, this proves you’re a genius. As a consequence, all the white people talk about how much they love rap, all the young females insist they love misogynistic cock rock,

The production was dense and menacing, louder and harsher than any record we had made, and so were the lyrics. The album took on prescription drug addiction, the way the media distorts the news, the risks of technology, and the financial crisis. And that’s just on the title track. There’s another song, “75 Bars (Black’s Reconstruction),” where Tari

I sometimes think how glorious it must have been to have written drama in sixteenth-century England, or poetry in ancient Greece, or religious narrative in the Middle Ages, when literature was need and did not have a critical history to constrain or diminish the writer's imagination. How magnificent not to have to de- pend on the reader's literary

“Though the white liberal imagination likes to feel temporarily bad about black suffering, there really is no mode of empathy that can replicate the daily strain of knowing that as a black person you can be killed for simply being black:

The alternative to appropriation is a world where white European people make art about white European people, with only white European references in it. Swap African or Asian or Latin or whatever culture you want for European. A world where everyone is blind and deaf to any culture or experience that is not their own. I hate that world, don’t you?