“Today’s hip-hop is just those pornographic rhymes on a grand scale.”Īren’t you just using one strain of hip-hop to attack an entire genre? “Listen, I don’t have to attack hip-hop. You know the kind of thing: ‘Your old woman got an ass like a truck/ Your old woman she likes to fuck.’” He declaims the words while beating out a rhythm on the table. Kids would sit on the street corner, improvising stupid rhymes with pornographic lyrics. We called it juba juba, you know, ‘My grandma said to your grandma/ Iko iko uh nay.’ But it dates back long before the Dr John or Dixie Cups version of that song.
“It’s the kind of rap we did in New Orleans back in the day. “It’s rapping, but it ain’t hip-hop,” he says. The lyrics make you cringe occasionally (“the rap game started out critiquing/ Now it’s all about killin’ and freakin’”), but it’s clearly a rap. The album’s final track, Where Y’All At?, is a state-of-the-union address, a declamatory, baritone-voiced sermon about a country in chaos, set against a jittery New Orleans funk beat. What is however surprising is that Marsalis’s latest album sees him trying to rap. The 46-year-old trumpeter and composer is regarded as a rather fogeyish, Brian Sewell figure in the jazz world, one who loudly registers his disgust at most music made since the early 60s. We shouldn’t be surprised that one of the world’s most famous jazz musicians is not a big hip-hop fan. Rap has become a safari for people who get their thrills from watching African-American people debase themselves, men dressing in gold, calling themselves stupid names like Ludacris or 50 Cent, spending money on expensive fluff, using language like ‘bitch’ and ‘ho’ and ‘nigger’.” Rappers have to display the correct pathology. Now you have to say that you’re from the streets, you shot some brothers, you went to jail. Hip-hop substitutes the plantation for the streets. “Old school minstrels used to say they were ‘real darkies from the real plantation’. “I call it ‘ghetto minstrelsy’,” he says. Wynton Marsalis is 10 minutes into an angry denunciation of hip-hop and he’s just hitting his stride.