May 24, 2025 • 49 mins
George is joined by Jason King, Dean of the USC Thornton School of Music, a musician, music historian and much, much more. Jason talks about how to live the summoned life, how to be a citizen of the world, the lost art of artist development and how artists like SZA and Beyoncé curates their influences and makes them new. For more Jason, check out his podcast eight-episode podcast documentary Sound Barrier: Sylvester, about the great Queer singer and performer Sylvester.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Everybody is equal, everybody deserves respect, everybody deserves an opportunity
to fully be themselves. And so part of the reason
that I'm so into music is because, to me, music
offers us a blueprint to understand how to get there,
how to achieve the future that we want, how to
achieve a kind of wholeness.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
That's Jason King.
Speaker 3 (00:25):
He's the dean of the Thornton School of Music at
USC and I'll let him explain all the other things
he does, because it kind of takes the word multi
hyphen it to a whole new level. He made a
podcast about Sylvester who if you don't know, you need
to check out, and he's got a way of talking
about music and resistance that I find incredibly inspiring.
Speaker 1 (00:45):
Music to me is a symbol for you know of
or even a blueprint of the future. And the great
Nigerian band leader Palakuchi used to call music the weapon
of the future, and I think it is in so
many ways. Singing and I'm heavy handy, souper world, take
(01:05):
a superbranded and coach you guy.
Speaker 4 (01:07):
You know what the plan is?
Speaker 5 (01:08):
Or became a Latin you know one does understand me.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
My name is George M. Johnson.
Speaker 3 (01:14):
I am the New York Times bestselling author of the
book All Boys Aren't Blue, which is the number one
most challenged book in the United States.
Speaker 2 (01:22):
This is Fighting Words, a.
Speaker 3 (01:24):
Show where we take you to the front lines of
the culture wars with the people who are using their
words to make change and who refuse to be silenced.
Today's guest Jason King. Mister Jason King, how are you
doing today.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
I'm good, George. It's great to meet you. Yes, very
nice to meet you as well.
Speaker 3 (01:47):
The way we like to start our show, I think
our bios at times precede us, so I always like
for the guests to come on and tell us who
they are, like who they really are, and so who
is Jason?
Speaker 1 (02:00):
Well, I'm a human being. Who're going to start there?
You know, I'm a bunch of things. So the word
multi hyphenic gets thrown out a lot. I like the
word pluralists because it just means I do many different things.
I've always been striving to be a master of many
trades rather than like, you know, jack of all trades
(02:22):
and master of none. But I would define myself first
and foremost as a musician. So I started in classical piano.
I got very into musical theater. I play keyboards, I sing,
I range vocals, I produce music.
Speaker 5 (02:36):
I've been a.
Speaker 1 (02:37):
Bandleader, songwriter, musical supervisor. So that's like the first and
foremost thing is I'm definitely a musician, also a music writer,
a journalist, and also an author. Wrote a book on
Michael Jackson, currently working on a new book. But I've
also done a bunch of other things in different mediums too,
So I've been a playwright and a theater director. I
actually have my degree in theater. I am a live
(02:59):
event producer. I've produced festivals and concerts. I've done radio hosting,
podcast hosting, video hosting. And then I'm also a scholar,
so I've published a lot of academic articles and journals
on artists like Beyonce and Drake and Luther Vandros and ROBERTA.
Speaker 5 (03:15):
Flack and so on.
Speaker 1 (03:16):
I've been a legal expert, you know, expert witness and
marketing and branding cases for jay Z and Madonna and
Gaga and others. And I consider myself a public intellectual,
so I like to take scholarly information and theory and
try to make it accessible and available for a wide
range of people. And that's everything from writing induction essays
(03:38):
for Jay z or Jimmy jam and Terry Lewis for
the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame to appearing in
a lot of documentaries that I have over the years,
and then producing films, so most recently Piece by Piece,
the Pharrell documentary that Morgan Neville directed, and then now
directing my own film.
Speaker 5 (03:55):
So that's a.
Speaker 1 (03:56):
Big broad description is actually a summary of the CV.
But you know, it's a big broad description to say
I do a lot of things, and I do the
things that I'm really passionate about, and so my life
and I think my purpose is around music, black music,
black culture and identity and really elevating those things and
feeling passionate about what I do every day.
Speaker 3 (04:18):
Now you're someone one, Yes, that is a lot, and
you had done a lot. You asked me, yes, I
did ask I guess. The first airpots of my mind
was one, when did you? When do you find the
time to do all these things? Because I'm also someone
who finds myself stretched into many different roles in many
different areas. So what goes into you making a decision
(04:43):
to go into another area or to go into a
different space.
Speaker 1 (04:47):
Yeah, I mean sometimes they are happening at the same time,
which is very true. Even I'm currently dealing with Yeah,
I could do better with sleep. I will fully admit that,
you know, it's hard to find the time to get
everything done, and I kind of don't sweat it. I
do what I can do and what I want to do.
I always think, if you wake up, you may not
(05:09):
have another day, so you might as well make the
most of that day. And that doesn't mean you have
to cram everything into the day. It just means that
you should live every day the way that you want
to live it. And so for me, that is living
what I would call a summoned life. So there's this
whole theory that there's a sum in life, and there's
what you might call it kind of prescriptive life, where
you know it's all prescribed for you, and you know
(05:29):
you're going to work until this age and then once
that's done, you're going to retire and go here. But
the sum in life is where you're sort of called
into a life and you are improvising a life. And
I often say that I live my life like Jazz,
I sort of improvise it, and I kind of I
kind of make it up as I go along, and
that's that's really exciting for me. And part of that
is leaving myself in directions where you know, I can
(05:54):
explore the things that I'm interested in, but also then
develop a kind of apparatus around it so I can
do it really well, because I think otherwise what you
end up being is a sort of dabbler and a
whole bunch of things, but not really good at any
one thing. Yes, it does take a lot of time management,
and it also takes a lot of I think personal
patients that you have to be willing to just say,
you know what, that's not going to get done in
(06:16):
the way that I thought it was going to get done,
on the timeline that I thought it was going to
get done. But I'm okay with that, and I just
sort of let it go and it'll come back to
me at some other point. Like I'd love to be
making more music right now, and I don't have the
time to do that because I'm running a school, but
I know that it will come back to me. It's
like a you know, boomerang that you throw up in
the air and it sort of comes back to you
at the right moment.
Speaker 3 (06:37):
Yeah, Now, you're very big on musicology. I guess for me,
when I think about like musicology, I think of people
like Prince.
Speaker 2 (06:44):
I could sit and listen to Prince just talk about
making music all day.
Speaker 3 (06:48):
Also funny enough, and think about someone you mentioned already,
robta Flack, as another person who really understood music on
a wide scale. What was your path to a college
like going the step deeper into music and becoming like
this person that people look to now for deeper meaning
of music.
Speaker 1 (07:09):
Well, I'm not an official musicologist, which is interesting because
that's a particular discipline. I would just definitely describe myself
as a music historian. I'm a music scholar. I have
always been really interested in music. My first memory is
sitting on my father's knee. He came from Trinidad. Both
my parents hail from Trinidad and the Caribbean, and they
would listen to Calypso music and he would bounce me
(07:29):
up and down on my knee, and I can distinctly
remember the rhythms of that and him doing that, And
so for me, I just feel like I've always been
very connected to music and always wanted to know more
about music. The power that it had on me, how
it kind of you know, has held me and summoned
me and saved me at certain moments in my life,
(07:49):
and I've always wanted to think about the deeper significance
of it. I grew up in the age of vinyl,
so we had all the liner notes, and I was
always interested in Yeah, sure, Prince or Michael Jackson, but
also so who was Greg phillngaines. You know, who's playing
the keys on the Michael Jackson records, or who was
prints playing with or who engineered the record. So I
wanted to dive deeper always and have more context around
(08:11):
the music. Plus I was always had skills as a writer,
I think growing up, and so.
Speaker 5 (08:16):
For me, I kind of merged all of those things.
Speaker 1 (08:19):
My deep interested in music and having a critical understanding
of music, and then also having this curiosity to dig
deeper and too understand context. And so I actually straddled
both of those things in being in music and making
music while also writing about it and theorizing about it
and doing critiques of it. And that led me to
do my master's my PhD at New York University, and
(08:41):
I focused on performance studies with a even deeper focus
on hip hop and R and B and popular music,
And there weren't a lot of places you could go
to grad school and.
Speaker 5 (08:50):
Like write essays on like jay Z and hip hop.
Speaker 1 (08:53):
But that's what I was interested in doing, so and
that's what I did, and I've been doing it ever since.
And I was also so doing scholarly academic writing at
the same time that I was doing writing for popular
magazines like Vibe and Village Voice, and so discovering different voices.
So when you ask me about musicology, for me, the
scholarly work fulfills me, but also just making it available
(09:15):
to as many people as possible and making the information
of the knowledge, and documentaries have become a great way
to do that.
Speaker 3 (09:21):
Yes, absolutely, How do you feel about the shift in
how we listen to music? But like how we have
to almost have instant gratification of music in this particular era.
I don't necessarily come from a vinyl era, but I
do come from a CD era where I used to
(09:43):
stand in line and wait to buy the CD because
I wanted the booklet and I wanted to read everything
in the booklet. But I also came from an era
where one album gave you two to three years of
music where singles were released every few months, whereas now
an album drops at midnight and by the time we
(10:05):
wake up, a whole review is already done about the album.
How do you feel about like where we are now
with that, and does that have an effect on how
you handle your program it you will see in teaching music.
Speaker 1 (10:20):
Well, I think what you're describing is the result of
the Internet and particularly social media, which has produced as
kind of instantaneity. So in other words, everything is instantaneous
in terms of not only gratification, but also the delivery
of media and the transmission of what we receive. So
things have really changed. I don't think they're going back,
(10:40):
so we have to kind of contend with where we are.
I think it has some negative aspects to it, there's
also some positive aspects. I think it's changed the nature
of songwriting. It's changed the way that people make music
and release music, which is a lot of the length
of songs. So songs have become shorter in the age
of streaming platforms, which we've all all noted, but that
(11:00):
actually harkens back to the late sixties in the motown era.
I mean Motown was not a label of albums, so
they put out albums, but until Marvin Gay's What's going
On in seventy one, they were a label of singles
for like the first thirteen to fifteen years of that label,
and the singles were very short. And so with the
change in technologies, the rise of multi tracking, for instance
(11:21):
in the sixties, which allowed you to lay voices and
instruments on top of each other and create these quilted,
complex works of art like the Beatles released or Slide
the Family Stone and Marvin gay you know. And then
also changes in radio formatting, for instance, with the rise
of progressive radio. Suddenly you had these concept albums and
people were making these major statements like Marvin Gaye's What's
(11:42):
going On?
Speaker 5 (11:42):
Or Isaac Hayes, or you can name Curtis Mayfield, you
can name any.
Speaker 1 (11:46):
Of these other artists who were such game changers at
that time. And arguably the technology is what leads, and
then people find ways to make art in response to that.
And so right now people are making music in response
to the reality that music is heard on streaming platforms
and they've had to make changes. But it has I
(12:06):
think also led to the rise of new and different
kinds of songwriting. So I think of a writer like
Frank Ocean or Scissa, and I think of the kind
of writing that they do, and it's very hooky and
very it brings you in dramatically in ways that are
very different and unusual. I think part of that is
just the nature of the time. It's very confessional, which
is also very social media oriented. They're oversharers in a
(12:29):
way that's really different, So all of that is definitely
these are all changes, and in terms of you know,
what we do at school, I think it's really important
to make sure that every student, no matter what they're
studying in the context of music, has an understanding of
technology and of media, and that they're literate in both
technology and media, even if they don't aspire to necessarily
(12:50):
be technologists or producers or to be behind the glass
in recording. Every performer, for instance, needs to have an
understanding of technology and the impact of technolog on their
music making process, and they also need to be able
to understand the business of music and how it's changing
and how the business impacts music. Years ago, if you
went to music school, you would never have to think
about those things. Now they have to take classes, and
(13:13):
it becomes essential to empower yourself as an artist to
know more about the world in which you live and
how that world is impacting the way that you make
music and how people are listening to music, so that
when you're making your music, you're also thinking about the
audiences that you're formatting.
Speaker 3 (13:28):
Yeah, and that's a good point you brought up about
technology and like its effects on just how music is
made nowadays, right, because even for me as an author,
it is hard because it's like I'm not actually fighting
against certain systems anymore.
Speaker 2 (13:41):
I'm fighting against TikTok.
Speaker 3 (13:43):
And then you see the industry start to shift in
a sense of where they're like, oh, we need more
books like this because these are the books that move
on TikTok. And I sense the same thing with music,
and we oftentimes joke about it on Twitter about this
song sounds like it was really made to try and
go viral on TikTok.
Speaker 5 (14:02):
Oh.
Speaker 3 (14:03):
Sure, is there like a struggle that you're seeing with
the music industry of like, this is the music I
want to make, which some people have the power to do.
Speaker 4 (14:11):
I e.
Speaker 3 (14:12):
A Beyonce who can just go out there and say,
I'm going to make the country record that I want
to make. I'm not worried about if any of this
shit ever goes viral on TikTok.
Speaker 5 (14:19):
That's one of my business.
Speaker 2 (14:20):
If it does, it does, If it doesn't, doesn't change
me a bit.
Speaker 3 (14:23):
Versus newer artists who may feel pressured to change sound
and change the ways in which, as you said, like
change how they write, being more confessional, feeling like they
have to be in a parasocial relationship for their music
to do anything.
Speaker 5 (14:39):
Yeah, those are Georgia, just super interesting question.
Speaker 1 (14:41):
I mean, what I would suggest to any artists is
to be themselves, to be heightened versions of themselves. Really,
at the end of the day, ROBERTA. Flak, who we
talked about at the beginning of this conversation, I once
interviewed her and I asked her how she defined soul,
because it's such a hard thing to define, but I
was writing essay on it and I wanted her take
on it. And she told me that soul is serving
(15:04):
up your heartbeat to somebody. And I love that definition
and I shared all the time in different contexts, And
part of the reason is because for me, that is
the nature of what it is to be an artist
is to serve up your heartbeat to other people so
that they can feel you and who you are, the
uniqueness of who you are in who they are. At
(15:24):
the deepest level, the bone, blood marrow like it can
feel you. And so when I listen to a Sissa,
for instance, I'm just I keep mentioning her.
Speaker 3 (15:32):
I don't know why, I mean, I mean, but I
think mentioning Saysa is important, right, like, especially because in
this day and age, everything is instant gratification. So they
look at Coco jones first week's sales and they're like, oh,
it flopped, and it's like, yeah, but Doci had less
sales first week and she worked the album like an
old school traditional way that you would work an album.
If Coco Jones does the same thing, she will see
(15:54):
probably success as well. And then we can get into,
you know, the colorism of things and then being darker
skinned artists and having to fight harder for space. But
it is very interesting. Whatever the Scissor effect is, I
always think about, like the Maxine Shaw effect with how
a bunch of people wanted to become black women specifically
became lawyers because of this one character on TV, and
(16:14):
it's like people are looking at sissas success and being like,
why this one person in.
Speaker 2 (16:19):
This particular R and B sound.
Speaker 3 (16:21):
So I actually am glad you're bringing it up because
a lot of people online are actually starting to ask
more questions about how did Sissy get to this place?
Speaker 1 (16:29):
Sure, and I mean the last album enormously successful, and
you know, the current song with Kendrick is I think
it's eleven weeks of number one, so there's clearly something there.
And she's demonstrated her longevity on her staying power in music,
but not only that that she's a real boundary pusher
and she is somebody who's kind of changing the definitions
(16:50):
of what success looks like in this moment. I think
part of the reason that she's able to do that
is that her voice is so unique. Literally her voice,
her singing voice, but also her writing ability has been
unique for some time now, I think, emerging out of
the history of folks like you know, Frank Ocean and
(17:12):
Lena del Rey and others. She's making this sort of
confessional R and B that is it's like a diary.
It's like you're hearing her diary, and you know, the
use of humor and cleverness and wit and the production.
Everything is just firing in all cylinders, and so I
can instantly recognize Sizza's sound, not just her voice, but
(17:34):
also the writing and the quality of her music, almost
in the way that the classic soul icons like a
Gladys Knight or a Patty LaBelle or Shaka Khan, you
could instantly recognize them and you never you know, you
never confused anyone for the other, right, And I'm not
comparing Sciss to them necessarily as a singer, but I
do think in terms of her brand, identity, her reputation,
(17:56):
she is standing alone. She's a unique, singular fake, sort
of beyond category, as the Great Duke Ellington would say,
and that's what we look for, and I think that's
what's really exciting. So I think she had the opportunity
to develop herself as an artist over time and not
everything had to go to number one, like her label
believed in her and was willing to take some chances
(18:16):
on her. That's one of the big things that's missing
in this culture of everything having to be instantaneous, what
people call the moment economy, is that in music you're
lacking what used to happen back in the day, which
was this rigorous artist development process, the A and R process,
where artists were given time to fail, to make mistakes,
(18:37):
but to also correct and then they were working closely
with really skilled executives at labels who would help develop
them shape them for the marketplace. Motown was the first
label to have an artist development unit, and you can
argue that maybe no label ever did it better than
Motown because instantly, if I named say Diana Ross, Marvin Gay,
Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder, I mean, you instantly conjured not
(18:58):
only who those artists are, but the music as well,
fifty sixty years after they started. And so that's what
we're really missing today because what's expected now for artists
is to develop themselves, to get themselves on social media,
to have that parasocial relationship with their audiences, and to
rack up impressions and numbers. It's a numbers game right now,
(19:18):
and getting attention has been the game for the last
twenty years or so, and that's a very different thing
than what it was in the past, for sure. I
mean today, if Aretha Franklin was starting her career, so
she would not only have to sing incredibly and write
songs incredibly and arrange them incredibly. But she'd also have
to be on social media half the day promoting herself,
(19:39):
you know, And that's a very different thing that we're
asking of artists.
Speaker 3 (20:15):
And now back to my conversation with music historian Jason King.
Anybody who knows me knows I'm a Jersey girl. I
am from Jersey. We love house music, we love disco.
I always say we are the epicenter. I know people
are gonna be upset because they go to say Chicago,
or they're gonna.
Speaker 2 (20:31):
Say Baltimore, But I just want to be very clear.
Speaker 3 (20:33):
Larry Levin and and them with Paradise Garage, New York,
but also was it in New Jersey?
Speaker 5 (20:39):
Okay, it can be. It can be many cities, It
could be, it can be multiple share it. Yes.
Speaker 3 (20:44):
But I always think about Sylvester because that's somebody that
my father used to play for us very often. My mother,
you know, would play for us a lot. His rendition
of you Are My Friend. My grandmother's favorite song by
patt le Bel was you Are My Friend. And so
that's a song I listened to regularly. It's in my
playlist that I'd probably listened to every single day.
Speaker 2 (21:03):
So two things.
Speaker 3 (21:04):
The first is, can you talk about like the connectedness
of music and artists in the business. And I say
this from the standpoint of you think of Patti LaBelle
and you like, oh, Patti LaBelle, But then you also
have to be like, background singer was Luther Vandross at
one point, who then became Luther Vandraws. Background singer was
Sylvester at one point, who then became Sylvester whose background
(21:27):
singers were Martha rog and Zora who then became the
weather Girl. And two tons of fun like can you
talk about like how connected the artist to who, like
the background artist is, and like that trajectory of them
finally making it to the main stage. And this also
plays into music documentary. Was it Twenty Feet from Stardom? Yeah,
(21:50):
the importance of music documentary in that sense.
Speaker 5 (21:52):
Sure, I mean I love Twenty Feet from Stardom.
Speaker 1 (21:55):
You know, I think the focus of that film, for
those who didn't see it, was on the history of
backround singers, particularly in these key moments fifty sixties seventies,
when arguably some of the greatest, most transformative artists came
to the forefront. But they weren't justified only by their
voice in themselves, but also by the instrumental lists who
(22:16):
played with them, and then by the background singers who
worked with them, who created these incredible, unbelievable tapestries of
sound behind these artists. And so you think of Aretha
Franklin in her golden period, you know, on Atlantic records
in the late sixties and the early seventies, for instance,
and you can't help but think of Sissy Houston with
Houston's mother, but you know, a brilliant singer in her
(22:40):
own rights from the gospel groups of Sweet Inspirations, and
who would go on to have her own solo career
as well, but who had sung for Elvis and sung
for Aretha, sung for Paul Simon, some of the great
artists of the time. And there's so many artists like that,
and the film tries to capture that world of background singers.
And then also I think to track a little bit,
(23:00):
you know, in terms of like what's happened to the
quality of background singers over time, because we don't have
people who have that level of prominence as much anymore,
and that's an unfortunate thing. But definitely there was a
path for some background singer, some of the great background
singers to go solo and to have their own solo careers.
So you think of somebody like us to see Houston,
for instance, who did have a solo career. But you
(23:22):
know Luther Vandros, he toiled for years as a background singer,
working for people like ROBERTA.
Speaker 5 (23:29):
Flack and others. ROBERTA. Flack actually fired him simply because
he was so good. She was like, yeah, to actually go.
Speaker 2 (23:35):
I read that article on that. I think it's so interesting.
Speaker 1 (23:38):
Yeah, And she did the same for Donnie Hathaway. And
they are all these kind of male singers who came
through her world that she helped move on to the
solo careers that would become transformative. And there's also a
lot of background singers who never made it as solo
artists because they didn't have the charisma or the connections
or the infrastructure and support from the industry to make it.
But those worlds were all connected, especially if we're talking
(23:58):
about R and B music instance, a lot of those
people knew each other, worked with each other, supported each other,
and loved each other and really wanted the best for
each other and so I think of somebody like Sylvester.
He eventually ended up singing on Aretha Franklin's Freeway of
Love that was produced by Narada Michael Walden, and part
(24:19):
of the reason he was able to do that was
because he had established himself as a solo artist at
that point. It was a dream of his and I
think it was Luthor. It might have been somebody else
in the industry who gave him that shot to be
able to sing backgrounds for Aretha. And so I think
those kinds of connections happen all the time. But you
look at Sylvester's background singers. He had the great Carl Hall,
(24:39):
one of the greatest gospel tenors in the history of music,
singing for him. Dolores Hall, amazing Broadway singer who'd do backgrounds.
Martha wash Izora Rhodes, who you mentioned, who came up
with him through the San Francisco scene in the early
nineteen seventies and then went on to their own success
as the Weather Girls with the song It's Raining Men.
The Hawkins Families background for Sylvester on a lot of tracks.
(25:02):
If you know, you know, if you don't, you don't,
I think that's part of the joy of music is
looking at all of these connections and networks and also
having an understanding of how this begat that and how
people influence each other, and how if you're listening to
it Aretha Franklin on her heyday, you're probably hearing Donnie
Hathaway on keys playing behind her, and so it behooves
(25:24):
you to learn as much as you can about all
of that because the quality of rich musicians who supported
each other and played on each other's records.
Speaker 3 (25:32):
Do you see that as something that the industry struggles
with today, Like they're just looking for, like who's the
hottest producer right now, who's the hottest sound right now,
and not focusing on like who knows this art for real?
For real and really should be part a part of
my project because it brings my project to life in
a different way.
Speaker 5 (25:50):
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (25:51):
I mean, I think a lot of different things are
happening in music, so I think they're part of it.
That has to do with the fact that the stakes
in music have changed so much. I mean, there's what
two hundred and something thousand songs per day being released,
you know, in platforms, and so at a certain level
you're trying to get heard through all of that traffic,
(26:11):
and probably one of the best ways to do that
is to just make something that's that is you and
that sounds like you, and that's distinctly what you're interested in.
And also, I think we're at a moment partly because
of the influence of YouTube and a lot of these
streaming platforms, which make so much of culture available to
us in a kind of push button way, like all
(26:33):
time periods and temporalities are available to us now. So
you know, that's why you see the rise of somebody
like an Adele, who to me is as a contemporary
sound but also an old school sound and covers Bob Dylan,
but also works with contemporary artists, and she can do
any of those things. I mean, Beyonce is covering Frankie
(26:53):
Beverly and Mays as much as she's doing anything contemporary.
Speaker 5 (26:56):
I see everything in her work. I see the.
Speaker 1 (26:57):
Samples of the Clark Sisters, you know, much as she's
working with the contemporary, younger dor artists. She's truly a
curator of her total sound, and that's really exciting. So
I think all of those kinds of things are happening
in music at the same time I love it.
Speaker 2 (27:17):
So I'm actually a question.
Speaker 3 (27:19):
This is something I've always wondered about, and it in
terms of like songwriting, Like how does one get into songwriting?
What is that process to becoming a songwriter.
Speaker 5 (27:31):
There's no one path to becoming a songwriter.
Speaker 1 (27:35):
Some people connect with somebody who's already in the industry,
and that person mentors them and helps them find their way,
and then they end up becoming a professional songwriter. Other
people are much more methodical about it. Perhaps they go
to school like USC Thornton and take a songwriting class.
Others might start down one path where they are aspiring
(27:58):
to be a performer and a singer, and then maybe
they learn more about the business and they realize a
lot of money can be made in songwriting, and in fact,
because there's often more revenue to be generated in songwriting
and production and being behind the scenes than there sometimes
is being on stage, and so that can be another path.
But there is unfortunately no single path or way to
(28:20):
becoming a songwriter. I always encourage anyone who wants to
be a songwriter to learn as much as possible about
the art and the craft and the discipline of being
a songwriter. Learn what a great song is versus a
good song versus a mediocre song. Learn music theory, learn
the components of what goes into writing a great song,
(28:40):
whether that is a melody or whether that's the rhythm track.
Are you approaching this as a top line writer where
you're going to be writing melodies for other people who
are making the music, or are you writing the chords?
What instrument are you composing on. There's lots of different
things to think about in ways to approach how you
might enter this world songwriting. But it does start, I think,
(29:02):
from having and understanding of the kinds of songs that
you like and the songs that have moved you and
that are transformative to you, and learning more about who
wrote those songs, discovering their discographies, learning as much about
them and their lives as possible. Yeah, and having someone
to emulate in that world that you feel like you
can I want that kind of a career for myself,
(29:23):
or I want to write those kinds of songs and
pursuing it that way. So no one way of doing it,
but many ways perfect.
Speaker 3 (29:32):
I tell people the same thing all the time, look
at the genre, look at it like when you're trying
to write. It's like, who's in that category, who's in
that space? What books have you read from that space?
What moved you about those books?
Speaker 2 (29:41):
But you know I've.
Speaker 3 (29:42):
Always wondered that, and so thank you because you're giving
a lot of wisdom today.
Speaker 1 (29:46):
Okay, well, you know a lot of people need to hear.
Everybody wants to be in music. You know, clearly not
everyone should be in music, but everybody wants to be
in music. But I always just say, if you're going
to do it, like be fully committed to it, and
be fully committed to being excellent.
Speaker 5 (30:03):
So whatever that means to you.
Speaker 1 (30:05):
And you know you're often having to define success on
your own terms, but strive for a level of excellence.
And so some of the people you know we're talking
about today, whether it's a Luther Vanros or Patty LaBelle
or Shaka Khan, I mean they literally define the standards
of excellence for their areas in a way that still
to this day. I mean, who sounds better than Luthor Andros,
(30:26):
Who's written better songs, who's made like nobody? They set
the level so high that it's been transformative for so
many generations to come. It's amazing that the number one
song right now has a sample of Luther Vanros and
Cherylnn doing If This World Were Minded so, and that's
decades after that song came out. So I do think
(30:47):
you have to strive for that level of excellence no
matter what you want to do. And you know, if
you want to write books like read Baldwin and read
like read the best.
Speaker 2 (30:58):
And be embarrassed about what you right after, but it's
okay because.
Speaker 5 (31:03):
Or not or not.
Speaker 1 (31:04):
I mean, how many people write like Joy Morrison, Like
nobody could write like.
Speaker 2 (31:08):
Nouey's gonna write like that.
Speaker 3 (31:09):
But I always tell people the first things you write
are usually terrible, and that's okay. Like I go back
and look at some of the old articles I wrote
and was like, why did they publish this? But it
was sharpening right and I had great editors who allowed
me the space to be bad to get better.
Speaker 5 (31:23):
Absolutely, the development process.
Speaker 2 (31:25):
It's the development process.
Speaker 3 (31:26):
What I love about what you have been talking about
today is artists development music theory.
Speaker 2 (31:30):
Go read, go learn.
Speaker 1 (31:33):
Go deep, go deep into it and be curious and
develop an intellectual curiosity, a creative curiosity. I mean, that's
one of the things that's definitely missing in this moment
right now, right that we live in. And it's weird
because we live in this moment of like info blood
right where there's just so much information that's available to us.
All we have to do is just reach into our pockets,
get our phones, and you can like find anything out.
(31:55):
Now we have ai chat ebt, like you have a concierge, literally,
and that can tell you anything you want to know.
Speaker 5 (32:01):
And yet people want to know nothing.
Speaker 1 (32:03):
They want to know less than nothing, it's like, and
the part of that has to do with the Internet
itself and the way that social media created these filter bubbles,
right that you live in a bubble of your own
self regard and information where you're not encouraged to actually
go outside of your comfort zone or to learn more.
And so we're so polarized right now as a culture,
(32:27):
partly because of the way that technology has siloed us,
but it has also made us far less intellectually curious
and far less willing to do the deep dives that
should be so available to everybody to do.
Speaker 5 (32:41):
And people should want to do those things.
Speaker 1 (32:42):
But let's face it, also today people don't even know
what facts are, They don't know what is true, they
don't know how to suss things out and to really
understand historical fact, and historical facts are also under attack.
Speaker 3 (32:56):
Frankly, so, yeah, lot with Jason's trying to tell y'all
there's work before you start work.
Speaker 2 (33:04):
It's true, like.
Speaker 1 (33:05):
Just preparation, right, is hugely important. But I even think
of somebody like a Beyonce because I saw her concert
Cowboy Carter Show twice last week. I went back. It
was so amazing. But part of the thing that really
gets me is that there's so much research and there's
so much preparation that goes into the work that she does.
And she also knows how to execute really really well,
(33:26):
because a lot of people don't know how to execute,
but she executes so well. But part of that is
because of the amount of preparation and then also the
research that goes into it. But the interesting thing is
her albums and her concerts and everything that she puts
out into the world of videos. It doesn't feel like research.
You feel it in your marrow and your bones. It's
(33:48):
like serving up your heartbeat. But you know that it
is the result of a deep amount of research, and
then what that invites you to do for like Renaissance
or Cowboy Carter for instance, is then to go back
and to engage in the kind of research that she's done,
but to figure it out for yourself. So you might
then go deep into the Clark sisters by listening to
(34:09):
Church Girl, or you might go deep into Donna Summer
and Georgia and Moroder and their relationship by listening to
Summer Renaissance, or you know, deep into the worlds of
country music and Linda Martel and all the people who
are referenced on Cowboy Carter. And that's a really powerful thing.
So I think research for a lot of people is
a scary thing, or it's something that is they solely
associate with academia. At least when I was coming up,
(34:31):
that's research was not a part of the conversation in
popular culture so much like an amazing dream.
Speaker 5 (34:37):
And now it really is and that's exciting.
Speaker 4 (34:40):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (34:50):
So something else you are not shy about is you
are very vocal about diversity, equity and inclusion. You are
also on the Hip Hop Council at the Kennedy Center
in DC. How hard has that become, especially with academia
under attack. We know we are living in anti intellectual
age right now, where they are attacking anything that is historical,
(35:15):
anything that is factual. So what is that thing that
pushes you to continue to be very vocal about what
you're not going to allow to happen and what you
stand for.
Speaker 1 (35:26):
I haven't changed anything at all ever. I am who
I am, and I'm doing the things that are meaningful
to me. And I'm also I have this project that
I'm interested in, which is making sure that people understand
the value of what it is to be a citizen
of the world and to be engaged in the world,
(35:47):
and to not treat other people with cruelty, to not
treat people in a way that is hierarchical, but that
everybody is equal, everybody deserves respect, everybody deserves an opportunity
to fully be themselves. And so part of the reason
(36:07):
that I'm so into music is because to me, music
offers us a blueprint to understand how to get there,
how to achieve the future that we want, how to
achieve a kind of wholeness. And that's through the aesthetics
of music itself, through collaboration, through all these collective configurations
that music uniquely makes possible, like jazz ensembles, or I
(36:29):
think of the complex structure of the Wu Tang clan
where it's an ensemble but then it's all these individual
members doing their thing or Brockhampton like. So, music to
me is a symbol or even a blueprint of the future.
And the great Nigerian band leader Falakuti, used to call
music the weapon of the future, and I think it
is in so many ways. And so that's part of
why I'm so attracted to music and studying music and
(36:51):
elevating music and being involved in music because it is
I think, producing a better world for us.
Speaker 5 (36:57):
And I'm so grateful to be in the arts in
this moment.
Speaker 1 (37:01):
Because it really the arts are so transformative, you know,
at the level of feeling emotion, not just logic and rationality,
although it does engage us there.
Speaker 5 (37:11):
Too, but it grips you.
Speaker 1 (37:13):
So when I go to an Aretha Franklin concert or
a siss A concert or Beyonce concert, it's those moments
where the hair stands up on the back of your
neck and you have that feeling of being engaged and transformed.
It's what James Baldwin would call the theater. He said
it was flesh and blood corroborating flesh and blood, the
performer and the audience formatting each other. So that, to
me is what I'm doing always. I'm trying to understand that,
(37:38):
elevate that, explain it to other people, and even make
my own music and make my own art that tries
to do the same kind of thing. In terms of
my work as a dean of a major music school,
nothing has changed. If anything, there are changes around language
and those sorts of things that are sort of required
(37:59):
in this moment where there are certain kinds of existential
threats to many institutions, But everything else to me is
just about staying the course and making sure that we're
committed to this work. It doesn't change because of who
might be in the office political administration. And I'm of
course inspired by the examples of all of these artists
(38:19):
who worked in the past in different countries under all
kinds of regimes that were not necessarily supportive of artists,
and they managed to get the work done even in
this country. I think of somebody like James Baldwin, for instance,
who was writing in the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties
at times that were really difficult, where there was lots
(38:39):
of repression going on, they managed to put work out
into the world that transformed the way that people think.
Or I think of an Audrey Lord, or I think
of a Bell Hooks, and I can just name, you know,
the many authors who did work and put intellectual thought
out into the world that was transformative and that people
could use as tools to be able to figure out
their future. Teaching a course in my previous institution on
(39:02):
world making, and in that course we're reading Octavia Butler
The Parable of the Sower, which is this incredibly prophetic book,
you know, prophetic novel about the times that we live
in and what it takes to strive and to create
a future for yourself where it seems like none is possible.
(39:23):
And I think that's the kind of writing, that's the
kind of work that we all need to return to
and really think about. Because she was writing this thirty
plus years ago in a different moment. But that is
the nature of what is great about art. It's like
a weapon that you can go back into the past
and dig and allow it to help you figure out
(39:45):
the current moment and to figure out what your future
can look like. And so for me, art is inherently optimistic,
it's inherently pointed to the future, and it's inherently something
that can offer us a path toward a better and
more inclusive and whole future.
Speaker 3 (40:15):
Now back to my conversation with Jason King. I know
it's almost time for us to wrap up, but we
do have one more just like real.
Speaker 2 (40:24):
Question, how's AI playing a role?
Speaker 3 (40:29):
Like I know for us, Like I'm in the writers
Guild and it's been a battle of like studios trying
to use AI for things, and we know if it
affects one industry, eventually it will get to publishing where
they are trying to use AI to write books and
they are trying to use AI to do songwriting. Are
you worried about the impact of it or are you
(40:51):
I don't know. Sometimes I'm like, like you said, soul
has heartbeat, and I feel like even if AI writes
something well, it can never write it like a person
who actually has experience as emotions.
Speaker 5 (41:01):
Sure, I mean it's going to get better.
Speaker 1 (41:03):
It's going to get to the point where people may
not be able to recognize the difference, and it's also
going to get to the point where people may not
care about the difference I think it's on us to
help identify what is human about music or theater or
dance or film or any of the things that we're
invested in that we describe as the product of a
(41:23):
human consciousness or a human body. So, on one hand,
I think AI is a very convenient tool. I mean,
human beings have long been looking for forms of convenience
and accessibility, and I think AI is just the latest
thing to come along to do that. Some of the
debates around AI remind me of the debates around the
drum machine in the nineteen seventies. The idea was that
(41:46):
the drum machine was going to replace all human drummers. No,
there would be no more human drummers needed since you
had a machine that you could press and make rhythms.
And that did not turn out to be the case.
We have great human drummers still, but we also have
a technologies that allow you to produce synthetic drums. And
then you have entire genres of music like hip hop
(42:07):
electronica that were created because of drum machines and other
sorts of technologies.
Speaker 5 (42:11):
So it can be a double edged sword.
Speaker 1 (42:14):
We also have human beings today, by the way, who
play like drum machines, that's the desires to play like
a quantized really you know, tight rhythm. But I think
in the context of AI, the thing that's really important
is to encourage people to use it as a creative tool,
and to encourage people to use it ethically and responsibly
in whatever field they might be using it in, because
(42:36):
it's very easy to cut corners and to sort of
cheat and to frankly just to become very lazy using it.
At the same time, I think it's important to teach
people about the value of their own labor, to teach
people about the value of their intellectual property, because a
lot of people don't even understand sometimes that the work
that they put out into the world, or the writing
(42:57):
or whatever it may be, is their own intellectual property
that has a subscribed value, economic value in this world.
So we need to shift toward an ownership economy where
people understand how to own their data, how to own
their IP, and how to frankly monetize their IP. And
we need to have a lot deeper conversations about labor
(43:18):
itself in this moment, and what is work and what
does it mean if a AI or a robot replaces
you in work, and should we be having conversations about
things like basic income and all kinds of ways of
supporting ourselves structurally as a society at a moment in
which lowage labor in particular is frankly under attack, and
(43:43):
I mean, the future for certain kinds of labor looks
extremely grim, and so we need to have these conversations.
And I, frankly I don't see them happening in a
mainstream way very much because we're dealing with so many
other things. But AI's here, It's here to stay, and
we're going to have to contend with it.
Speaker 3 (44:04):
But we always like to end two quick points. I
usually do a segment called George is tired this week.
I'm absolutely tired of these people on TikTok debating the
humane way to kill a crab. I have not seen
that a woman in Baltimore made a crab and an
air fryer and the crab was live, and it has
(44:24):
sparked such a humane controversy throughout the TikTok's bear. But
I think we have bigger issues than how people are
cooking crabs.
Speaker 2 (44:34):
Is there anything as you are tired of for the week?
Speaker 1 (44:41):
Well, I live in La, so I've been very tired
of Yeah, I've been very tired of the cold, the
relative chili weather in LA because I'm a recent transplant
to LA. But I have to say that the weather
has completely changed and now it's apparently super hot, so
we swing in all these different directions that are like,
you can never know what's going to happen for one
day to another. So that's super super mundane and a
(45:03):
small issue compared to the many issues that we face
on a daily basis. But sometimes the reality is you're
just think looking up at the weather and you're like,
what is today bringing me?
Speaker 3 (45:11):
Yes, I am also tired of the La weather. And
the final thing is do you have any words.
Speaker 2 (45:16):
To leave with anyone?
Speaker 3 (45:17):
I always say like mantras and things like that, they
really do help people get through hard days.
Speaker 1 (45:23):
Well, I always say, the three things that you really
need in order to live a successful life or what
you know, you might call the good life are one
self honesty, and I think you have to be ruthless
in self honesty in order to really move through this
world in a way that allows you to thrive. I
(45:44):
think the second thing is relentless self care. I think
you have to take care of yourself, mind, body, soul, spirit,
you name it. And by taking care of yourself, you
need to also take care of other people as well.
So community care I think is part of self care.
I don't think those things are separate. And then the
third thing is I think you need to have a
(46:04):
daily practice of goodwill towards other people. And if that's
just helping somebody across the street, or if it's just
doing one thing that is good to someone else, and
not just people, but also I would say all living things.
So there's the crab comes back into the conversation. But
practicing daily goodwill will change you and will change.
Speaker 5 (46:27):
The world over time.
Speaker 2 (46:28):
I love that. Well, Jayson, I want to thank you
for coming on fighting words.
Speaker 3 (46:32):
We appreciate all that you do and all of the
history and that you continue to put out in the world,
especially during a time where they're trying to erase it.
Speaker 5 (46:39):
Thank you, George. I really appreciate all the work that
you're doing.
Speaker 4 (46:42):
Thank you.
Speaker 3 (47:00):
So today's quote is from one of Jason and my
favorite singers and performers, Sylvester.
Speaker 2 (47:05):
Sylvester was largely done for a couple of.
Speaker 3 (47:07):
Disco hits in the late seventies, but he was also
an innovator in high NRG dance music and had a
second act in the eighties that was incredibly influential. In
nineteen eighty six, he appeared on The Jones River Show.
They were obviously fond of each other, and Sylvester thanks
her for being one of the first to join with
him and the gay community in raising AIDS awareness, so
(47:30):
he didn't seem put off When she asked him what
his parents thought when they found out he was going
to be a drag queen. Sylvester just laughed and said,
I'm not a drag queen. I'm Sylvester, and I think
that gets at something which is misunderstood about drag. To
the outside, it seems like a costume, a way of
being someone else, but in truth, it's all about self expression,
(47:52):
and part of Sylvester's legacy was that he refused.
Speaker 2 (47:54):
To be defined as just one thing.
Speaker 3 (47:58):
Two years later, Sylvester had AIDS himself, but that didn't
stop him from speaking out. He marched in the Castros
nineteen eighty eight gave Freedom Parade in a wheelchair, one
of the first celebrities.
Speaker 2 (48:08):
With AIDS not to hide the disease.
Speaker 3 (48:11):
By the time he died later that year, he had
become an icon in the community and showed the.
Speaker 2 (48:16):
Power of never hiding no matter what.
Speaker 3 (48:37):
Fighting Words is a production of iHeart Podcasts in partnership
with Best Case Studios. I'm Georgia Johnson. This episode was
produced by Charlotte Morley. Executive producers are myself and Twiggy
Puchi gar Song with Adam Pinks and.
Speaker 2 (48:51):
Brick Cats for Best Case Studios.
Speaker 3 (48:54):
The theme song was written and composed by Kovas, Bambianna
and Myself. Original music by Kovas. This episode was edited
and scored.
Speaker 2 (49:04):
By Max Michael Miller.
Speaker 3 (49:06):
Our ieart team is Ali Perry and Carl Ketel. Following
rap Fighting Words Wherever you get your Podcasts
Everybody is equal, everybody deserves respect, everybody deserves an opportunity
to fully be themselves. And so part of the reason
that I'm so into music is because, to me, music
offers us a blueprint to understand how to get there,
how to achieve the future that we want, how to
achieve a kind of wholeness.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
That's Jason King.
Speaker 3 (00:25):
He's the dean of the Thornton School of Music at
USC and I'll let him explain all the other things
he does, because it kind of takes the word multi
hyphen it to a whole new level. He made a
podcast about Sylvester who if you don't know, you need
to check out, and he's got a way of talking
about music and resistance that I find incredibly inspiring.
Speaker 1 (00:45):
Music to me is a symbol for you know of
or even a blueprint of the future. And the great
Nigerian band leader Palakuchi used to call music the weapon
of the future, and I think it is in so
many ways. Singing and I'm heavy handy, souper world, take
(01:05):
a superbranded and coach you guy.
Speaker 4 (01:07):
You know what the plan is?
Speaker 5 (01:08):
Or became a Latin you know one does understand me.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
My name is George M. Johnson.
Speaker 3 (01:14):
I am the New York Times bestselling author of the
book All Boys Aren't Blue, which is the number one
most challenged book in the United States.
Speaker 2 (01:22):
This is Fighting Words, a.
Speaker 3 (01:24):
Show where we take you to the front lines of
the culture wars with the people who are using their
words to make change and who refuse to be silenced.
Today's guest Jason King. Mister Jason King, how are you
doing today.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
I'm good, George. It's great to meet you. Yes, very
nice to meet you as well.
Speaker 3 (01:47):
The way we like to start our show, I think
our bios at times precede us, so I always like
for the guests to come on and tell us who
they are, like who they really are, and so who
is Jason?
Speaker 1 (02:00):
Well, I'm a human being. Who're going to start there?
You know, I'm a bunch of things. So the word
multi hyphenic gets thrown out a lot. I like the
word pluralists because it just means I do many different things.
I've always been striving to be a master of many
trades rather than like, you know, jack of all trades
(02:22):
and master of none. But I would define myself first
and foremost as a musician. So I started in classical piano.
I got very into musical theater. I play keyboards, I sing,
I range vocals, I produce music.
Speaker 5 (02:36):
I've been a.
Speaker 1 (02:37):
Bandleader, songwriter, musical supervisor. So that's like the first and
foremost thing is I'm definitely a musician, also a music writer,
a journalist, and also an author. Wrote a book on
Michael Jackson, currently working on a new book. But I've
also done a bunch of other things in different mediums too,
So I've been a playwright and a theater director. I
actually have my degree in theater. I am a live
(02:59):
event producer. I've produced festivals and concerts. I've done radio hosting,
podcast hosting, video hosting. And then I'm also a scholar,
so I've published a lot of academic articles and journals
on artists like Beyonce and Drake and Luther Vandros and ROBERTA.
Speaker 5 (03:15):
Flack and so on.
Speaker 1 (03:16):
I've been a legal expert, you know, expert witness and
marketing and branding cases for jay Z and Madonna and
Gaga and others. And I consider myself a public intellectual,
so I like to take scholarly information and theory and
try to make it accessible and available for a wide
range of people. And that's everything from writing induction essays
(03:38):
for Jay z or Jimmy jam and Terry Lewis for
the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame to appearing in
a lot of documentaries that I have over the years,
and then producing films, so most recently Piece by Piece,
the Pharrell documentary that Morgan Neville directed, and then now
directing my own film.
Speaker 5 (03:55):
So that's a.
Speaker 1 (03:56):
Big broad description is actually a summary of the CV.
But you know, it's a big broad description to say
I do a lot of things, and I do the
things that I'm really passionate about, and so my life
and I think my purpose is around music, black music,
black culture and identity and really elevating those things and
feeling passionate about what I do every day.
Speaker 3 (04:18):
Now you're someone one, Yes, that is a lot, and
you had done a lot. You asked me, yes, I
did ask I guess. The first airpots of my mind
was one, when did you? When do you find the
time to do all these things? Because I'm also someone
who finds myself stretched into many different roles in many
different areas. So what goes into you making a decision
(04:43):
to go into another area or to go into a
different space.
Speaker 1 (04:47):
Yeah, I mean sometimes they are happening at the same time,
which is very true. Even I'm currently dealing with Yeah,
I could do better with sleep. I will fully admit that,
you know, it's hard to find the time to get
everything done, and I kind of don't sweat it. I
do what I can do and what I want to do.
I always think, if you wake up, you may not
(05:09):
have another day, so you might as well make the
most of that day. And that doesn't mean you have
to cram everything into the day. It just means that
you should live every day the way that you want
to live it. And so for me, that is living
what I would call a summoned life. So there's this
whole theory that there's a sum in life, and there's
what you might call it kind of prescriptive life, where
you know it's all prescribed for you, and you know
(05:29):
you're going to work until this age and then once
that's done, you're going to retire and go here. But
the sum in life is where you're sort of called
into a life and you are improvising a life. And
I often say that I live my life like Jazz,
I sort of improvise it, and I kind of I
kind of make it up as I go along, and
that's that's really exciting for me. And part of that
is leaving myself in directions where you know, I can
(05:54):
explore the things that I'm interested in, but also then
develop a kind of apparatus around it so I can
do it really well, because I think otherwise what you
end up being is a sort of dabbler and a
whole bunch of things, but not really good at any
one thing. Yes, it does take a lot of time management,
and it also takes a lot of I think personal
patients that you have to be willing to just say,
you know what, that's not going to get done in
(06:16):
the way that I thought it was going to get done,
on the timeline that I thought it was going to
get done. But I'm okay with that, and I just
sort of let it go and it'll come back to
me at some other point. Like I'd love to be
making more music right now, and I don't have the
time to do that because I'm running a school, but
I know that it will come back to me. It's
like a you know, boomerang that you throw up in
the air and it sort of comes back to you
at the right moment.
Speaker 3 (06:37):
Yeah, Now, you're very big on musicology. I guess for me,
when I think about like musicology, I think of people
like Prince.
Speaker 2 (06:44):
I could sit and listen to Prince just talk about
making music all day.
Speaker 3 (06:48):
Also funny enough, and think about someone you mentioned already,
robta Flack, as another person who really understood music on
a wide scale. What was your path to a college
like going the step deeper into music and becoming like
this person that people look to now for deeper meaning
of music.
Speaker 1 (07:09):
Well, I'm not an official musicologist, which is interesting because
that's a particular discipline. I would just definitely describe myself
as a music historian. I'm a music scholar. I have
always been really interested in music. My first memory is
sitting on my father's knee. He came from Trinidad. Both
my parents hail from Trinidad and the Caribbean, and they
would listen to Calypso music and he would bounce me
(07:29):
up and down on my knee, and I can distinctly
remember the rhythms of that and him doing that, And
so for me, I just feel like I've always been
very connected to music and always wanted to know more
about music. The power that it had on me, how
it kind of you know, has held me and summoned
me and saved me at certain moments in my life,
(07:49):
and I've always wanted to think about the deeper significance
of it. I grew up in the age of vinyl,
so we had all the liner notes, and I was
always interested in Yeah, sure, Prince or Michael Jackson, but
also so who was Greg phillngaines. You know, who's playing
the keys on the Michael Jackson records, or who was
prints playing with or who engineered the record. So I
wanted to dive deeper always and have more context around
(08:11):
the music. Plus I was always had skills as a writer,
I think growing up, and so.
Speaker 5 (08:16):
For me, I kind of merged all of those things.
Speaker 1 (08:19):
My deep interested in music and having a critical understanding
of music, and then also having this curiosity to dig
deeper and too understand context. And so I actually straddled
both of those things in being in music and making
music while also writing about it and theorizing about it
and doing critiques of it. And that led me to
do my master's my PhD at New York University, and
(08:41):
I focused on performance studies with a even deeper focus
on hip hop and R and B and popular music,
And there weren't a lot of places you could go
to grad school and.
Speaker 5 (08:50):
Like write essays on like jay Z and hip hop.
Speaker 1 (08:53):
But that's what I was interested in doing, so and
that's what I did, and I've been doing it ever since.
And I was also so doing scholarly academic writing at
the same time that I was doing writing for popular
magazines like Vibe and Village Voice, and so discovering different voices.
So when you ask me about musicology, for me, the
scholarly work fulfills me, but also just making it available
(09:15):
to as many people as possible and making the information
of the knowledge, and documentaries have become a great way
to do that.
Speaker 3 (09:21):
Yes, absolutely, How do you feel about the shift in
how we listen to music? But like how we have
to almost have instant gratification of music in this particular era.
I don't necessarily come from a vinyl era, but I
do come from a CD era where I used to
(09:43):
stand in line and wait to buy the CD because
I wanted the booklet and I wanted to read everything
in the booklet. But I also came from an era
where one album gave you two to three years of
music where singles were released every few months, whereas now
an album drops at midnight and by the time we
(10:05):
wake up, a whole review is already done about the album.
How do you feel about like where we are now
with that, and does that have an effect on how
you handle your program it you will see in teaching music.
Speaker 1 (10:20):
Well, I think what you're describing is the result of
the Internet and particularly social media, which has produced as
kind of instantaneity. So in other words, everything is instantaneous
in terms of not only gratification, but also the delivery
of media and the transmission of what we receive. So
things have really changed. I don't think they're going back,
(10:40):
so we have to kind of contend with where we are.
I think it has some negative aspects to it, there's
also some positive aspects. I think it's changed the nature
of songwriting. It's changed the way that people make music
and release music, which is a lot of the length
of songs. So songs have become shorter in the age
of streaming platforms, which we've all all noted, but that
(11:00):
actually harkens back to the late sixties in the motown era.
I mean Motown was not a label of albums, so
they put out albums, but until Marvin Gay's What's going
On in seventy one, they were a label of singles
for like the first thirteen to fifteen years of that label,
and the singles were very short. And so with the
change in technologies, the rise of multi tracking, for instance
(11:21):
in the sixties, which allowed you to lay voices and
instruments on top of each other and create these quilted,
complex works of art like the Beatles released or Slide
the Family Stone and Marvin gay you know. And then
also changes in radio formatting, for instance, with the rise
of progressive radio. Suddenly you had these concept albums and
people were making these major statements like Marvin Gaye's What's
(11:42):
going On?
Speaker 5 (11:42):
Or Isaac Hayes, or you can name Curtis Mayfield, you
can name any.
Speaker 1 (11:46):
Of these other artists who were such game changers at
that time. And arguably the technology is what leads, and
then people find ways to make art in response to that.
And so right now people are making music in response
to the reality that music is heard on streaming platforms
and they've had to make changes. But it has I
(12:06):
think also led to the rise of new and different
kinds of songwriting. So I think of a writer like
Frank Ocean or Scissa, and I think of the kind
of writing that they do, and it's very hooky and
very it brings you in dramatically in ways that are
very different and unusual. I think part of that is
just the nature of the time. It's very confessional, which
is also very social media oriented. They're oversharers in a
(12:29):
way that's really different, So all of that is definitely
these are all changes, and in terms of you know,
what we do at school, I think it's really important
to make sure that every student, no matter what they're
studying in the context of music, has an understanding of
technology and of media, and that they're literate in both
technology and media, even if they don't aspire to necessarily
(12:50):
be technologists or producers or to be behind the glass
in recording. Every performer, for instance, needs to have an
understanding of technology and the impact of technolog on their
music making process, and they also need to be able
to understand the business of music and how it's changing
and how the business impacts music. Years ago, if you
went to music school, you would never have to think
about those things. Now they have to take classes, and
(13:13):
it becomes essential to empower yourself as an artist to
know more about the world in which you live and
how that world is impacting the way that you make
music and how people are listening to music, so that
when you're making your music, you're also thinking about the
audiences that you're formatting.
Speaker 3 (13:28):
Yeah, and that's a good point you brought up about
technology and like its effects on just how music is
made nowadays, right, because even for me as an author,
it is hard because it's like I'm not actually fighting
against certain systems anymore.
Speaker 2 (13:41):
I'm fighting against TikTok.
Speaker 3 (13:43):
And then you see the industry start to shift in
a sense of where they're like, oh, we need more
books like this because these are the books that move
on TikTok. And I sense the same thing with music,
and we oftentimes joke about it on Twitter about this
song sounds like it was really made to try and
go viral on TikTok.
Speaker 5 (14:02):
Oh.
Speaker 3 (14:03):
Sure, is there like a struggle that you're seeing with
the music industry of like, this is the music I
want to make, which some people have the power to do.
Speaker 4 (14:11):
I e.
Speaker 3 (14:12):
A Beyonce who can just go out there and say,
I'm going to make the country record that I want
to make. I'm not worried about if any of this
shit ever goes viral on TikTok.
Speaker 5 (14:19):
That's one of my business.
Speaker 2 (14:20):
If it does, it does, If it doesn't, doesn't change
me a bit.
Speaker 3 (14:23):
Versus newer artists who may feel pressured to change sound
and change the ways in which, as you said, like
change how they write, being more confessional, feeling like they
have to be in a parasocial relationship for their music
to do anything.
Speaker 5 (14:39):
Yeah, those are Georgia, just super interesting question.
Speaker 1 (14:41):
I mean, what I would suggest to any artists is
to be themselves, to be heightened versions of themselves. Really,
at the end of the day, ROBERTA. Flak, who we
talked about at the beginning of this conversation, I once
interviewed her and I asked her how she defined soul,
because it's such a hard thing to define, but I
was writing essay on it and I wanted her take
on it. And she told me that soul is serving
(15:04):
up your heartbeat to somebody. And I love that definition
and I shared all the time in different contexts, And
part of the reason is because for me, that is
the nature of what it is to be an artist
is to serve up your heartbeat to other people so
that they can feel you and who you are, the
uniqueness of who you are in who they are. At
(15:24):
the deepest level, the bone, blood marrow like it can
feel you. And so when I listen to a Sissa,
for instance, I'm just I keep mentioning her.
Speaker 3 (15:32):
I don't know why, I mean, I mean, but I
think mentioning Saysa is important, right, like, especially because in
this day and age, everything is instant gratification. So they
look at Coco jones first week's sales and they're like, oh,
it flopped, and it's like, yeah, but Doci had less
sales first week and she worked the album like an
old school traditional way that you would work an album.
If Coco Jones does the same thing, she will see
(15:54):
probably success as well. And then we can get into,
you know, the colorism of things and then being darker
skinned artists and having to fight harder for space. But
it is very interesting. Whatever the Scissor effect is, I
always think about, like the Maxine Shaw effect with how
a bunch of people wanted to become black women specifically
became lawyers because of this one character on TV, and
(16:14):
it's like people are looking at sissas success and being like,
why this one person in.
Speaker 2 (16:19):
This particular R and B sound.
Speaker 3 (16:21):
So I actually am glad you're bringing it up because
a lot of people online are actually starting to ask
more questions about how did Sissy get to this place?
Speaker 1 (16:29):
Sure, and I mean the last album enormously successful, and
you know, the current song with Kendrick is I think
it's eleven weeks of number one, so there's clearly something there.
And she's demonstrated her longevity on her staying power in music,
but not only that that she's a real boundary pusher
and she is somebody who's kind of changing the definitions
(16:50):
of what success looks like in this moment. I think
part of the reason that she's able to do that
is that her voice is so unique. Literally her voice,
her singing voice, but also her writing ability has been
unique for some time now, I think, emerging out of
the history of folks like you know, Frank Ocean and
(17:12):
Lena del Rey and others. She's making this sort of
confessional R and B that is it's like a diary.
It's like you're hearing her diary, and you know, the
use of humor and cleverness and wit and the production.
Everything is just firing in all cylinders, and so I
can instantly recognize Sizza's sound, not just her voice, but
(17:34):
also the writing and the quality of her music, almost
in the way that the classic soul icons like a
Gladys Knight or a Patty LaBelle or Shaka Khan, you
could instantly recognize them and you never you know, you
never confused anyone for the other, right, And I'm not
comparing Sciss to them necessarily as a singer, but I
do think in terms of her brand, identity, her reputation,
(17:56):
she is standing alone. She's a unique, singular fake, sort
of beyond category, as the Great Duke Ellington would say,
and that's what we look for, and I think that's
what's really exciting. So I think she had the opportunity
to develop herself as an artist over time and not
everything had to go to number one, like her label
believed in her and was willing to take some chances
(18:16):
on her. That's one of the big things that's missing
in this culture of everything having to be instantaneous, what
people call the moment economy, is that in music you're
lacking what used to happen back in the day, which
was this rigorous artist development process, the A and R process,
where artists were given time to fail, to make mistakes,
(18:37):
but to also correct and then they were working closely
with really skilled executives at labels who would help develop
them shape them for the marketplace. Motown was the first
label to have an artist development unit, and you can
argue that maybe no label ever did it better than
Motown because instantly, if I named say Diana Ross, Marvin Gay,
Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder, I mean, you instantly conjured not
(18:58):
only who those artists are, but the music as well,
fifty sixty years after they started. And so that's what
we're really missing today because what's expected now for artists
is to develop themselves, to get themselves on social media,
to have that parasocial relationship with their audiences, and to
rack up impressions and numbers. It's a numbers game right now,
(19:18):
and getting attention has been the game for the last
twenty years or so, and that's a very different thing
than what it was in the past, for sure. I
mean today, if Aretha Franklin was starting her career, so
she would not only have to sing incredibly and write
songs incredibly and arrange them incredibly. But she'd also have
to be on social media half the day promoting herself,
(19:39):
you know, And that's a very different thing that we're
asking of artists.
Speaker 3 (20:15):
And now back to my conversation with music historian Jason King.
Anybody who knows me knows I'm a Jersey girl. I
am from Jersey. We love house music, we love disco.
I always say we are the epicenter. I know people
are gonna be upset because they go to say Chicago,
or they're gonna.
Speaker 2 (20:31):
Say Baltimore, But I just want to be very clear.
Speaker 3 (20:33):
Larry Levin and and them with Paradise Garage, New York,
but also was it in New Jersey?
Speaker 5 (20:39):
Okay, it can be. It can be many cities, It
could be, it can be multiple share it. Yes.
Speaker 3 (20:44):
But I always think about Sylvester because that's somebody that
my father used to play for us very often. My mother,
you know, would play for us a lot. His rendition
of you Are My Friend. My grandmother's favorite song by
patt le Bel was you Are My Friend. And so
that's a song I listened to regularly. It's in my
playlist that I'd probably listened to every single day.
Speaker 2 (21:03):
So two things.
Speaker 3 (21:04):
The first is, can you talk about like the connectedness
of music and artists in the business. And I say
this from the standpoint of you think of Patti LaBelle
and you like, oh, Patti LaBelle, But then you also
have to be like, background singer was Luther Vandross at
one point, who then became Luther Vandraws. Background singer was
Sylvester at one point, who then became Sylvester whose background
(21:27):
singers were Martha rog and Zora who then became the
weather Girl. And two tons of fun like can you
talk about like how connected the artist to who, like
the background artist is, and like that trajectory of them
finally making it to the main stage. And this also
plays into music documentary. Was it Twenty Feet from Stardom? Yeah,
(21:50):
the importance of music documentary in that sense.
Speaker 5 (21:52):
Sure, I mean I love Twenty Feet from Stardom.
Speaker 1 (21:55):
You know, I think the focus of that film, for
those who didn't see it, was on the history of
backround singers, particularly in these key moments fifty sixties seventies,
when arguably some of the greatest, most transformative artists came
to the forefront. But they weren't justified only by their
voice in themselves, but also by the instrumental lists who
(22:16):
played with them, and then by the background singers who
worked with them, who created these incredible, unbelievable tapestries of
sound behind these artists. And so you think of Aretha
Franklin in her golden period, you know, on Atlantic records
in the late sixties and the early seventies, for instance,
and you can't help but think of Sissy Houston with
Houston's mother, but you know, a brilliant singer in her
(22:40):
own rights from the gospel groups of Sweet Inspirations, and
who would go on to have her own solo career
as well, but who had sung for Elvis and sung
for Aretha, sung for Paul Simon, some of the great
artists of the time. And there's so many artists like that,
and the film tries to capture that world of background singers.
And then also I think to track a little bit,
(23:00):
you know, in terms of like what's happened to the
quality of background singers over time, because we don't have
people who have that level of prominence as much anymore,
and that's an unfortunate thing. But definitely there was a
path for some background singer, some of the great background
singers to go solo and to have their own solo careers.
So you think of somebody like us to see Houston,
for instance, who did have a solo career. But you
(23:22):
know Luther Vandros, he toiled for years as a background singer,
working for people like ROBERTA.
Speaker 5 (23:29):
Flack and others. ROBERTA. Flack actually fired him simply because
he was so good. She was like, yeah, to actually go.
Speaker 2 (23:35):
I read that article on that. I think it's so interesting.
Speaker 1 (23:38):
Yeah, And she did the same for Donnie Hathaway. And
they are all these kind of male singers who came
through her world that she helped move on to the
solo careers that would become transformative. And there's also a
lot of background singers who never made it as solo
artists because they didn't have the charisma or the connections
or the infrastructure and support from the industry to make it.
But those worlds were all connected, especially if we're talking
(23:58):
about R and B music instance, a lot of those
people knew each other, worked with each other, supported each other,
and loved each other and really wanted the best for
each other and so I think of somebody like Sylvester.
He eventually ended up singing on Aretha Franklin's Freeway of
Love that was produced by Narada Michael Walden, and part
(24:19):
of the reason he was able to do that was
because he had established himself as a solo artist at
that point. It was a dream of his and I
think it was Luthor. It might have been somebody else
in the industry who gave him that shot to be
able to sing backgrounds for Aretha. And so I think
those kinds of connections happen all the time. But you
look at Sylvester's background singers. He had the great Carl Hall,
(24:39):
one of the greatest gospel tenors in the history of music,
singing for him. Dolores Hall, amazing Broadway singer who'd do backgrounds.
Martha wash Izora Rhodes, who you mentioned, who came up
with him through the San Francisco scene in the early
nineteen seventies and then went on to their own success
as the Weather Girls with the song It's Raining Men.
The Hawkins Families background for Sylvester on a lot of tracks.
(25:02):
If you know, you know, if you don't, you don't,
I think that's part of the joy of music is
looking at all of these connections and networks and also
having an understanding of how this begat that and how
people influence each other, and how if you're listening to
it Aretha Franklin on her heyday, you're probably hearing Donnie
Hathaway on keys playing behind her, and so it behooves
(25:24):
you to learn as much as you can about all
of that because the quality of rich musicians who supported
each other and played on each other's records.
Speaker 3 (25:32):
Do you see that as something that the industry struggles
with today, Like they're just looking for, like who's the
hottest producer right now, who's the hottest sound right now,
and not focusing on like who knows this art for real?
For real and really should be part a part of
my project because it brings my project to life in
a different way.
Speaker 5 (25:50):
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (25:51):
I mean, I think a lot of different things are
happening in music, so I think they're part of it.
That has to do with the fact that the stakes
in music have changed so much. I mean, there's what
two hundred and something thousand songs per day being released,
you know, in platforms, and so at a certain level
you're trying to get heard through all of that traffic,
(26:11):
and probably one of the best ways to do that
is to just make something that's that is you and
that sounds like you, and that's distinctly what you're interested in.
And also, I think we're at a moment partly because
of the influence of YouTube and a lot of these
streaming platforms, which make so much of culture available to
us in a kind of push button way, like all
(26:33):
time periods and temporalities are available to us now. So
you know, that's why you see the rise of somebody
like an Adele, who to me is as a contemporary
sound but also an old school sound and covers Bob Dylan,
but also works with contemporary artists, and she can do
any of those things. I mean, Beyonce is covering Frankie
(26:53):
Beverly and Mays as much as she's doing anything contemporary.
Speaker 5 (26:56):
I see everything in her work. I see the.
Speaker 1 (26:57):
Samples of the Clark Sisters, you know, much as she's
working with the contemporary, younger dor artists. She's truly a
curator of her total sound, and that's really exciting. So
I think all of those kinds of things are happening
in music at the same time I love it.
Speaker 2 (27:17):
So I'm actually a question.
Speaker 3 (27:19):
This is something I've always wondered about, and it in
terms of like songwriting, Like how does one get into songwriting?
What is that process to becoming a songwriter.
Speaker 5 (27:31):
There's no one path to becoming a songwriter.
Speaker 1 (27:35):
Some people connect with somebody who's already in the industry,
and that person mentors them and helps them find their way,
and then they end up becoming a professional songwriter. Other
people are much more methodical about it. Perhaps they go
to school like USC Thornton and take a songwriting class.
Others might start down one path where they are aspiring
(27:58):
to be a performer and a singer, and then maybe
they learn more about the business and they realize a
lot of money can be made in songwriting, and in fact,
because there's often more revenue to be generated in songwriting
and production and being behind the scenes than there sometimes
is being on stage, and so that can be another path.
But there is unfortunately no single path or way to
(28:20):
becoming a songwriter. I always encourage anyone who wants to
be a songwriter to learn as much as possible about
the art and the craft and the discipline of being
a songwriter. Learn what a great song is versus a
good song versus a mediocre song. Learn music theory, learn
the components of what goes into writing a great song,
(28:40):
whether that is a melody or whether that's the rhythm track.
Are you approaching this as a top line writer where
you're going to be writing melodies for other people who
are making the music, or are you writing the chords?
What instrument are you composing on. There's lots of different
things to think about in ways to approach how you
might enter this world songwriting. But it does start, I think,
(29:02):
from having and understanding of the kinds of songs that
you like and the songs that have moved you and
that are transformative to you, and learning more about who
wrote those songs, discovering their discographies, learning as much about
them and their lives as possible. Yeah, and having someone
to emulate in that world that you feel like you
can I want that kind of a career for myself,
(29:23):
or I want to write those kinds of songs and
pursuing it that way. So no one way of doing it,
but many ways perfect.
Speaker 3 (29:32):
I tell people the same thing all the time, look
at the genre, look at it like when you're trying
to write. It's like, who's in that category, who's in
that space? What books have you read from that space?
What moved you about those books?
Speaker 2 (29:41):
But you know I've.
Speaker 3 (29:42):
Always wondered that, and so thank you because you're giving
a lot of wisdom today.
Speaker 1 (29:46):
Okay, well, you know a lot of people need to hear.
Everybody wants to be in music. You know, clearly not
everyone should be in music, but everybody wants to be
in music. But I always just say, if you're going
to do it, like be fully committed to it, and
be fully committed to being excellent.
Speaker 5 (30:03):
So whatever that means to you.
Speaker 1 (30:05):
And you know you're often having to define success on
your own terms, but strive for a level of excellence.
And so some of the people you know we're talking
about today, whether it's a Luther Vanros or Patty LaBelle
or Shaka Khan, I mean they literally define the standards
of excellence for their areas in a way that still
to this day. I mean, who sounds better than Luthor Andros,
(30:26):
Who's written better songs, who's made like nobody? They set
the level so high that it's been transformative for so
many generations to come. It's amazing that the number one
song right now has a sample of Luther Vanros and
Cherylnn doing If This World Were Minded so, and that's
decades after that song came out. So I do think
(30:47):
you have to strive for that level of excellence no
matter what you want to do. And you know, if
you want to write books like read Baldwin and read
like read the best.
Speaker 2 (30:58):
And be embarrassed about what you right after, but it's
okay because.
Speaker 5 (31:03):
Or not or not.
Speaker 1 (31:04):
I mean, how many people write like Joy Morrison, Like
nobody could write like.
Speaker 2 (31:08):
Nouey's gonna write like that.
Speaker 3 (31:09):
But I always tell people the first things you write
are usually terrible, and that's okay. Like I go back
and look at some of the old articles I wrote
and was like, why did they publish this? But it
was sharpening right and I had great editors who allowed
me the space to be bad to get better.
Speaker 5 (31:23):
Absolutely, the development process.
Speaker 2 (31:25):
It's the development process.
Speaker 3 (31:26):
What I love about what you have been talking about
today is artists development music theory.
Speaker 2 (31:30):
Go read, go learn.
Speaker 1 (31:33):
Go deep, go deep into it and be curious and
develop an intellectual curiosity, a creative curiosity. I mean, that's
one of the things that's definitely missing in this moment
right now, right that we live in. And it's weird
because we live in this moment of like info blood
right where there's just so much information that's available to us.
All we have to do is just reach into our pockets,
get our phones, and you can like find anything out.
(31:55):
Now we have ai chat ebt, like you have a concierge, literally,
and that can tell you anything you want to know.
Speaker 5 (32:01):
And yet people want to know nothing.
Speaker 1 (32:03):
They want to know less than nothing, it's like, and
the part of that has to do with the Internet
itself and the way that social media created these filter bubbles,
right that you live in a bubble of your own
self regard and information where you're not encouraged to actually
go outside of your comfort zone or to learn more.
And so we're so polarized right now as a culture,
(32:27):
partly because of the way that technology has siloed us,
but it has also made us far less intellectually curious
and far less willing to do the deep dives that
should be so available to everybody to do.
Speaker 5 (32:41):
And people should want to do those things.
Speaker 1 (32:42):
But let's face it, also today people don't even know
what facts are, They don't know what is true, they
don't know how to suss things out and to really
understand historical fact, and historical facts are also under attack.
Speaker 3 (32:56):
Frankly, so, yeah, lot with Jason's trying to tell y'all
there's work before you start work.
Speaker 2 (33:04):
It's true, like.
Speaker 1 (33:05):
Just preparation, right, is hugely important. But I even think
of somebody like a Beyonce because I saw her concert
Cowboy Carter Show twice last week. I went back. It
was so amazing. But part of the thing that really
gets me is that there's so much research and there's
so much preparation that goes into the work that she does.
And she also knows how to execute really really well,
(33:26):
because a lot of people don't know how to execute,
but she executes so well. But part of that is
because of the amount of preparation and then also the
research that goes into it. But the interesting thing is
her albums and her concerts and everything that she puts
out into the world of videos. It doesn't feel like research.
You feel it in your marrow and your bones. It's
(33:48):
like serving up your heartbeat. But you know that it
is the result of a deep amount of research, and
then what that invites you to do for like Renaissance
or Cowboy Carter for instance, is then to go back
and to engage in the kind of research that she's done,
but to figure it out for yourself. So you might
then go deep into the Clark sisters by listening to
(34:09):
Church Girl, or you might go deep into Donna Summer
and Georgia and Moroder and their relationship by listening to
Summer Renaissance, or you know, deep into the worlds of
country music and Linda Martel and all the people who
are referenced on Cowboy Carter. And that's a really powerful thing.
So I think research for a lot of people is
a scary thing, or it's something that is they solely
associate with academia. At least when I was coming up,
(34:31):
that's research was not a part of the conversation in
popular culture so much like an amazing dream.
Speaker 5 (34:37):
And now it really is and that's exciting.
Speaker 4 (34:40):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (34:50):
So something else you are not shy about is you
are very vocal about diversity, equity and inclusion. You are
also on the Hip Hop Council at the Kennedy Center
in DC. How hard has that become, especially with academia
under attack. We know we are living in anti intellectual
age right now, where they are attacking anything that is historical,
(35:15):
anything that is factual. So what is that thing that
pushes you to continue to be very vocal about what
you're not going to allow to happen and what you
stand for.
Speaker 1 (35:26):
I haven't changed anything at all ever. I am who
I am, and I'm doing the things that are meaningful
to me. And I'm also I have this project that
I'm interested in, which is making sure that people understand
the value of what it is to be a citizen
of the world and to be engaged in the world,
(35:47):
and to not treat other people with cruelty, to not
treat people in a way that is hierarchical, but that
everybody is equal, everybody deserves respect, everybody deserves an opportunity
to fully be themselves. And so part of the reason
(36:07):
that I'm so into music is because to me, music
offers us a blueprint to understand how to get there,
how to achieve the future that we want, how to
achieve a kind of wholeness. And that's through the aesthetics
of music itself, through collaboration, through all these collective configurations
that music uniquely makes possible, like jazz ensembles, or I
(36:29):
think of the complex structure of the Wu Tang clan
where it's an ensemble but then it's all these individual
members doing their thing or Brockhampton like. So, music to
me is a symbol or even a blueprint of the future.
And the great Nigerian band leader Falakuti, used to call
music the weapon of the future, and I think it
is in so many ways. And so that's part of
why I'm so attracted to music and studying music and
(36:51):
elevating music and being involved in music because it is
I think, producing a better world for us.
Speaker 5 (36:57):
And I'm so grateful to be in the arts in
this moment.
Speaker 1 (37:01):
Because it really the arts are so transformative, you know,
at the level of feeling emotion, not just logic and rationality,
although it does engage us there.
Speaker 5 (37:11):
Too, but it grips you.
Speaker 1 (37:13):
So when I go to an Aretha Franklin concert or
a siss A concert or Beyonce concert, it's those moments
where the hair stands up on the back of your
neck and you have that feeling of being engaged and transformed.
It's what James Baldwin would call the theater. He said
it was flesh and blood corroborating flesh and blood, the
performer and the audience formatting each other. So that, to
me is what I'm doing always. I'm trying to understand that,
(37:38):
elevate that, explain it to other people, and even make
my own music and make my own art that tries
to do the same kind of thing. In terms of
my work as a dean of a major music school,
nothing has changed. If anything, there are changes around language
and those sorts of things that are sort of required
(37:59):
in this moment where there are certain kinds of existential
threats to many institutions, But everything else to me is
just about staying the course and making sure that we're
committed to this work. It doesn't change because of who
might be in the office political administration. And I'm of
course inspired by the examples of all of these artists
(38:19):
who worked in the past in different countries under all
kinds of regimes that were not necessarily supportive of artists,
and they managed to get the work done even in
this country. I think of somebody like James Baldwin, for instance,
who was writing in the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties
at times that were really difficult, where there was lots
(38:39):
of repression going on, they managed to put work out
into the world that transformed the way that people think.
Or I think of an Audrey Lord, or I think
of a Bell Hooks, and I can just name, you know,
the many authors who did work and put intellectual thought
out into the world that was transformative and that people
could use as tools to be able to figure out
their future. Teaching a course in my previous institution on
(39:02):
world making, and in that course we're reading Octavia Butler
The Parable of the Sower, which is this incredibly prophetic book,
you know, prophetic novel about the times that we live
in and what it takes to strive and to create
a future for yourself where it seems like none is possible.
(39:23):
And I think that's the kind of writing, that's the
kind of work that we all need to return to
and really think about. Because she was writing this thirty
plus years ago in a different moment. But that is
the nature of what is great about art. It's like
a weapon that you can go back into the past
and dig and allow it to help you figure out
(39:45):
the current moment and to figure out what your future
can look like. And so for me, art is inherently optimistic,
it's inherently pointed to the future, and it's inherently something
that can offer us a path toward a better and
more inclusive and whole future.
Speaker 3 (40:15):
Now back to my conversation with Jason King. I know
it's almost time for us to wrap up, but we
do have one more just like real.
Speaker 2 (40:24):
Question, how's AI playing a role?
Speaker 3 (40:29):
Like I know for us, Like I'm in the writers
Guild and it's been a battle of like studios trying
to use AI for things, and we know if it
affects one industry, eventually it will get to publishing where
they are trying to use AI to write books and
they are trying to use AI to do songwriting. Are
you worried about the impact of it or are you
(40:51):
I don't know. Sometimes I'm like, like you said, soul
has heartbeat, and I feel like even if AI writes
something well, it can never write it like a person
who actually has experience as emotions.
Speaker 5 (41:01):
Sure, I mean it's going to get better.
Speaker 1 (41:03):
It's going to get to the point where people may
not be able to recognize the difference, and it's also
going to get to the point where people may not
care about the difference I think it's on us to
help identify what is human about music or theater or
dance or film or any of the things that we're
invested in that we describe as the product of a
(41:23):
human consciousness or a human body. So, on one hand,
I think AI is a very convenient tool. I mean,
human beings have long been looking for forms of convenience
and accessibility, and I think AI is just the latest
thing to come along to do that. Some of the
debates around AI remind me of the debates around the
drum machine in the nineteen seventies. The idea was that
(41:46):
the drum machine was going to replace all human drummers. No,
there would be no more human drummers needed since you
had a machine that you could press and make rhythms.
And that did not turn out to be the case.
We have great human drummers still, but we also have
a technologies that allow you to produce synthetic drums. And
then you have entire genres of music like hip hop
(42:07):
electronica that were created because of drum machines and other
sorts of technologies.
Speaker 5 (42:11):
So it can be a double edged sword.
Speaker 1 (42:14):
We also have human beings today, by the way, who
play like drum machines, that's the desires to play like
a quantized really you know, tight rhythm. But I think
in the context of AI, the thing that's really important
is to encourage people to use it as a creative tool,
and to encourage people to use it ethically and responsibly
in whatever field they might be using it in, because
(42:36):
it's very easy to cut corners and to sort of
cheat and to frankly just to become very lazy using it.
At the same time, I think it's important to teach
people about the value of their own labor, to teach
people about the value of their intellectual property, because a
lot of people don't even understand sometimes that the work
that they put out into the world, or the writing
(42:57):
or whatever it may be, is their own intellectual property
that has a subscribed value, economic value in this world.
So we need to shift toward an ownership economy where
people understand how to own their data, how to own
their IP, and how to frankly monetize their IP. And
we need to have a lot deeper conversations about labor
(43:18):
itself in this moment, and what is work and what
does it mean if a AI or a robot replaces
you in work, and should we be having conversations about
things like basic income and all kinds of ways of
supporting ourselves structurally as a society at a moment in
which lowage labor in particular is frankly under attack, and
(43:43):
I mean, the future for certain kinds of labor looks
extremely grim, and so we need to have these conversations.
And I, frankly I don't see them happening in a
mainstream way very much because we're dealing with so many
other things. But AI's here, It's here to stay, and
we're going to have to contend with it.
Speaker 3 (44:04):
But we always like to end two quick points. I
usually do a segment called George is tired this week.
I'm absolutely tired of these people on TikTok debating the
humane way to kill a crab. I have not seen
that a woman in Baltimore made a crab and an
air fryer and the crab was live, and it has
(44:24):
sparked such a humane controversy throughout the TikTok's bear. But
I think we have bigger issues than how people are
cooking crabs.
Speaker 2 (44:34):
Is there anything as you are tired of for the week?
Speaker 1 (44:41):
Well, I live in La, so I've been very tired
of Yeah, I've been very tired of the cold, the
relative chili weather in LA because I'm a recent transplant
to LA. But I have to say that the weather
has completely changed and now it's apparently super hot, so
we swing in all these different directions that are like,
you can never know what's going to happen for one
day to another. So that's super super mundane and a
(45:03):
small issue compared to the many issues that we face
on a daily basis. But sometimes the reality is you're
just think looking up at the weather and you're like,
what is today bringing me?
Speaker 3 (45:11):
Yes, I am also tired of the La weather. And
the final thing is do you have any words.
Speaker 2 (45:16):
To leave with anyone?
Speaker 3 (45:17):
I always say like mantras and things like that, they
really do help people get through hard days.
Speaker 1 (45:23):
Well, I always say, the three things that you really
need in order to live a successful life or what
you know, you might call the good life are one
self honesty, and I think you have to be ruthless
in self honesty in order to really move through this
world in a way that allows you to thrive. I
(45:44):
think the second thing is relentless self care. I think
you have to take care of yourself, mind, body, soul, spirit,
you name it. And by taking care of yourself, you
need to also take care of other people as well.
So community care I think is part of self care.
I don't think those things are separate. And then the
third thing is I think you need to have a
(46:04):
daily practice of goodwill towards other people. And if that's
just helping somebody across the street, or if it's just
doing one thing that is good to someone else, and
not just people, but also I would say all living things.
So there's the crab comes back into the conversation. But
practicing daily goodwill will change you and will change.
Speaker 5 (46:27):
The world over time.
Speaker 2 (46:28):
I love that. Well, Jayson, I want to thank you
for coming on fighting words.
Speaker 3 (46:32):
We appreciate all that you do and all of the
history and that you continue to put out in the world,
especially during a time where they're trying to erase it.
Speaker 5 (46:39):
Thank you, George. I really appreciate all the work that
you're doing.
Speaker 4 (46:42):
Thank you.
Speaker 3 (47:00):
So today's quote is from one of Jason and my
favorite singers and performers, Sylvester.
Speaker 2 (47:05):
Sylvester was largely done for a couple of.
Speaker 3 (47:07):
Disco hits in the late seventies, but he was also
an innovator in high NRG dance music and had a
second act in the eighties that was incredibly influential. In
nineteen eighty six, he appeared on The Jones River Show.
They were obviously fond of each other, and Sylvester thanks
her for being one of the first to join with
him and the gay community in raising AIDS awareness, so
(47:30):
he didn't seem put off When she asked him what
his parents thought when they found out he was going
to be a drag queen. Sylvester just laughed and said,
I'm not a drag queen. I'm Sylvester, and I think
that gets at something which is misunderstood about drag. To
the outside, it seems like a costume, a way of
being someone else, but in truth, it's all about self expression,
(47:52):
and part of Sylvester's legacy was that he refused.
Speaker 2 (47:54):
To be defined as just one thing.
Speaker 3 (47:58):
Two years later, Sylvester had AIDS himself, but that didn't
stop him from speaking out. He marched in the Castros
nineteen eighty eight gave Freedom Parade in a wheelchair, one
of the first celebrities.
Speaker 2 (48:08):
With AIDS not to hide the disease.
Speaker 3 (48:11):
By the time he died later that year, he had
become an icon in the community and showed the.
Speaker 2 (48:16):
Power of never hiding no matter what.
Speaker 3 (48:37):
Fighting Words is a production of iHeart Podcasts in partnership
with Best Case Studios. I'm Georgia Johnson. This episode was
produced by Charlotte Morley. Executive producers are myself and Twiggy
Puchi gar Song with Adam Pinks and.
Speaker 2 (48:51):
Brick Cats for Best Case Studios.
Speaker 3 (48:54):
The theme song was written and composed by Kovas, Bambianna
and Myself. Original music by Kovas. This episode was edited
and scored.
Speaker 2 (49:04):
By Max Michael Miller.
Speaker 3 (49:06):
Our ieart team is Ali Perry and Carl Ketel. Following
rap Fighting Words Wherever you get your Podcasts
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