On his book Secular Devotion: Afro-Latin Music and Imperial Jazz
Cover Interview of December 04, 2008
Editor’s note
Originally, this interview ran on the Rorotoko cover page under the headline
“Popular music is popular because it is influenced by neo-African religious practices.”
We highlighted two quotes.
On the first page:
“There is a scandalous fact underlying the largely negative images of Africa in today’s media: namely, that in the face of this wholesale dissing of the region, there is a massive African unconscious to everyday life and leisure.”
On the second:
“Only European classical music and jazz are ‘world’ music, for they are the only forms known everywhere as a result of first-world marketing muscle and military occupation.”
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
Editor’s note
Originally, this interview ran on the Rorotoko cover page under the headline
“Popular music is popular because it is influenced by neo-African religious practices.”
We highlighted two quotes.
On the first page:
“There is a scandalous fact underlying the largely negative images of Africa in today’s media: namely, that in the face of this wholesale dissing of the region, there is a massive African unconscious to everyday life and leisure.”
On the second:
“Only European classical music and jazz are ‘world’ music, for they are the only forms known everywhere as a result of first-world marketing muscle and military occupation.”