La La Land (2016) dir. Damien Chazelle
i cant believe i had to sit in the theater watching Emma Stone “dance” to jazz music played by a white guy surrounded by black people faded into the background like????
shes still dancing off beat and horribly im so??
It really bothers me that people hate this movie? Like y'all really have THAT much hate that you’re going to shit on this movie. Dance is a form of entertainment. It was created because it’s fun! You don’t have to be good at dancing to dance. He was playing and she loves him. So she wanted to dance. That’s all this is. There’s no “white agenda” in it there’s no “white washing” to it there was TONS of black people in the movie. Sure not as the two main characters but you guys act like it was ALL white people.
It especially annoys me because I understand that Jazz was created by black people. There’s no denying that. But you guys act like y'all are keeping it alive…cause I’m sorry but that goes to the white folk. You guys almost entirely abandoned Jazz for Hip Hop! Which is fine! But stop trying to reclaim this genre that you left behind!
Jazz musicians pay homage to the black jazz geniuses ALL the time. They all know Jazz would be non existent without black people. But Jazz is not the face of Black culture anymore it’s Hip Hop and y'all can call me ignorant or anti-black as much as you want (cause I know that’s what is gonna happen) but please stop acting like white people are ruining Jazz or stealing it from you when you guys left it for Hip Hop.
What the hell are you talking about? American Jazz is still a predominantly Black genre, unlike Rock n Roll, a Black genre that somehow got skipped over in the “Black people abandoned Jazz for Hip Hop” theory.
Is that what La La Land teaches? Because it’s false. And it ignores the evolution of Black jazz into the modern day, that Black artists created jazz funk, fused jazz with electro first, and started Nu Jazz. Black artists are keeping jazz alive and constantly evolving it, not looking at it as some kind of rosy old-fashioned nostalgia.
This is what La La Land teaches. And as a Black musician, it bothered the everliving fuck out of me. Ryan Gosling’s character is portrayed as keeping jazz alive…by not adding any innovations to it whatsoever??? While John Legend’s character is treated like some kind of shill artist cause he modernizes and makes jazz-hip-hop fusion that actually appeals to people younger than ninety? But this is bad, cause he has sexy twerking backup singers, and jazz was never considered racy back in the day, and was always considered high art.
This is such bullshit, because at first white people thought jazz was all about sex, drugs, and crime and they called it actual, honest-to-goodness Evil-with-a-capital-E. They thought of Cab Calloway the same way they thought of Snoop Dogg. And after it had been around for a while, and they felt comfortable around it, they started appropriating it, watering it down, and acting like they were better at it than the people who created it. I have a record at home of King Olivier’s band, including Louis gotdamn Armstrong before he went solo, like these were the best of the best. And whatever white dude wrote the blurb on the back of the record case called them “the best of the Negro bands” as if that were some lower tier of jazz, as if to say, “they’re alright for Negros I guess.”
This, by the way, is the same process that happened to Rock n Roll, which evolved out of the blues, and therefore out of Negro spirituals and work songs, in the first place.
And, like what was already mentioned, Black people have been innovating and fusing jazz since we created it. If you want an explanation for why older jazz is considered elevator music (New Orleans jazz is my fave, btw) you can look to white people who sanitized it, and started treating it like classical music, like it’s this higher, classier form of entertainment for classy old people to go to the opera house to see, and which should never, ever be changed. The rose-colored nostalgia goggles are the reason why jazz is considered elevator music.
And @mamihlapinatapia, what you said is ignorant and anti-Black. It shows poor knowledge of jazz history, ignores the still-ongoing innovation of Black jazz artists, and dismisses both the white appropriation of jazz and La La Land’s glorification of it. We have every right to be pissed about it.
THIS RIGHT HERE👆👆👆👆
