Journal of Popular Music Studies, Volume 22, Issue 4, Pages 416–435

The World According to Marsalis: Difference and

Sameness in Wynton Marsalis’s From the Plantation
to the Penitentiary
John Paul Meyers
University of Pennsylvania

You’ve got to speak the language the people are speaking

‘Specially when you see the havoc it’s wreaking
Even the rap game started out critiquing
Now it’s all about killing and freaking.
(Wynton Marsalis, lyrics to “Where Y’All At?”
from the album From the Plantation to the Penitentiary)

Ever since he appeared on the scene as a member of Art Blakey’s Jazz

Messengers in 1980, trumpeter Wynton Marsalis has been among the most
visible of contemporary jazz musicians, appearing on television, at awards
ceremonies, in advertisements, and on magazine covers. The jazz community
has never been at a loss for opinionated and talented individuals, but through
his frequent media appearances, his writings, his position as artistic director
of Jazz at Lincoln Center, and his guiding role as senior creative consultant
to Ken Burns’s 10-part PBS documentary Jazz, Marsalis has been tireless
as an advocate for the importance of jazz. He has been a custodian of its
history, a policeman of its boundaries, and a critic of its excesses, and
he is perhaps the most public of jazz’s public intellectuals.1 But while
Marsalis has often expressed strong political views in interviews, his 2007
album From the Plantation to the Penitentiary is one of only a few times
in his career when Marsalis has presented his critique of contemporary
American culture so self-consciously in his music itself—and not just in
his writings and public appearances. My essay will look briefly at the track
“Supercapitalism” and more thoroughly at the album’s most notable track,
“Where Y’All At?”—in which Marsalis performs his version of a “rap”—
in order to discuss how Marsalis goes about communicating his political
meaning and message in musical form and to examine Marsalis’s relationship

C 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
The World According to Marsalis 417

with other forms of black culture, particularly hip-hop. Ultimately, I suggest

that Marsalis’s political—and musical—critiques center around the question
of difference and sameness, and that his well-known dislike of hip-hop is
based at least as much on the ideology of difference that hip-hop represents
as it is on hip-hop’s supposed musical deficiencies. Rather than condemn
Marsalis for hewing to a narrow or conservative view of musical worth or
the jazz tradition, this article seeks to understand the roots of Marsalis’s
influential ideas and place them within the realm of other contemporary
black thinkers like Shelby Steele, John McWhorter, Bill Cosby, and, perhaps
most interestingly, Angela Davis.
Released on 6 March 2007 on Blue Note Records (a subsidiary
of EMI), From the Plantation to the Penitentiary is made up of seven
of Marsalis’s own original compositions, six of which are vocal tracks
featuring either vocalist Jennifer Sanon or Marsalis himself. As has been
customary on Marsalis’s albums, Marsalis himself does not write the liner
notes, but leaves any explanation or commentary such notes usually provide
to his close associate, the writer Stanley Crouch, who was also heavily
featured in Burns’s documentary and serves with Marsalis on the board
of Jazz at Lincoln Center. In the liner notes, Crouch praises Marsalis by
comparing him to famed early jazz trumpeter Buddy Bolden: “Like Bolden,
this contemporary son of New Orleans made a name for himself by ‘calling
the children home’” (Crouch 2007). Crouch also includes a long quotation
from Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address in his essay, perhaps
meaning to suggest that the “heroic and collective sense of democracy” that
he finds expressed in that speech can also be heard on the present recording.
The album cover features a painting by artist Jessica Benjamin depicting
a young black man wearing a thick yellow/gold-colored chain and staring
blankly ahead at the observer. The painting is titled Rapper (Tragedy) and
comes from Benjamin’s series of paintings The Americans; other equally
stark and provocative images from this series (such as Politician, General,
and Katrina Victim) are reproduced in the CD insert booklet. These two
elements of the packaging convey a sense of seriousness and importance
to the album, but still, Marsalis was not content to let the album artwork
by Benjamin, the liner notes by Crouch, the music, or its lyrics “speak for
themselves.” He made a number of media appearances—in venues as diverse
as The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, This Week with George Stephanopoulos,
the CBS Early Show, Jazz Times magazine, The Philadelphia Inquirer,
The Guardian, The Boston Herald, and The San Diego Union-Tribune—to
discuss, promote, and condition the reception of this album.2
418 John Paul Meyers

Marsalis is one of the few contemporary jazz musicians with much

name recognition outside of the jazz community, but a new release by him,
famous or controversial as he may be in jazz circles, does not usually receive
this kind of intense attention from the so-called “mainstream media,” which
largely ignores jazz. From the Plantation to the Penitentiary has received
such attention because Marsalis (and his publicity staff) have made it clear
that this record is not just a regular jazz album. The discourse both from
Marsalis and his journalistic interlocutors—not to mention the album title,
artwork, and liner notes discussed above—makes it clear that he intends
this album to be received as a major artistic and political statement, one
which addresses the current state of affairs in the United States, the plight
of African Americans, relations between men and women, and the failures
of the US government and the Bush administration from Katrina to Iraq to
Guantánamo Bay. Indeed, a full four months before the album was to be
released, the Associated Press had a brief story proclaiming its “political”
nature (Moody).
Marsalis has often voiced his opinions about the state of American
and African-American culture, but his critiques have usually been most
highly concentrated in his extra-musical production: for example, in the
interviews, writings, and television appearances that have made him, as
I noted above, one of the most visible figures in contemporary jazz.3
However, there are other instances, in addition to From the Plantation to
the Penitentiary, where Marsalis has addressed social and political issues
within his music itself, including, most notably, his Pulitzer Prize-winning
1995 oratorio about slavery, Blood on the Fields. But, as Eric Porter notes
in his discussion of Blood on the Fields, Marsalis presents slavery less as a
calculated injustice systematically perpetrated on people of African descent
than as both a personal tragedy for specific individuals sold into slavery and
a part of history that has universal relevance for all of humanity, regardless of
color or nationality.4 In the liner notes to the 1997 CD release of Blood on the
Fields, Stanley Crouch sums up this sentiment concisely with a quotation
from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick: “Who ain’t a slave?” Indeed, these
ideas of universalism and individuality, along with the eschewing of politics
based on identity and difference, form a key component of the social and
aesthetic philosophy of Crouch and Marsalis. These sentiments also find
expression in From the Plantation to the Penitentiary.
From the Plantation to the Penitentiary is perhaps Marsalis’s most
striking—and, as evidenced by the amount of media attention it has received,
his most high-profile—project mixing the political and the musical to date.
The World According to Marsalis 419

After thirty years in the public eye, Marsalis’s critique has stayed relatively
consistent. The musical, social, and political context of his critique, however,
certainly has changed, which is why his ideas are worth our attention again
now. Indeed, just the last few years have witnessed something of a sea change
in black cultural politics—the increasing visibility of black conservatives,
the backlash against the use of the word “nigger” in hip-hop led by Russell
Simmons, not to mention the election of Barack Obama, who declared his
candidacy for the presidency just one month before From the Plantation to
the Penitentiary was released—and Marsalis’s ideas take on new meaning
and relevance in this context.
Marsalis’s musical, political, and social views have been greatly
influenced by Stanley Crouch, Albert Murray, and Ralph Ellison, an
inheritance which has been widely discussed by scholars such as Eric Porter
and John Gennari. Marsalis believes strongly in the musical superiority of
acoustic jazz musicians relative to fusion, funk, rock, and hip-hop artists;
he colorfully describes the contemporary popular music scene as “Heavy
doses of bullshit made by nonmusicians” (Marsalis and Hinds 83). He sees
jazz musicians as providing an authentic—and not commercially co-opted
or exploitative—experience of African-American culture, which is to say,
for him, American culture. Hip-hop and funk musicians, along with the
musics they play, are dismissed because they are seen as not having adequate
technical skills. Hip-hop is especially singled out for critique by Marsalis
because of the misogyny and legacy of minstrelsy he hears and sees in it.
For example, Marsalis’s lyrics for From the Plantation to the Penitentiary’s
“Love and Broken Hearts,” before developing into a plea for conventional
gestures of romance, take time out to condemn several of what he views as
the worst aspects of hip-hop culture:

I ain’t your bitch I ain’t your ho,

And public niggerin’ has got to go.
Oh safari seekers and thug life coons,
You modern day minstrels and your songless tunes.

Marsalis argues for a vision of African-American culture that places

its geniuses and their works squarely within the American—indeed, the
Western or the global—mainstream. Hip-hop is most harshly damned
because, according to Marsalis, it exoticizes, minstrelizes, and “others”
African-American culture, for the consumption of blacks and whites
alike.
420 John Paul Meyers

Selected elements of the type of political critique Marsalis has

employed throughout his career appear in this album.5 He is aided in
transmitting this message by his decision to compose lyrics for the songs
that make up this album. Indeed, not only are there lyrics for six of the seven
tracks on the album, but these lyrics are re-printed in the liner notes for ease
of reference, one more layer of redundancy to make sure the listener gets
the message.

“Gimme that, Gimme this, Gimme that”

Marsalis makes little effort on five of the album’s six vocal tracks
(leaving aside the entirely instrumental track “Doin’ (Y)Our Thing) to match
the literal meaning of the lyrics to their musical setting. The text of the track
“Supercapitalism,” however, is about being overwhelmed with too many
possibilities, and the brisk tempo and staccato delivery by singer Jennifer
Sanon is certainly overwhelming. The style of presentation here is none
too subtle, but perhaps this is intended, for the sentiment conveyed is not
aiming at subtlety. As composer and lyricist, Marsalis presents us with a
musical portrait of a greedy person who cannot get enough of what he or she
wants—according to the song’s lyrics, “a lot of stuff, expensive fluff.” The
song’s middle-section lament, “There’s never enough,” is a modified slow
blues in 3/4 time, while its outer, repeated exhortations to “Gimme that,
Gimme this, Gimme that,” are musically presented here in rapid-fire
sixteenth notes at the already brisk tempo of 184 beats per minute. The
text-setting in “Supercapitalism” imitates what the text itself signifies: the
greedy person depicted by the lyrics—alternating between highs of manic
consumerist desire and lows of ennui when these purchases fail to satisfy—
might not sound very different at all from how Marsalis’s vocalist Jennifer
Sanon sounds here.
It may be useful to revisit the album’s cover painting by Jessica
Benjamin, Rapper (Tragedy), in light of the preceding discussion of the
track “Supercapitalism.” In email correspondence with the author, Benjamin
explained the creation of this cover image and its counterpart, Rapper
(Comedy), which is found inside the CD liner note booklet:

These images came from listening to the album and being aware
of Wynton’s ideas of the predominant commercial music scene that
exists in the United States and the propagation of stereotypes that
have been created to promote and sell product. In these two paintings
The World According to Marsalis 421

I wanted to depict this cultural stereotype specifically but since I

didn’t want the paintings to read as portraits I used two faces to
create an image of a person that does not exist.

The album cover of From the Plantation to the Penitentiary, Rapper

(Tragedy), is a composite image of a slave child and the rapper Method Man,
a meld which seems to suggest some sort of link between their two eras, a
link also posited with the first two lines of the album’s title track: “From the
plantation to the penitentiary/From the yassuh boss to the ghetto minstrelsy.”
Other commentators and critics have adopted this reading of the album cover,
suggesting that the painting “shows a young African-American man whose
gold neck chain seems to represent both a lust for bling and shackle that
can’t be broken” (Varga). In this reading, consumerism itself—particularly
the kind celebrated in hip-hop—acts as a kind of slave master.6
Both the album cover and the track “Supercapitalism” suggest
some kind of relationship between slavery and consumerism: the cover,
through its visual punning of a gold necklace and shackles, and the track,
through its musical depiction of a person enslaved by his or her desire for
consumer products. “Supercapitalism” is, in this regard, perhaps a rather
unremarkable example of word-music relations, but it is notable for being
one of a few instances on the album in which—to speak in reductive terms—
the content of the message transmitted (Marsalis’s critique of American
culture) is greatly influenced by the form of the message (the fact that it is
being transmitted not through ordinary speech or text but through musical
declamation). For other tracks on the album, the fact that the words are
presented in song is almost incidental; Marsalis could have published these
lyrics as poetry, as an essay, or as an op-ed, and little of their political message
would have been lost. Indeed, as I suggested above, it is mostly in newspaper
articles and interviews where Marsalis has previously expressed his political
and social views. In this paper, I am chiefly concerned with what happens
when he self-consciously chooses to express political and social views in a
musical context. It is only on “Supercapitalism”—in which the alternation
between passages of rapid, declamatory sixteenth notes and a slow blues
lament seems to mimic consumer desire—and “Where Y’All At?”—in
which the form of the song’s vocal delivery seems to very much be a part
of its message—that the unique signifying capabilities of music, whatever
they may be to each of us as listeners and performers, are exploited fully.7
422 John Paul Meyers

“It’s Rapping, But It Ain’t Hip-Hop”

“Where Y’All At?,” then, is perhaps the album’s most important
track in this regard, and certainly one of the most unusual performances in
recent jazz history. All of the album’s tracks are labeled on the CD’s back
cover with a description of their (sometimes multiple) feel(s). For example,
“Supercapitalism” is a “fast swing, Charleston, cha-cha, slow shuffle,” the
track “Find Me” is a “modern Habanera,” and “Doin’ (Y)Our Thing” is an
“alternating 2-beat country groove, soca, cumbia, swing.” “Where Y’All
At?” is described as a “2nd-line swing with Motown vamp,” but that
description misses what I take to be the most important formal element
of this piece: the fact that the text is not sung by Marsalis’s vocalist Jennifer
Sanon (who sings on all of the other vocal tracks on the album, including
“Supercapitalism”), but delivered in a “rap” by Marsalis himself.
The song alternates verses rapped by Marsalis with choruses
featuring a group-sung repeat of the title of the song, overdubbed with
Marsalis’s muted trumpet lines in a kind of call-and-response. This all takes
place over a simple, 4-bar bass riff in A-flat which underpins the entire song,
except for an 8-bar section in the middle. The song’s groove hardly changes
at all between verse and chorus, save for the addition of tambourine on
beats 1 and 3 in the chorus. This seems like hardly a coincidence, since the
tambourine is a strong sonic signifier of the black church and the chorus’s
group vocal aesthetic seems to be referencing the black church or black
folk expression more generally, as if Marsalis and his group represent the
“authentic” black community, calling out to “y’all” who have let them down.
Saxophonist Walter Blanding takes the song’s only extended improvised
solo, for 24 bars between verses and 9 and 10 and 8 more bars before the
final verse. This relative lack of instrumental solos marks something of a
departure for Marsalis; even the other tracks with vocals on this album all
devote ample space to solos. Their absence here suggests that the burden
of carrying the weight of the song rests more heavily on the words and
Marsalis’s performance of them.
Madrigalism or other conventional text-music relationships as such
are not at play in the text setting of “Where Y’All At?”—with the
possible exception of the song’s opening invocation, “You’ve got to
speak the language the people are speaking/’Specially when you see the
havoc it’s wreaking.” More interesting than the text-music relationships in
“Supercapitalism” is what rap music as a cultural practice—distinct from any
particular rap performance—signifies for Marsalis and what he would like
it to signify for his audience as well, especially vis-à-vis jazz. This is what
The World According to Marsalis 423

makes Marsalis’s rap so noteworthy, and perhaps is why many of the articles
about the album mention “Where Y’All At?”; indeed, nearly every reporter
he talked to while promoting the album asked him about it. In response
to these queries, Marsalis seems to have essentially the same conversation
with each interviewer—just like our contemporary media-savvy politicians,
Marsalis stays “on message,” and he clearly has his talking points down. The
interviewer poses a question similar to the one asked by the Philadelphia
Inquirer’s Dan DeLuca: “And yet, there’s a song on From the Plantation
called ‘Where Y’All At?’ on which you rap, or at least chant.” To which,
Marsalis will usually reply with a response similar to the one he gave to
John Lewis of The Guardian, “It’s rapping, but it ain’t hip-hop. It’s the kind
of rap we did in New Orleans back in the day. We called it juba juba, you
know, ‘My grandma said to your grandma/Iko iko uh nay.’”
This statement—“It’s rapping, but it ain’t hip-hop”—is of interest
here for two reasons. First, I would imagine that the reason most of Marsalis’s
interviewers have focused on this track is because it seems that, at least for
the duration of one song, Marsalis is going to try to speak a language he
has denounced as corrupt: rap. This mixing of jazz and hip-hop elements in
itself is no longer surprising, as open-minded jazz and hip-hop musicians
have been dabbling in each other’s realms at least since Quincy Jones’s
1989 album Back on the Block. However, Marsalis’s usage of rap techniques
is a strange and ironic gesture from someone whose distaste for popular
music and popular culture—particularly hip-hop culture and rap music—is
well-known and has been a consistent theme throughout his career.8 His rap
performance begins to look less strange when he insists that it is rooted in the
New Orleans cultural traditions of his youth and not in the globally pervasive
African-American musical practices (i.e., hip-hop) of his adulthood. But
then, we are left with the conflict between the opening lines of “Where Y’All
At?” and his statement that his performance is “rapping, but it ain’t hip-hop.”
What are we to make of the relationship between these two languages? How
is it possible for Marsalis to communicate in New Orleans rap and have it
understood by an audience that only knows contemporary hip-hop? Are they
mutually intelligible? Is “Where Y’All At?” communicating in one of these
languages, both, or neither?
These comments from Marsalis contradict or weaken the first two
lines of the song, the invocation I mentioned above: “You’ve got to speak
the language the people are speaking/’Specially when you see the havoc it’s
wreaking.” In these two lines, Marsalis seems to be justifying the musical
performance that follows. The language the people are speaking, whether
424 John Paul Meyers

Marsalis likes it or not, is hip-hop, but he will only speak it here because his
message is too important to be misunderstood. Not only that, but, according
to these lines from Marsalis, it is the language itself that is causing problems;
it is the thing that is wreaking havoc. So already in the first two lines of
the song, Marsalis has set up quite a complicated task for himself. Marsalis
is going to give us his message that hip-hop is dangerous in the very form
of hip-hop because hip-hop is a language that the community understands.
Indeed—no doubt to his chagrin—some of the very people that Marsalis is
ostensibly trying to reach have been termed by author Bakari Kitwana “the
hip-hop generation.”
Second, Marsalis’ statement “It’s rapping, but it ain’t hip-hop,” is
noteworthy because it mirrors a debate about the parentage of verbal art in
African-American culture that is taking place on the other side of the wall
from Marsalis, from the burgeoning field of hip-hop studies. Somewhat
prophetically, Tricia Rose, writing in her seminal 1994 book Black Noise,
warns against attempts to read rap (only) as a logical development out of
earlier forms of black expressive culture (such as oral poetry, the blues,
and jazz): forms that have recently gained some measure of legitimacy in
the academy and in the larger cultural world. To read jazz, the blues, or
oral poetic traditions into rap—however warranted—is often primarily a
legitimating gesture and only secondarily an argument about ancestry. We
should beware of these attempts to link rap to canonized genres, to “make
a lady out of” rap because of the very significant elements of rap these
accounts conveniently write out or gloss over. Rose argues:

In an attempt to rescue rap from its identity as postindustrial

commercial product and situate it in the history of respected black
cultural practices, many historical accounts of rap’s roots consider
it a direct extension of African-American oral, poetic, and protest
traditions, to which is it clearly and substantially indebted. . . .
Clearly, rap’s oral and protest roots, its use of toasting, signifying,
boasting, and black folklore are vitally important; however these
influences are only one facet of the context for rap’s emergence.
Rap’s primary context for development is hip-hop culture, the
Afrodiasporic traditions it extends and revises, and the New York
urban terrain in the 1970s. (25–26).

It is important, then, for scholars like Rose to locate the origins

of rap in a specific political, postindustrial, and commercial environment
The World According to Marsalis 425

and not as (exclusively) the organic outgrowth of earlier African American

folk traditions, such as Marsalis’s New Orleans rap. However, this position
has by no means been unanimously accepted either within the academy or
outside it. Other scholars (e.g., Ramsey) have preferred to draw connections
between black American musical styles in the twentieth century, focusing
on the continuities in production and reception of these styles rather than
on constructing boundaries between them. Such scholars are perhaps taking
their cue from Amiri Baraka, who viewed the seemingly disparate genres
of R&B and avant garde jazz as participating in what he termed “the
changing same” (Baraka 180–211). Indeed, some recent scholarship has
re-asserted the link between earlier black traditions and contemporary rap.
Kyra Gaunt’s study of musical children’s games, The Games Black Girls
Play, argues: “Handclapping games often feature a melodic tune, or chanted
lyrics, that resemble an approach to rapping not only prominent in hip-hop
culture, but one that has existed in African American music-making since
slavery” (Gaunt 21). Even Rose, while arguing for a view of hip-hop that
sees it as coming out of the utterly unique postindustrial environment of
New York in the 1970s, also urges us to hold onto “the necessary tension
between the historical specificity of hip-hop’s emergence and the points of
continuity between hip-hop and several Afrodiasporic forms, traditions, and
practices” (Rose 25).9 Marsalis himself is perhaps an unwitting participant
in this debate by asserting a strict separation between contemporary hip-
hop and the vocal technique he uses on “Where Y’All At?” which is,
in his words, “rapping, but it ain’t hip-hop.” However, Marsalis’s most
important difference with these academics is in the relatively positive views
of many forms of African-American popular music these scholars express,
including both jazz and hip-hop, a pluralism that Marsalis does not share.
The consequences of Marsalis’s position against hip-hop are significant, for
if jazz signifies a particular version of democracy, “a heroic and collective
sense of democracy,” in Stanley Crouch’s words, what is rap to signify?

Difference and Sameness

Marsalis and his intellectual forebears (Crouch, Murray, and Ellison,
primarily) view African-American culture as an integral part of larger
American culture.10 For all four of these men, jazz music in particular
assumes a privileged place in their writing and thought as something born
out of a unique African-American experience but that has now transcended
those roots to become an art form with relevance for all Americans, indeed
426 John Paul Meyers

for all of humanity. It should also be noted here that just as Marsalis has been
influenced by Ellison, Murray, and Crouch, these men in turn can be seen as
participants in a debate about the proper content and place of black art that
stretches back, at least, to the early decades of the twentieth century and to
the ideas of figures as diverse as W.E.B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, Langston
Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston.11 Marsalis and Crouch, roughly speaking,
can be seen as the intellectual descendants of the aesthetic thought of Locke
and Du Bois, thinkers who valued the “elevation” of black high cultural
forms over and against folk and popular art. In the contemporary iteration
of this view as subscribed to by Marsalis and Crouch, jazz is claimed to be
universal, uncorrupted, and culturally-rooted while rap music, on the other
hand, is viewed as all that is parochial, provincial, commercial, and rootless
in black America.
But most importantly, I would argue that their opposition to rap is
based on the question of difference and otherness. Eric Porter notes that
Albert Murray’s book The Omni-Americans argues specifically against
people or policies which “exaggerate ethnic differences and distance black
people from the American mainstream” (Porter 294). This is an important
point which leads to a common thread in the political and aesthetic thought of
Murray, Ellison, Crouch, and Marsalis: these men live in a liberal humanist
world where specific ethnic experiences can be mined for art’s sake, but all
people, regardless of their background or upbringing, have the opportunity
to create and appreciate works on the same elevated plane of pure aesthetic
experience. This is where Crouch’s notion of a “heroic and collective sense
of democracy” takes artistic shape, for under this vision, ideal works of art
are those created by “geniuses” or “heroes” but have universal relevance
for all of mankind.12 An irony must be noted here: men so committed to
being prophets (and, indeed, exponents) of an African-American/American
sensibility are, in fact, heavily indebted to a nineteenth-century European
ideology of individual genius. It is perhaps no surprise, then, that Marsalis
and Crouch have found such a comfortable home at Lincoln Center, for
their aesthetic philosophy of jazz is similar to that which has traditionally
underpinned the performance and reception of European classical music.13
Theirs is what I would term an ideology of sameness and equality:
an ideology that posits that we are all the same and governed by the same
set of objective universal standards and rules, be they aesthetic or legal.
Perhaps this is why hip-hop has been such a persistent target for Marsalis
and Crouch, for nothing is more threatening to an ideology which posits
universal humanity and sameness than the sign of difference and otherness.
The World According to Marsalis 427

Rap presents a world that is “other” than and “different” from the world
conjured by Marsalis and company, and I would argue that they perceive it as
dangerous and have spent so much time and energy to critique it not because
of its formal qualities or alleged aesthetic failings, not because it is “bullshit
made by nonmusicians,” but because it presents a vision of black America
that is antithetical to their own. In contrast to their vision of aesthetic uni-
versalism, hip-hop is a music which constantly re-asserts its connections to
local histories and networks and its refusal to abide by “universal” (read: Eu-
rocentric) standards.14 Yet hip-hop today finds itself, paradoxically, far more
universally popular than the music championed by Ellison, Murray, Crouch,
and Marsalis. Against the criticism of consumerism found in the track
“Supercapitalism,” hip-hop is a world of Benjamins, bling, and black Lincoln
Navigators. Alternately, it is a world of ethnic pride, music-inspired agitation
against racial injustices, and stinging critique of the white-dominated power
structure from a position outside of or alienated from it. Whichever scenario
fits your own personal views of rap music, the hip-hop movement, and
black culture in general, it is decidedly a long distance from here to the
mainstream America of which Marsalis, Crouch, Murray, and Ellison claim
African Americans are rightfully full citizens and co-equal partners.15
It is surprising, then, that Marsalis has given the seemingly radical
title of From the Plantation to the Penitentiary to this release, especially
since the title calls to mind the work of Angela Davis, the black radical
philosopher and activist. Davis has been studying, writing, and lecturing
about prisons for several decades now, following her own imprisonment
in 1970. Most importantly for our discussion here of From the Plantation
to the Penitentiary, Davis has recently focused her attention on the links
between slavery and the contemporary American penal system in which,
according to a 2008 report from the Pew Center, blacks are nearly seven
times as likely as whites to be incarcerated and black males between the
ages of 20 and 39 are ten times as likely as their white male counterparts to
be in prison. In Davis’s analysis, people of color, particularly young black
men, are the surplus population of global capitalism. Since capitalism does
not have a place for them, they are put in prison. The modern American
penal system—especially the death penalty—can be seen as an extension of
slavery in that it is a technology of control and punishment far more likely
to ensnare people of color than whites. In a recent interview collected in
the book Abolition Democracy, Davis, who ran for vice president on the
Communist Party ticket in 1980 and 1984, presents a Marxist-influenced
428 John Paul Meyers

take on the same social realities that inspired the title—From the Plantation
to the Penitentiary—of Marsalis’s album:

There is a direct connection with slavery: when slavery was

abolished, black people were set free, but they lacked access to
the material resources that would enable them to fashion new, free
lives. Prisons have thrived over the last century precisely because
of the absence of those resources and the persistence of some of
the deep structures of slavery. They cannot, therefore, be eliminated
unless new institutions and resources are made available to those
communities that provide, in large part, the human beings that make
up the prison population (Davis 96–97).

Marsalis and Davis may both see a link between slavery and the
contemporary incarceration of blacks in the United States, but if Marsalis
is vague about how we have reached such a position, Davis is not. Indeed,
the same ideas of universalism and liberal individualism that Marsalis and
Crouch are championing as liberating in the aesthetic realm are, for Davis,
the very opposite of liberating in the judicial system. Davis argues explicitly
against what I earlier termed the ideology of sameness, the ideology which is
now enshrined in our civil rights laws and forms a key part of the American
democracy, to which paeans flow freely from the pen of Crouch and the
trumpet of Marsalis. Against this vision, Davis writes:

The grand achievement of civil rights was to purge the law of its
references to specific kinds of bodies, thus enabling racial equality
before the law. But at the same time this process enabled racial
inequality in the sense that the law was deprived of its capacity to
acknowledge people as being racialized, as coming from racialized
communities. Because the person that stands before the law is an
abstract, rights-bearing subject, the law is unable to apprehend the
unjust social realities in which many people live (Davis 93).

How then are we to place what Marsalis is up to here in the context

of other thinkers about contemporary black social realities or in the context
of general political debates in the United States? The critiques mounted here
by Marsalis are hard to pin down and place on the political spectrum, on our
right and left wings, on our now-ubiquitous map of red and blue states. In
some sense, it is very simply a conservative critique, a critique that looks
The World According to Marsalis 429

at the contemporary situation and laments that society has been degraded
and encourages us to hold on to what we still retain from the values of the
past. Similar to black conservatives Shelby Steele and John McWhorter,
both of whom use their status as respected intellectuals (Steele as a senior
fellow at the Hoover Institution and McWhorter as a professor of linguistics
and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute) to gain an audience for their
critiques of contemporary African-American culture, Marsalis has used his
prestige as a well-known jazz musician and head of Jazz at Lincoln Center
to issue negative proclamations about hip-hop’s musical characteristics and
cultural stance. Marsalis’s critiques also echo those of Bill Cosby, whose
decades as a beloved actor and comedian may have been overshadowed by his
recent harsh attacks on the black lower class. Michael Eric Dyson describes
Cosby as a member of the “Afristocracy,” a group he defines as being made
up of “upper-middle-class blacks and the black elite who rain down fire
and brimstone upon poor blacks for their deviance and pathology, and for
their lack of couth and culture” (xiii–xiv). On this album and throughout
his career, this definition would apply equally well to Marsalis. Indeed,
Marsalis does Cosby one better, proclaiming, “I was speaking out about it
long before Bill Cosby” on the cover of the April 2007 issue of Jazz Times,
an issue which came out right as From the Plantation to the Penitentiary
was being released. It makes sense that many of these contemporary attacks
on the black lower class have persistently targeted musical expression for,
as Ramsey argues:

Public activities like entertainment (especially musical performance)

have historically constituted an arena of diligent moral surveil-
lance. . . . Historically, the black middle class has leveled the most
sustained (but by no means exclusive) critique of black expressive
culture in this regard. It sought for much of the twentieth century to
shape and reshape the broader American public’s images of African
American people and their cultural practices. (44)

Significantly, the conservative tone of From the Plantation to the

Penitentiary differentiates it from earlier jazz protest albums such as Max
Roach’s Freedom Now Suite and Don Byron’s Nu Blaxploitation, albums
which decried racism and can be seen as attacks on the dominant power
structure in unambiguous terms. But at times, Marsalis is deeply skeptical
of conservatism, at least as it manifests itself today in the Republican party.
“It all can’t be blamed on the party of Lincoln,” he raps in “Where Y’All
430 John Paul Meyers

At?” Yet later in the song, he includes a critique of the handling of the “war
on terror” by the Bush administration: “We runnin’ all over the world with
a blunderbuss/And the Constitution all but forgot in the fuss.” And while
the lyrics seem to support tenets of supply-side economics (“Taxes, that’s
your real inalienable right,” he raps), it would also be incredibly difficult for
Marsalis, a native of New Orleans, not to criticize the Bush administration
and its bungling of Hurricane Katrina.16 However, Marsalis is certainly no
liberal, either. While addressing feminists, Marsalis raps: “I guess you’d
pimp your daughters if you had your druthers,” and, earlier in the track, he
expresses his dissatisfaction with the leadership of “60s radicals and world
beaters/Righteous revolutionaries and Camus readers/Liberal students and
equal rights pleaders”—in other words, people like Angela Davis.
I would like to suggest that Marsalis’s politics as presented in From
the Plantation to the Penitentiary and throughout his career are not best
described in the usual Manichean sense that sees left and right, red states and
blue states, conservative and liberal as antithetically opposed to each other.
Both of these ideologies, at least as manifested in contemporary American
political discourse, still admit to otherness and difference. Indeed, however
much they might disagree philosophically, liberals and conservatives both
use difference and otherness as key elements of their political and rhetorical
strategies. In the increasingly polarized political climate of the United
States and in the “Us vs. Them” rhetoric that characterized much political
debate after the 9/11 attacks, Marsalis and his listeners are perhaps all
too aware of difference and otherness. But in Marsalis’s vision, our varied
ethnic, religious, and political differences dissolve in the face of our
shared humanity and our shared acknowledgement of aesthetic genius that
transcends boundaries of race, time, and genre: genius that is, as is said of
Duke Ellington, “beyond category.” Marsalis, throughout his career and in
From the Plantation to the Penitentiary in particular, presents us with an
attractive world, no doubt, but it would be all the more livable if only we
could stop the rattle of our ceiling from that damned racket of otherness and
difference, pounding from the subwoofers of the neighbors upstairs.

Acknowledgments
Several colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania read and offered
insightful comments on earlier versions of this essay, including Guthrie
Ramsey, Gary Tomlinson, Timothy Rommen, Jennifer Ryan, and Matthew
Valnes. The editorial advice of my wife Catharine Fairbairn was also
invaluable.
The World According to Marsalis 431

Notes
1. That jazz musicians function as public intellectuals has received its most
extensive discussion in Eric Porter’s What Is This Thing Called Jazz? African
American Musicians as Artists, Critics, and Activists.
2. The album was also extensively reviewed in the media. See, for example,
Chinen, Francis, Davis, Garelick, and Reich. For a perceptive review of this album
by an academic, see Givan.
3. For a classic example of Marsalis passionately articulating his ideas about
music and society in an interview, see Zabor and Gambarini.
4. See Porter: 287–334.
5. Another example of Marsalis using his music to express specific social
or political ideas might be his 1985 album Black Codes (From the Underground).
However, unlike Blood on the Fields or From the Plantation to the Penitentiary,
Black Codes (From the Underground) is an entirely instrumental album, and the
social and political relevance of the album has to be read mostly from the liner
notes by Stanley Crouch and the quotations from Marsalis they contain.
6. Several critics have mentioned that Marsalis’s denunciation of materi-
alism in “Supercapitalism” is a bit hypocritical. The new Jazz at Lincoln Center
complex sits atop a mall of high-end shops, and Marsalis himself is featured in
advertisements for pricey Movado watches.
7. There is also an obvious relationship between the words and music of
the track “Love and Broken Hearts.” The lyrics state, “It’s time for the return of
romance/It’s time for you and me to slow dance,” and the music obliges with a
suitable accompaniment.
8. For example, Marsalis’s books Sweet Swing Blues on the Road, Letters
to a Young Jazz Musician, Jazz in the Bittersweet Blues of Life, and Moving to a
Higher Ground all contain passages critical of hip-hop.
9. One of the benefits of Rose’s focus on the specific 1970s origins of
hip-hop is that it draws our attention to the key presence of Jamaican immigrants
and Latinos—in addition to African Americans—in the New York community that
produced hip-hop. For more on this topic, see Rivera and Chang.
10. Key sources for the musical and social thoughts of Crouch, Murray, and
Ellison include: Crouch (2006), Murray (1970, 1976, 1996) and Ellison (2001).
11. These early twentieth century debates over the place of black music have
been much discussed in scholarly literature, see especially Floyd and Anderson.
432 John Paul Meyers

These debates also receive coverage in more general discussions of the period by
Ann Douglas and David Levering Lewis.
12. In fact, books by Murray (The Hero and the Blues) and Crouch
(Considering Genius: Writings on Jazz) engage this set of ideas even in their
titles.
13. See Janet Wolff’s essay “The Ideology of Autonomous Art” and Scott
Burnham’s Beethoven Hero for further discussion of how this ideology works in
European classical music.
14. On the topic of localism in hip-hop, see Rose’s insistence (quoted above)
on grounding rap in the specific context of postindustrial New York and Murray
Forman’s The ’Hood Comes First: Race, Space, and Place in Rap and Hip-Hop.
15. Indeed, Marsalis and company have walked a fine line, attempting
to balance their universalist rhetoric about the power, importance, and relevance
of jazz with a rather strictly defined male African-American exceptionalism—
particularly in their programming and hiring decisions for Jazz at Lincoln Center,
which have been criticized by a number of white critics, avant garde musicians,
and feminist writers (see Pellegrinelli).
16. On this topic, it is certainly unlikely that Jessica Benjamin’s usage of
Dick Cheney and former FEMA director Michael Brown as the basis for her
painting “Politician” (reproduced in the album liner notes) is meant to evoke
positive connotations.

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