when you literally have no knowledge of Duke Ellington or Ella Fitzgerald's lives or their music, or about the history surrounding jazz music in the 20th century https://twitter.com/NikkiMcR/status/1387511868646993921

Fun story! In 1955 when Fitzgerald was 38 & at the height of her popularity, she was arrested for performing at a nightclub in Houston. This was because it was a club that allowed white patrons as well as black, and her music was seen a too dangerous an influence on the former.

But, you know, arrested in a totally "bourgeois normalcy" way.

There were whole states where Ella was not allowed to play music in the 1960s.

Not the 1930s. The 1960s.

Another fun story! In 1963 radio personality & jazz fan Fred Robbins interviewed Ella where she gave the below quote. It as viewed as too radical and so the entire interview was shelved until 2018.

Harry Anslinger, the head of the FBN (th precursor to today's FBI) instructed the US government to hound Ellington (among others) for years, because of what Anslinger believed was a music that perverted wholesome morals. Ellington concerts were often raided by federal agents.

Anslinger claimed that Ellington's music used the sounds of “the jungles in the dead of night,” and that its sole purpose to “lure white women” into the beds of black men. The govt, in turn, asked the mainstream press to back the cause, and my goodness it did.

The Ladies Home Journal had articles saying music like Ellington's "caused brain cells to atrophy." Clubs near hospitals were shut down because possible expose to the music in maternity wards would damage infants and "[imperil] the happiness of future generations."

No less than Henry Ford pushed to have the music outlawed, on the basis that it was a Jewish plot to infect to bring down the morals of the nation with "Negro musical slush.”

And here's the thing, anti-hip hop fans: jazz *was* subversive, and if you werle someone who believed what most whites did from 1920-65, it *was* dangerous. And the people who excelled at it *did* come from the streets. (Ellington hustled pool while he taught himself music.)

Hip hop isn't the moral opposite of jazz. It's jazz's progeny. Everything you say about hip hop now, people exactly like you said about jazz 60 year ago and further back. The entire point of each, other than to make people move and sway, is to be subvert the system.