A Quote by Jasmine Cephas Jones

When people are feeling a bunch of feelings or there's something happening within the world, a lot of people get healing through music, or a lot of people's go-to entertainment to find some answers or understand something.
But music raises a lot of issues. Music is something that matters to people a lot, and they put a lot of passion into it. And I think when you have an area like that, you're gonna find a lot of issues coming up.
I can feel pretty critical of people, and I understand that sort of feeling of when you're going through something that's painful, taking it out on the world and projecting onto other people, finding faults with other people because it's harder to find faults in yourself.
I fell in love with books. Some people find beauty in music, some in painting, some in landscape, but I find it in words. By beauty, I mean the feeling you have suddenly glimpsed another world, or looked into a portal that reveals a kind of magic or romance out of which the world has been constructed, a feeling there is something more than the mundane, and a reason for our plodding.
L.A. is a big city that has a lot of music in it but is not necessarily known for it. A lot of musicians got lost in that. You can make a living; you can gig a lot within the city and never get out of it. That was something that me and my friends, our generation, were afraid of happening to us.
When I dabble in watching the news and reading about current events, I tend to get a future negative view, and that's something I've dealt with through music. It's quite possible I'm slightly paranoid. But I'd say making music is an expression of feelings of helplessness and lack of control that I think a lot of people can relate to.
I did not like that name "world music" in the beginning. I think that African music must get more respect than to be put in a ghetto like that. We have something to give to others. When you look to how African music is built, when you understand this kind of music, you can understand that a lot of all this modern music that you are hearing in the world has similarities to African music. It's like the origin of a lot of kinds of music.
I don't find a lot of people actually saying things through music any longer. They are not trying to say anything with their music, they just want to make money with it. I think it's important to actually say something real, something meaningful, rather than just write some trash and try to sell it.
I'm just willing to do a lot, take a lot, and force people into a fight. That's something a lot of people aren't ready to do. Some people are.
I love to dance. But I don't like being up in front of tons of people. I didn't have that in me to do it, the desire to be performing in front of a lot of people. If there's a lot of people on a set, I get nervous. So music just wasn't something I ever seriously considered.
I think I'm speaking for a bunch of girls when I say that the idea that feminism is completely natural and shouldn't even be something that people find mildly surprising. ...I find a lot of feminist reading quite confusing and that often there's a set of rules, and people will be like, 'Oh, this person isn't a true feminist because they don't embody this one thing,' and I don't know, often there is a lot of gray area that can be hard to navigate.
For me, there's a lot of intrinsic mystery and power in folk music, but a lot of people don't perceive that music from around the world as something that fits into their lives or their psyche in any way. So I tried to present it in a different way to give it more of a chance to sink into people's heads.
I don't like to veer away from the truth because I think that's what people have fallen in love with about my music. It's honest. I can't portray to you something that I've never been through or something I didn't watch someone close to me go through. It's the best way for people to get to me know.
People ask me many times, "Aren't you afraid you're going to scare people? Aren't you afraid you're going to make people feel bad about the human race?" I look at it as entirely the opposite. Something you can understand and identify should be less frightening than something you can't. And to understand that there are people who are capable of acting without conscience, without considering other people at all, explains a lot of things.
For me, writing music is a way of processing the world. It's not a concrete thing, as in, "This piece is about giraffes." It's much more of an emotional sort of thing. I want people to find something out about themselves through my music, something that was inaccessible before, something that they were suppressing, something that they couldn't really confront.
We live in an age of music for people who don't like music. The record industry discovered some time ago that there aren't that many people who actually like music. For a lot of people, music's annoying, or at the very least they don't need it. They discovered if they could sell music to a lot of those people, they could sell a lot more records.
I like the fact that a lot of people get to hear the music and I love performing with people cheering you on and you're feeling the love for what you're doing, but there's also the other side where if you give away as much personal information as I do it's hard not to take it personally when people are saying mean things about you. But I try not to read any comments. Right now I'm just feeling a lot of love.
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