A Quote by Jess Row

I was relatively isolated from people of color. My parents are too old to be Baby Boomers; they had me later in life. So we didn't listen to any black music at all in the house, not even Ben E. King.
Well, I was a real late-comer to listen to music, actually, because my parents - first of all, my parents weren't big music fans. They didn't listen to music. We didn't really listen to stuff in the house.
I'm not really up on what's new. I'm still listening to Run DMC twenty-five years later. In the same way that the baby-boomers in America were forcing '60s music and Motown down our throats, now people of my generation are forcing Tears For Fears and old Hip Hop upon others.
Merely because I was black, it seemed, I was supposed to listen to Hugh Maskela instead of Carole King, just as I was expected to be a radical, not a conservative. I no longer cared to play that game ... The black people I knew came from different places and backgrounds - social, economic, even ethnic - yet the color of our skin was somehow supposed to make us identical in spite of our differences. I didn't buy it. Of course we had all experienced racism in one way or another, but that did not mean we had to think alike
My audience is the baby-boomers, the bulk of the population. This is also a group that is being ignored by most record companies because they're not the Top 40 hit singles market. They forget these people still listen to music.
Yes, and when I had Aaron, he left me, and I didn't know how to raise a child. And I wasn't close to my parents, and because I was too proud to go to my parents for help, I mistreated that little baby. I didn't want a baby.
Black is the absence of all color. White is the presence of all colors. I suppose life must be one or the other. On the whole, though, I think I would prefer color to its absence. But then black does add depth and texture to color. Perhaps certain shades of gray are necessary to a complete palette. Even unrelieved black. Ah, a deep philosophical question. Is black necessary to life, even a happy life? Could we ever be happy if we did not at least occasionally experience misery?
It's old white ladies, old black ladies, old black men, who don't even listen. Everyone else, everyone who understands, likes Snoop Dogg. They like my music.
I got a naughty thrill out of listening to music that was that dirty, especially being that young and able to listen to it around my parents. Kids would come over to my house to listen to Too $hort records.
I started my own business because my parents had no dowry for me, and I was worried. I ran it from their Martha Vineyard's summer house. I baby-sat for a 14-year-old boy all summer and was giving him time-outs, even though I was two years younger than him.
...they told me of color, that it was an illusion of the eye, an event in the perceiver's mind, not in the object; they told me that color had no reality; indeed, they told me that color did not inhere in a physical body any more than pain was in a needle. And then they imprisoned me in darkness; and though there was no color there, I still was black, and they still were white; and for that, they bound and gagged me.
Brown people and black people and red people swarmed through our great halls, until those who were white looked simply faded-out human beings beside them. Indeed, I came to see that white is not a color in skin any more than in textiles, and if it had not quality, it had no value even for humanity. I saw that color in skin had a certain advantage in strength and warmth as a means of beauty.
I probably like being isolated more than many people do, but I'm lucky to have the friendship of many fine people, and they keep me from becoming very isolated. The world of my mind is certainly a populated and warm place, too. It's difficult for me to become too isolated with such resources.
I'm so jealous of my friends who came from these super musical households where they were learning piano at three years old. My parents didn't really play loads of music around the house. We had the radio, but they weren't teaching me about music.
I've had a ranch house my whole life, so we'd go down there, be in nature, and just listen to country music. For me, it's very relaxing. When I hear it while I'm traveling or wherever I am, even working, it just mellows me out and brings me back home... It's comforting.
I'm very much inspired by the Latin music, especially the romantic boleros. Not that when I sit to write a play I listen to boleros. But I think it's part of my DNA, it's part of my upbringing. I grew up in a house where this is the kind of music my parents used to listen to. This is the kind of music I would even hear in my neighborhood. I think that sort of romanticism is part of the culture.
If you force me to pick one color, it'd be Black... It covers up the things inside of me that I don't want to be known. Well, for the same reason, black is the color I hate, too.
This site uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience. More info...
Got it!