Top 1200 African Music Quotes & Sayings - Page 3

First of all, the music that people call Latin or Spanish is really African. So Black people need to get the credit for that.

The treatment of African and African American culture in our education was no different from their treatment in Tarzan movies.

Even if I am French, I have African roots. Helping African sport to develop is something that is very important to me. If I can use my reputation or other means to help, then I will.

We’ve gone through the names—Negro, African American, African, Black. For me that’s an indication of a people still trying to find their identity. Who determines what is black?

Seriously though, my father was the first African American to sign a contract with the Metropolitan Opera so I grew up with classical music and jazz in the home all the time.

I come from an African Caribbean background. I've been influenced by a reggae church music style, contemporary gospel, and rock all fused together.

It's obvious that the rest of the world loves high African culture - African culture, period.

I wanted to show that an African-American artist could make it in this country on a national level in the graphic arts. I want to be a strong role model for my family and for other African Americans.

Anytime an African-American writes an unconventional novel, the writer gets compared to Ellison. But that's O.K. I am working in the African-American literary tradition. That's my aim and what I see as my mission.

Americans think African writers will write about the exotic, about wildlife, poverty, maybe AIDS. They come to Africa and African books with certain expectations.

I was always playing with whatever I could get under my hands, making rhythm with it, which was natural for me, because my parents were listening to a lot of African music.

It's very hard to grow up in the African American church and for music to not be in your veins. It's just part of the fabric of who we are as people, especially black musicians.

The 'Cheetah Generation' refers to the new and angry generation of young African graduates and professionals, who look at African issues and problems from a totally different and unique perspective.

It was very challenging, trying to add an orchestra on top of these traditional African rhythms, because as soon as you add any kind of melody or chords over it, it stops feeling African.

I didn't mind being in a school with a small African-American population. The African-American-community was very tight, and that was great. But I also wanted to interact with other types of folks.

I realized that you cannot think European and want to write or create something African. You have to think African in everything.

I only became an actor to get your attention, to challenge the archetype of an African American male; I can't be anything else in this lifetime than an African American man.

There's a history of enslaved African-Americans having to make their slave masters comfortable. This business of what we call skinning and grinning - that is something African-Americans are very much cognizant of.

I was in Paris last year, where there's a great appreciation of many different aspects of African culture and of black culture. The music... the art... whatever... And I kind of went with that.

The thing is: Yes, I'm white and yes, I love African music, and I can't do anything about it.

I have my mother who is an Irish-Italian, and my father who is African, so I have the taste buds of an Italian and the spice of an African.

I meet almost no one that goes to an African-American church or thinks, "I'm going to do that." Now there are whites in African-American churches. They're interracially married. They're highly committed. Maybe there's a professor or two, or a student.

The good and bad are all tangled up together. American popular music is loved around the world because of its African rhythm. But that wouldn't have happened if it wasn't for slavery.

I have a well-balanced show. It's 50/50 on men/women, and also African-American/white writers, it's the same thing. I have four African-American writers, and four non-African-American writers.

It is up to African leaders to show their will and political courage in order to assure that this new pan-African institution becomes an efficient instrument and not a place for endless discussions.

I read mostly Irish, African, Japanese, South American, and African writers. You can count on Scandinavian literature for a certain kind of darkness, a modern mythic style.

If I were to call it black music, that would be untrue. I don't know what that is, unless it would be some African drums or something.

I love my heritage! I have my mother, who is an Irish-Italian, and my father who is African, so I have the taste buds of an Italian and the spice of an African.

Not only are there African accomplices inside the imperialist system, but every African has a responsibility to understand the system and work for its overthrow.

In fact, the Harvard study data indicates that 70 percent of African American children attend schools that are predominately African American, about the same level as in 1968 when Dr. King died.

It is clear that we must find an African solution to our problems, and that this can only be found in African unity. Divided we are weak; united, Africa could become one of the greatest forces for good in the world.

Miles Davis was doing something inherently African, something that has to do with all forms of American music, not just jazz.

I can see quite clearly that if there was a single event that launched me on the road to ultimate involvement at the heart of South African politics, it was an assault on an African woman by her white employer in a kitchen in Fort Hare.

I find that people today tend to use them interchangeably. I use African-American, because I teach African Studies as well as African-American Studies, so it's easy, neat and convenient. But sometimes, when you're in a barber shop, somebody'll say, "Did you see what that Negro did?" A lot of people slip in and out of different terms effortlessly, and I don't think the thought police should be on patrol.

African-American music tends to have, at the very least, a glimmer of hope to it - sometimes full-fledged hope.

When I was a kid, I'd go to the African-American section in the bookstore, and I'd try and find African-American people I hadn't read before. So in that sense the category was useful to me. But it's not useful to me as I write. I don't sit down to write an African-American zombie story or an African-American story about elevators. I'm writing a story about elevators which happens to talk about race in different ways. Or I'm writing a zombie novel which doesn't have that much to do with being black in America. That novel is really about survival.

I do think, however, that there's a very diverse point of view in the African-American community. There's a lot of different voices that need to be heard. I don't claim and pretend to know the thoughts and opinions and ideas of all African-Americans.

I plan with the BBC African Player of the Year award to become an agent of hope and positive change in the lives of the millions of African youths who have lost hope and are deprived.

Jazz is really 20th-century fusion music. You take West African harmony and rhythm, mix with European harmony, and boom!

In L.A., I was a talent manager for many years. I represented many African-American actors. After a while, I became disheartened over the shortage of roles for African Americans.

My husband [Julius Tennon] and I started a production company. We've already optioned a book and some scripts to do exactly that, to create more complicated, multi-faceted roles for African-Americans, especially African-American females. I think it's important.

For me it's hard, especially being a young African-American woman. My dad doesn't look like what you might call the 'safe' African-American male that America would accept, if you know what I mean.

African narratives in the West, they proliferate. I really don't care anymore. I'm more interested in the stories we tell about ourselves - how, as a writer, I find that African writers have always been the curators of our humanity on this continent.

In a country that was still racially segregated and prejudiced, music was among the first domains in which African-Americans thrived alongside whites.

I was raised on African music, Harry Belafonte, and the Boston Pops. Then I got a dose of soul and hip-hop. I related to it immediately.

Most of all, I dislike this idea nowadays that if you're a black person in America, then you must be called African-American. Listen, I've visited Africa, and I've got news for everyone: I'm not an African.

There are some people who are happy to be African writers. They are pan-Africanists. I'm not a pan-Africanist. I think African countries have a lot in common. But we are also very different.

I can do an hour-long speech about Democrats taking African Americans for granted, and I'd have a line behind me of very prominent African-Americans who would say, 'Amen.'

Silence marks time, saturates and shapes African-American art. Silences structure our music, fill the spaces - point, counterpoint - of rhythm, cadence, phrasing.

As I said, the matter of the Pan African Parliament was raised with us by other African countries who said we should host.

I love all types of music - jazz, great pop music, world music and folk music - but the music I listen to most is piano music from the 18th, 19th and 20th century. Russian music in particular.

It may be changing, but still it's the one place, that total control of an institution, that African Americans have. So sometimes, you know, you'll hear the statement of African Americans saying, "I have to work with whites.

I've always thought of myself as an African-American comedian, African-American man, everything.

I live with one foot in the sand and one in the snow. There's European egocentricity, and the African opposite. I normally say that my African experience has made me a better European.

It saddens me that African Americans - when they express their pain, when they protest about police violence, when they question inequality, when they raise issues of bondage and discrimination - African Americans are seen as not patriotic.

What we are trying to do now, this new generation of African writers, is to write about what it is to be a human being living in a particular African country. These are stories that resonate with anyone, anywhere.

The central objective in decolonising the African mind is to overthrow the authority which alien traditions exercise over the African. This demands the dismantling of white supremacist beliefs, and the structures which uphold them, in every area of African life. It must be stressed, however, that decolonisation does not mean ignorance of foreign traditions; it simply means denial of their authority and withdrawal of allegiance from them.

There are so many families who do not come up in a traditional household. African Americans, Latins, and, I'm sure, whites as well, but there are a lot of men missing in African American communities and in Latin communities.

The Dr. King holiday is not just for black people, African-Americans or people of African descent.

What is most important is that the brand African cinema is going beyond African cinema.