Interview with Quincy Jones

JONES: Well, I do. I was raised in Chicago and I guess that was one of the special breeding grounds for gangsters of all colors. That was the Detroit of the gangster world. The car industry was thugs. Jesus, Capone, the Jones brothers, Twohey, Dillinger, everybody. But I think just watching it and being totally involved in it, with my kids and the music business and everything else and knowing all of the players almost, in a way it’s a — seems to be a subliminal way of, artificial way of protecting a manhood, of feeling the manhood. Because the rap attitude is, it’s a staggering. It’s like a gang thing really.

It reminds me so much of what Chicago used to be like when we were kids. They’d start to play the dozens, two opposing gangs start to play the dozens and the one that lost the rhythm, the rumble started. So that hasn’t really changed too much but I think the basic underlying elements have changed a lot.

Number one, it’s about you gotta get paid, I wanna get paid. Show me the money. Quick. I think that’s the governing force behind it because you’re in an era now where in the 60s they may have been dealing with pot and uppers and downers and LSD and so forth, you’re dealing with a designer drug now that goes back to commerce again. That is, designer drug that’s designed to take you up and leave you there for 15 minutes, the biggest high that heroin or cocaine ever dreamed about and snatch you out of it 15 minutes later and it costs $8 or something. It’s like McDonalds and it costs $8 to get back there. Everybody can play that game.

That’s why I probably favor a very unpopular view. I think drugs should be legalized tomorrow. I really do. It should be planned. I’m not saying it could be irresponsible, but everybody wants to get high in any strata of society is already doing it and what you would do is you would take, I would guess, $700 billion of cash and put it in a different place and you would stop 80% of the crime.Immediately. We can’t do it worse than we’re doing now. I just think probably too many government officials can use an extra million dollars a year to look the other way. It’s a very profitable thing. It’s huge.

And what is happening is if that is the psychological metaphor for the gangster’s condition, it still gives them no more control that they had before. It just appears that they are like the least of the — they reign on their own turf, and they control their own turf; but that’s a fallacy too. Because they really don’t. Because the supply of drugs are still controlled from the external force.

GATES: But you take a guy like Tupac. Middle class, very well educated. I heard you say yesterday how smart he was. Why is he dead?

JONES: Playing the game, and unfortunately, playing the gangster game is very profitable. It’s a strange, strange animal. MTV Raps. You are making entertainment out of something that is just probably the most negative aspect of what we are all about.

It’s been marketed very well. Between the films and the newspaper articles, the 6:00 news, etc., you would believe that the whole spectrum of black America is Boyz ‘N the Hood. It’s just a huge rainbow. I just met the director Ted Winship from Chicago. Brilliant kid. He’s dealing with another aspect of black society — with black alternative music and kids that are going to college and everything else.

There are so many colors in that rainbow but this fear is created because you are taking two or three percent of the population and making it the norm and making everybody think that everybody is like that so it gives everybody a great justification if they have even a seed of racism inside to just keep it up and so forth.

Not only that — on a platter they are handing them a favorite word — the big N word as though if we keep playing with it, it will press the button; and it won’t mean anything anymore like Lenny Bruce tried that. Like Richard Pryor tried that. Richard Pryor went to Africa and said, “I will never say that word again.” If you are handing it on a platter to a little 11 year old blue eyed, blonde kids from North Dakota and saying it’s OK. But back to the significant tone coming from Africa, it can be done affectionately. It can become straight from the heart where it is literally taken and meant and felt as what the world was invented for. It’s to be derogatory. It’s too much subjectivity out there to be that careless with the word.

I’ve had a lot of arguments with rappers about this. They think “it’s just a thang.” Just lay down like a lot of other things they say. I think that they’ll grow out of that though. I know most of the players, and they are having kids now. Ice T has a little kid. Ice Cube’s got kids. Maybe five or six. EZ E has kids. They all shift. I’ve got seven kids from three to forty three. I get every generation test market in my house. All the pure dynamics of every decade.

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