GATES: Are you optimistic about our people’s future?
JONES: Absolutely. When I come here [Harvard University], I get more optimistic because the knowledge has got to be revered and everything else and there were certain aspects of just….. to preserve our blackness, that’s the constant thing. It’s the rubber band, that pull to preserve the blackness and still grow.
You can’t get to the point of where you wear ignorance as a badge and think it’s OK to not know. It’s never cool not to know, and I tell the hip hoppers that all the time. We can’t afford to have a generation of kids that are so in the palms of such influence as the hip-hop generation has in terms of lifestyle, sensibility, body language, graphics, dance, music, slang, everything. We haven’t had that since the modern jazz. Rock and roll didn’t bring nothing to the table with slang. Far out. A couple of little like acid or something, but they used cool. They were still talking like the jazz musicians talked, spoke.
And the hip-hoppers brought in a whole other thing, which is, that’s valuable and it has to just be — it has to go to the right place and it is going to the right place. It’s evolving, it’s a constant embryonic stage and it’s mixed with serious politics of using the theater and drama of the climate of our–political climate of our country to make a lot of money. And they’re very talented dudes, man. Will Smith went from $20,000 to $20 million in six years. And Fresh Prince, he’s a triple A player. He’s a rapper. First rapper on television. We had to apologize for that when we were talking to the advertisers and Brandon Tartikoff said we have to let them know that it’s safe to check out a rapper on network TV and I’ve got seven kids, they’re into the hip-hop and stuff but they’re all right. And ten weeks later we were on the air.
GATES: Do you enjoy any part of your great life better than others? I mean of all your artistic endeavors, publishing, TV, making music, I mean do you have a favorite?
JONES: All of it. Just knowing that it’s working and once you find the right people in charge of it, and I feel that way about several of our divisions, that they really are on top of it and you just have to deal with the big buttons and so forth and they really have got it together and to me that’s big growth, to see that. And now I’ve got a record company now that they go everywhere together, 26 men strong. Everywhere. They were down in Palm Springs meeting and they stay in office till 12. Weekends, they’re with each other all the time. Kidada’s with the company now, and Mark Facade who’s a Harvard graduate, a brother from Harvard. And he was at RCA so he’s got the street, they have the ambidexterity to understand it all. Like Rashida now and all the kids. They don’t have any boxed in attitudes about anything. They’re wide open.
GATES: And that’s the future of our people.
JONES: I agree. I think so.
This Article First Appeared @http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/race/interviews/