The Tight Rope

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As we navigate the balance between hope and uncertainty, we invite you to join Dr. Cornel West & Professor Tricia Rose on The Tight Rope, a weekly program where we welcome listeners and guests as thought collaborators. The Tight Rope is rich in creative, unfiltered dialogue on topics ranging from culture, art, and music to the contours of systemic racism, philosophy, the power of Socratic self-examination, and the possibilities of a peaceful and just world. Our innovative and interactive format will highlight the professors’ combined expertise to encourage critical thinking, self-reflection, and human connection as we navigate The Tight Rope.

Episodes

Thursday Jul 23, 2020

Purple Rain: Prince's Legacy Lives On

Thursday Jul 23, 2020

Episode Summary

Dr. Cornel West and Professor Tricia Rose unravel the Black pain of the present in the context of the tremendous legacy of African American creativity and music, in this special extended version of Office Hours. They connect Black musical tradition to the current political moment and pay special homage to Prince and his iconic “Purple Rain.” Discover how you can transform this current moment in this important episode of The Tight Rope.

Cornel West

Dr. Cornel West is Professor of the Practice of Public Philosophy at Harvard University. A prominent democratic intellectual, social critic, and political activist, West also serves as Professor Emeritus at Princeton University. He graduated Magna Cum Laude from Harvard in three years and obtained his M.A. and Ph.D. in Philosophy at Princeton. West has authored 20 books and edited 13. Most known for Race Matters and Democracy Matters, and his memoir, Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud, West appears frequently on the Bill Maher Show, CNN, C-Span, and Democracy Now. West has appeared in over 25 documentaries and films, including Examined Life, and is the creator of three spoken word albums including Never Forget, featuring Prince. West brings his focus on the role of race, gender, and class in American society to The Tight Rope podcast.

Tricia Rose

Professor Tricia Rose is Director of the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America at Brown University. She also holds the Chancellor’s Professorship of Africana Studies and serves as the Associate Dean of the Faculty for Special Initiatives. A graduate of Yale (B.A.) and Brown University (Ph.D), Rose authored Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (1994), Longing to Tell: Black Women Talk about Sexuality and Intimacy (2003), and The Hip Hop Wars: What We Talk About When We Talk About Hip Hop and Why It Matters (2008). She also sits on the Boards of the Nathan Cummings Foundation, Color of Change, and Black Girls Rock, Inc. Focusing on issues relating to race in America, mass media, structural inequality, popular culture, gender and sexuality and art and social justice, Rose engages widely in scholarly and popular audience settings, and now also on The Tight Rope podcast.

Insight from this episode:

Recollections of Dr. Cornel West’s first impressions of and ensuing friendship with Prince.
Reasons why Black music is important and the role it plays in social activism.
Strategies on generating a new sound for the current moment, extending and elaborating on the Black American musical tradition.
How to leverage the current “tipping point” as a catalyst for lasting social movement.
Details on the need for creative, interactive spaces for BIPOC.
Strategies on utilizing technology to create impact and effective change.

Quotes from the show:

On the Black musical tradition and its relationship to historical trauma and suffering: “To look unflinchingly at all the hurt and the pain and yet still dish out the compassion and creativity, the style and smile-- that’s the great gift to America.” –Cornel West The Tight Rope Episode #2
“Any time you lyrically express a catastrophe, the catastrophe does not have the last word.” –Cornel West The Tight Rope Episode #2
“Music touches the hopeless, and it can heal, sustain, equip, fortify… Once you get oppressed folk fortified, woo, Lord, that’s like Sly Stone’s “Stand!”” –Cornel West The Tight Rope Episode #2
“Part of the contemporary spiritual war against young folk, especially young Black folk, is to get them to consent to a capitalist economy that’s shot through with wealth inequality. You get them to consent to a militarized nation state that will contain them or incarcerate them if they step out of line. But also you get them to consent to a commodified culture so that they’re distracted into things that are superficial: status and spectacle.” –Cornel West The Tight Rope Episode #2
“[C]apitalism and neoliberalism have destroyed local urban cultural spaces for people of color to create.” –Tricia Rose The Tight Rope Episode #2
“Every month should be African American music month. That should be in our curriculum.” –Tricia Rose The Tight Rope Episode #2
On Prince’s inspiration behind “Purple Rain”: “Purple rain is the blood in the sky. The red and the blue produce purple. And so that purple rain is rooted in the blood, sweat, tears, but you’re looking up. It’s visionary. It’s in some sense grounded in the most painful situation, but it’s visionary because it’s looking up… rooted in the most visceral responses to the most vicious kinds of treatment which is bloodstained, and yet it’s still looking up, like being in a dehumanized gutter, but one has one’s eyes always looking towards the sky.” –Cornel West The Tight Rope Episode #2
On Prince: “He knew it, as Ralph Waldo Emerson reminds us that “Every genius is a highly indebted person.” [Prince] knew his debts to James Brown, his debts to Little Richard, his debts to a whole host of folks who came before him. He was grounded in precisely this great Black musical tradition.” –Cornel West The Tight Rope Episode #2
On the boundarylessness of Black geniuses: “There’s no reason that we should be segregating genres along the lines of the spatial segregation that the country has constantly been invested in producing.” –Tricia Rose The Tight Rope Episode #2
On Prince’s gender fluidity and non-binary performance: “It was a neither/nor, a both/and. He was just able to elevate above the binaries, and the boundaries, and the questions of who belongs where on the ground.” –Tricia Rose The Tight Rope Episode #2
“The ways in which our bodies are fashioned and presented are integral to the way in which our sounds are both produced and received.” –Cornel West The Tight Rope Episode #2
“Conformity can get you a lot of company. You don’t want your goal to just have good company.” –Tricia Rose The Tight Rope Episode #2
On despair and despondency: “Use it in such a way that in the end it becomes a source of giving to other people.” –Cornel West The Tight Rope Episode #2