The Paris Review - Fall 2016

REED
I became more accessible when I started collaborating with musicians. I went
to this place called the Soul Food Kitchen in Oakland, this black restaurant.
They were playing a song I had written for Taj Mahal on the radio. And I
said, This is it. I told the guy, the chef who ran the place, that it was me on
the radio, but he didn’t believe me. Bobby Womack was performing before
forty thousand people in Oakland Park. I told the man standing next to me
that Bobby Womack had recorded my songs. He didn’t believe me. And
then I saw that George Clinton said Mumbo Jumbo’s one of the best books
he’s ever read. He wanted to do a film of it. And Tupac mentioned me in a
song, “Still I Rise.” So that’s worth a lot to me. Worth a lot. To see the work
appearing in new forms and locations. We just have to keep challenging and
breaking up stuff. In art and culture and other places.
INTERVIEWER
In one of your lectures, you encouraged your audience to “tell your stories,
or people will tell them, and they’ll vulgarize and degrade you.” Aren’t marginalized
people in a better position to tell their own stories today? Do you
think things have gotten better or worse?
REED
It’s better because of social media, where more voices can get through. Worse
because Jim Crow Hollywood and Jim Crow media won’t budge when it
comes to diversity, and so black opinion and black images are still manipulated
by outsiders. This whole discussion about Black Lives Matter is being
conducted and controlled by media people who have little chance of being
harassed by the police. Other people tell our stories. I’ve had this ongoing
back and forth about the HBO show The Wire. I want David Simon, the
creator, to admit that it’s a cliché. He should do something new, like a series
about a suburban gun dealer who brings guns into the inner city. Richard
Price was also writing The Wire. We were on a panel at a conference in Aixen-Provence
together and I got on him. I said, You need to quit writing
all these stereotypes about black people. And the audience turned against
me. My friend Russell Banks got up, and he said, This is a local issue, you
shouldn’t be bringing it up at this conference. But there was an International
Herald Tribune on sale at the conference, and it had a big, full-page ad for
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