art/vision/voice - Maryland Institute College of Art

58 art / vision / voice
john Some kids you can’t save, there’ve been kids at Xavier who I really
regret not being able to save—not save, but just to help direct. And
you can’t get ’em all and you have to recognize the ones that are
salvageable, and do everything you can to salvage those kids. So, you
have to see what is there and then, how do you motivate them? You
can’t motivate everybody the same way.
richard The consciousness that we had at Xavier of extended family,
the consciousness, all the moral values, have just gone, pretty much.
And the cultural life, or the cultural climate, at most of these
schools, even at McDonogh 35—kids use this obscene language to
communicate with each other constantly. I mean Tupac [Shakur]
really sold us out with the “thug mentality,” getting everybody to be
a thug and the thing about the “thug life.” He was an artist who
presented certain values to kids that they shouldn’t have. And
certain images that these kids focus in on. You see it’s all tied to
self-esteem. Your whole consciousness of being an artist or creating
or creativity is tied to self-esteem.
john But it’s also creatively tied to responsibility, Richard. And you
know, I think that might be a difference. At Xavier I was never, and
neither were you, ever told that you could or could not do a certain
kind of thing. But you were always told that you were responsible
for the thing that you did. You know, you can go out here and do it,
but you’ve got to accept the consequences.
I think a lot of young people now, people like Tupac and
others, their responsibility ended at the tips of their shoes. It’s them;
the rest of that stuff doesn’t count. I think you hit on something
talking about the family thing. . . . I think we’re so concerned about
the New Yorks, the Phillys, the Chicagos that a lot of our young
people consider the values here passé or provincial. And I think
that is killing us.
You know what’s funny as hell? People outside of here are freakin’
about what we’ve got here, and people here throw it away. Without
that extended family, without that kind of consciousness, the music
scene here could not exist. The music scene is the extended family
that we once had in a bigger sense. An Ellis Marsalis will teach a kid
he’s never [met] before because the kid is in the family of music.
But a lot of the peripheral stuff outside of that, the energies they
could get after doing that, the energies that are perpetuated in black
magazines, Essence, Soul, whatever, the kids seeing that and saying,
“Oh, man, this is a good thing to do. I gotta be like that.”