Black music’s global appeal lies in its future-oriented, anti-nostalgic innovations

Evidence

Doesn’t the temptation to take from Blackness make sense, then? Here is the music of a people who have survived, who not only won’t stop but also can’t be stopped. Music by a people whose major innovations—jazz, rock ‘n’ roll, funk, hip-hop—have been about progress, about the future, about getting as far away from nostalgia as time will allow, music that’s thought deeply about the allure of outer space and robotics, music whose promise and possibility, whose rawness, humor, and carnality call out to everybody: to other Black people; to kids in working-class England, middle-class Indonesia, and the cités of Paris; to teenagers in Seoul, Mexico City, and Bogotá. If freedom’s ringing, who on earth wouldn’t want to rock that bell? — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 1147

Categorization

• XREF: The claim that Black musical genres are forward-looking connects to the 1619 framing of Black Americans as agents of progress rather than victims — parallels the reader’s central reframing-vs-factual-claim taxonomy.