Here we go again. More "La La Land" backlash. The amount of hate this film has gotten from the P.C. crowd is ridiculous. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar now calls "racism!" on the film's "white depiction" of Jazz in a think-piece he wrote for The Hollywood Reporter.
He makes good points, but I don't think this should distract or prevent a person from going to watch La La Land, which is a brilliant work of art. I've loved Jazz and Blues since I first discovered the greats when I was 13. The fact that these were genres populated by African American geniuses over the last century made it feel mystical and unique. Even moreso the blues, which invented almost every single genre of music we now know today, especially rock and roll, and was started in the delta by slaves in the fields and freed African Americans in grainy kitchen recordings. The history of these genres is important and it seems like La La Land failed to tackle it. That's what the issue is. NOT that a white person is trying to save it, because, sadly, most of the jazz bars I go to these days in the North East have white people on sax, piano, trumpet etc. mostly due to the fact that many of the original Jazz and Blues musicians have faded away in time due to age. African Americans have moved on to other, more current forms of music, especially Hip-Hop.