Politics & Power Quote by Sonny Rollins

Rollins needles American exceptionalism with the calm authority of someone who helped define an art form that America actually can claim. The jab lands because it’s aimed at “the most jingoistic person” - the listener who wants culture to function like a flag. He sets up a trap: if you insist on cultural purity, you still have to concede that one of America’s prestige soundtracks, “classical,” is an import. The repetition of “even” isn’t clumsy; it’s rhetorical pressure, pushing the nationalist into a corner where pride has to coexist with provenance.

The subtext is less anti-American than anti-myth. Rollins is separating invention from inheritance. America’s musical story is famously hybrid - African rhythms and blues structures, European harmony, church music, marching bands, Tin Pan Alley - and jazz is the volatile mix that couldn’t have happened in a monoculture. By naming “classical music” as “real European music,” he’s both acknowledging its lineage and puncturing the way Americans sometimes treat it as a neutral yardstick of sophistication. In the U.S., classical has often been coded as “serious,” “educated,” “high,” which makes it a perfect example of how cultural hierarchy can smuggle in old-world authority.

Context matters: Rollins comes from jazz, a Black American tradition that spent decades fighting to be heard as art rather than nightlife. His point isn’t to demote classical; it’s to expose how American culture borrows, rebrands, and then pretends the borrowing proves supremacy. The deeper flex is implicit: if you want an American “classical,” look to jazz - the music that didn’t have to come from Europe to be real.