Politics & Power Quote by Bill Griffith

“Jazz, rock and roll, movies and comics” is a deliberately populist canon: loud, mass-produced, and once dismissed as trash. Coming from Bill Griffith, a cartoonist who made his name in the unruly margins of American media, the line isn’t a bland celebration of entertainment. It’s a provocation aimed at gatekeepers who keep trying to file “culture” under symphonies, oil paintings, and Ivy League taste.

The specificity matters. Jazz and rock are both Black-rooted, youth-driven forms that America exported while frequently policing the communities that invented them. Movies and comics are industrial arts: collaborative, commercial, shaped by censorship codes, advertising dollars, and distribution monopolies. Griffith’s list is a shorthand history of how American identity actually travels: not as philosophical treatises, but as rhythm, spectacle, and panels stapled to cheap paper.

The subtext is also self-defense. Comics, especially the underground and alternative scenes Griffith came out of, have spent decades arguing they’re not just kiddie fare or disposable jokes. By putting comics in the same breath as jazz and film, he’s insisting on their equal capacity for innovation, social critique, and formal experimentation.

Contextually, it reads like an argument with the American habit of romanticizing “high culture” while consuming something else entirely. Griffith is betting that the country’s truest self-portrait is drawn in the vernacular: improvised, electric, visually saturated, and engineered for the masses.