Michael Jackson fundamentally altered the terms of the debate about African American music.

Society wants to categorize everything, but to me it’s all African-American music.

I’d been listening to African-American music since the first record I ever bought, which was by Sam Cooke. And it sounds more like my private thoughts that I never thought I would be able to articulate – I never thought I would be able to express publicly.

What city has given the world more in terms of American culture than New Orleans? There is none. Not New York. Not L.A. Not Chicago. Not anywhere, in the sense that African American music has gone around the world twenty times over, and it’s continuing to evolve. It is our greatest cultural export.

African American music can’t happen in Germany or in Italy or in Mumbai. If America disappeared off the face of the Earth today, the greatest single cultural loss would be blues, jazz, hip-hop, R&B, rock-and-roll.

I did a little bit to raise the dignity and recognition of the greatness of African-American music.