John Legend Can’t Pretend Times Are Normal

http://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/21/magazine/john-legend-cant-pretend-times-are-normal.html

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You’ll be playing Frederick Douglass in the second season of WGN America’s “Underground.” Do you think it’s possible that President Trump was thinking of you when he described Douglass as someone who’s done an amazing job? Yeah, I’ve been doing a lot of good things lately, and I’m getting recognized more and more! I don’t think that Trump has read a book in his adult life, or that he knows anything about American history, black history, any history. I don’t think he knows what’s in the Constitution. I don’t think he knows anything about Civil War history, or just about any kind of history. We can’t expect him to know much of anything.

You released an album not long after the election, in early December. If you started making that album today, how do you think it might be different? It would probably be a little angrier, though this past album had moments of doubt and darkness, where I thought, Is it all worth it? I think there’d probably be more anger as opposed to doubt.

The idea that, because of Trump, everything is politicized now also works in the opposite direction: It reminded me a bit of some of the critical reactions to Damien Chazelle’s “La La Land,” which you were an executive producer for and acted in. What do you think of the recent backlash? I see both sides. Damien’s been making “La La Land” for six years, so it’s hard to blame him for not knowing that Donald Trump was going to be the president when his film finally came out. Damien made a film that was expressive of his artistry and his point of view, and he’s been trying to make it for years — who knew that it would be released during a Trump presidency? The work, on its own, is a beautiful piece of art. Whether or not you think it’s relevant during a Trump presidency, at least judge it on the merits of its artistry.

Do you think about conservatives or Trump supporters who may be your fans? Do you have a hope that your work would make them think differently? I think a lot of people are staying in their own bubbles and only hearing things that reinforce what they already believe. I don’t know if they’re even going to watch the kind of work that I’m putting out, that could push them or could teach them something new, but maybe life will just teach them. Maybe when Trump takes away Obamacare, and they realize that it was the Affordable Care Act that they were using to get affordable health coverage — that might teach them, more than listening to a John Legend song.

Has there been a piece of art that has affected you politically? Books have certainly affected me. In college, I took a class that centered on a book called “Obedience to Authority,” which was trying to explain why an ordinary German would be a worker at a concentration camp, or why anyone would be part of a system that is so evil and corrosive, and how they deal with authority and whatever cognitive dissonance they need to have to do something so inhumane. Then we read some James Joyce and Virginia Woolf; all those books in that class opened my eyes to the way human beings deal with authority and deal with how we become inhumane. I took those classes 20 years ago, but I’ve been thinking about that a lot when I think about how we’re reacting to Donald Trump right now.

How are you applying that thought process to contemporary times? Yeah, are we just going to go about our lives and try to be normal? I’ve seen a tweet going around about how a lot of people say that they would have been part of the civil rights movement, so this is basically that chance, this moment of truth for our society. Are we going to just accept inhumanity, or are we going to resist?

What young actor will play John Legend 50 years from now in the TV series? We’ll see if I have a life worthy of being portrayed by anybody.