The essence of it is that much like every commercial manifestation from Afro-American culture, those early plays are locked into the moment in time in which they were made. Otherwise, they could never have been produced and no momentum could be generated to improve upon. To that end, because every single thing that we produce must be acceptable on some level to the powers that be so that a dollar value can be assigned to it and exploited, we could not set a positive president for Afro-American identity until the advent of be-bop. In the liminal space afforded by be bop, every musician was subject to the same rules and once they got their head cut on the bandstand, they had to sit down regardless of their position in the Jim Crow binary. Where is that now? We don’t even make music anymore. We just punch buttons and mumble over computer generated tracks and get angry when the low fruit we grow gets taken and discarded because it isn’t conspicuously consumable.