The late great (and for once that phrase feels appropriate) Quincy Jones was never one to mince his words. In a famous 2018 Vulture interview he said that his first impressions of the Beatles were that they were “the worst musicians in the world” and that U2 weren’t writing good songs any more.
Today – and unless you’re living under a rock you’ll know it’s US election day - fans of his have been sharing his opinions about Donald Trump, voiced in the same Vulture interview. And it’s safe to say that he wasn’t a MAGA devotee.
“It’s Trump and uneducated rednecks. Trump is just telling them what they want to hear. I used to hang out with him,” Jones said. “He’s a crazy motherfucker. Limited mentally – a megalomaniac, narcissistic. I can’t stand him.”
“A symphony conductor knows more about how to lead than most businesspeople – more than Trump does. He doesn’t know shit. Someone who knows about real leadership wouldn’t have as many people against him as he does. He’s a fucking idiot.”
He then proceeded to drop another bombshell: “I used to date Ivanka, you know,” he said before elaborating: “Twelve years ago. Tommy Hilfiger, who was working with my daughter Kidada said, ‘Ivanka wants to have dinner with you.’ I said, ‘No problem. She’s a fine motherfucker.’ She had the most beautiful legs I ever saw in my life. Wrong father, though.”
It should be pointed out that Ivanka Trump has never commented on Jones’s claims.
Jones, 91, died on Sunday, after a long career at the top of the music business as a writer, producer, arranger, musician and businessman. There’s too little space here to detail the vast swathes of 20th (and 21st Century culture) that he touched.
He worked with many of the all-time greats: Sinatra, Elvis, Billie Holiday, Dizzy Gillespie, Little Richard, Ella Fitzgerald, Count Basie and Ray Charles to name but eight.
Then there was his partnership with Michael Jackson – Jones produced Off The Wall, Bad and Thriller. The latter, of course, is the biggest-selling album of all time, accruing some 70 million sales as of 2009. It’s no coincidence that Jackson’s commercial touch started to falter in the 1990s without Jones’s assured presence in the producer’s chair.
A long line of A-listers have paid tribute to Jones, including Elton John, Will Smith, Nile Rodgers and another ex-President, Barack Obama, who said: “For decades, Quincy Jones was music.”
