John Legend opened up in the latest edition of GQ Hype about his new music as well as his feelings regarding COVID-19 and the way Donald Trump has handled the pandemic.
“He says a bunch of ridiculous happy-talk home remedies that people should not be doing, and he thinks he’s brilliant because he has a relative who is a doctor,” Legend said of the irrational and often times incompetent commander in chief. The “All of Me” singer added, “Then you combine that with the fact that he doesn’t listen to scientists and makes every decision on how it will benefit him personally. He’s also a very short-term thinker, so he doesn’t think much about how to handle big, complex problems that require planning and long-term vision.”
Legend, who is quarantining in his California home with his wife Chrissy Teigen, their 4-year-old daughter Luna and 2-year-old son Miles, is remaining optimistic about staying at home during the coronavirus pandemic.
“I feel like we’ve adjusted pretty well. We’re fortunate, of course. We have the resources to deal with everything we need to deal with in a pretty painless way. We have our family unit, and we love our kids and love hanging out with them. And they especially love being home with us 24/7. We’re making the best of a wild situation.”
Despite making the best of quarantine, the 41-year-old does admit that the unknown is cause for concern in terms of his career. Legend, along with most of the music community, has been forced to cancel concerts and other appearances, which are typically a large portion of their income.
“On the career side, it’s been crazy, because we have all this new music that we were preparing to put out and you just never know how all of it affects how people are going to receive it. Will they receive it differently?” Legend revealed to GQ Hype. “And then, of course, we’ve had to cancel all kinds of performances. We just don’t know what’s going to happen. I do know that I have a lot of music that I want people to hear, and we’re finishing the album up, and we still want to put it out reasonably soon.”
Legend also spoke to how African American’s have been more severely affected by the coronavirus, equating the disproportion to a long history of inequality against blacks.
“Black people’s symptoms, our symptoms, are not taken as seriously in a lot of medical offices and hospitals. Combine that with environmental racism, which is when poor neighborhoods with less political power take the brunt of air and water pollution when it comes to allowing industry to contaminate the areas where they live.” He went on to explain, “The crisis is exposing weaknesses in our system, and one of them is that we’ve treated black people unfairly for the entirety of our nation’s history.”
