LSAT 150 | Section 4 | Reading Comprehension: Q2

RC Question 2 Explanation

DISCUSSION: When an LSAT question quotes a small excerpt, you should go back and read the whole context. The executive says that the retro ideology is “not of moment” and “museum-like”.

The downside of museums is that nothing changes: we only have a fixed past tradition to look at. That’s what critics say jazz has become, thanks to Marsalis.

___________

1. Marsalis emphasized classic jazz. Classic jazz isn’t “discredited”: it’s widely admired. Critics’ only issue with it is that they want new jazz to develop too.
2. “Retro” doesn’t have this meaning in English. It means looking back to past style. It doesn’t have a negative sense of merely copying old ideas.
3. CORRECT. This best matches. If you are retro in the sense of museum, it means you never change anything and only show stuff from the past.
4. Marsalis did reinvent some jazz elements: see lines 43-44. But, that’s just a random fact from elsewhere in the passage. Here, the record executive is criticizing Marsalis, and they are accusing him of not reinventing anything, of keeping things stale as if jazz were a mere museum piece, never to be changed.
5. Inauthentic? No one has denied that Marsalis championed classic, authentic jazz (see lines 4-7). Their criticism is that he championed it too much, making jazz a sort of unchanging, retro museum genre.