Curse you, ptcruiser!
People say that Don Imus isn't funny, but let's face it, there is a joke in all of this. It's a joke on the black community. And the joke is this: white people don't even have to call black people niggers and bitches and whores anymore. They do it for us. You throw a couple dozen talented black artists mid-level stockbroker money and they'll be ho-calling bitch-slapping modern Bojangles acts till the end of fucking time. From Whitey's point of view that's a hell of a punchline. The mistake Imus made was saying it out loud.
The most annoying thing about the Don Imus fiasco? The instant it blew up into an absurdly overdone national controversy, we all knew exactly how everyone was going to play it -- or overplay it, as it were.
We all knew that the angry-white-guy columnists of the Townhall.com ilk were going to turn even the previously-hated liberal Imus into a martyr of the political correctness age ("Imus, Political Correctness, and the end of America" was Douglas McKinnon's not-at-all-hysterical offering). We knew Al Sharpton would show up, business card in hand, at the back of the ambulance, offering his services. We knew campus feminists would surface en masse to paint Imus as a hatemongering symbol of the old-boy white male power structure that secretly still insists on its power and privilege in American society, his show a daily vulgar wink to fellow members of the Matrix. And we knew -- or at least I knew, since I've personally been through a couple of these media ass-whippings before -- that virtually every editorial denouncing Imus would include a line in there that would read something along the lines of, "And the worst thing is, his so-called 'jokes' aren't even that funny."
Canny observers of the cultural issues underlying the Imus controversy could have also made a few other predictions. The first is that the angry-white-guy crowd would try to turn the tables on Imus's accusers and point the finger at the hip-hop culture that introduced old white liberals like Imus to use words like "nappy-headed hos" in the first place. The second is that black intellectuals like the above-quoted Dr. Todd Boyd of USC would use their advanced degrees to find a way to split the necessary rhetorical hairs to repel these attacks, dismissing Imus as a worthless bigot on the one hand while upholding rap and hip-hop as a "unique form of fictional expression" deserving of the broad indulgence we grant to true art forms.
They're all full of shit, all of them. With very few exceptions almost everyone who jumped onto the Don Imus pigpile was a shameless opportunist whose mind was made up years before this incident even happened, and used the occasion of a radio jock stepping in shit to robotically jerk off his constituency for a cheap buck. First of all, let's just get this out of the way: the idea that anyone in the media world gives a shit about the dignity of women, black or white, is a ridiculous joke.
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Old School Rap
Sorry, P6, but it was this hit on the newly emerging niggerati that made the piece irresistible. That and Taibbi's observations about the media's actual, as opposed to feigned, regard for the dignity of women. See, when rap and hip-hop first emerged on the scene my musical tastes were already firmly formed but I use to catch a show that was broadcast on Saturday afternoons on KPOO-FM that featured the kind of music that Taibbi refers to as "scary social commentary." I told all of my old jazz head friends that they needed to listen to this music. A few of them did and agreed with my view that these young folks were making some acute and dead-on observations about American culture, society and the world. After that, of course, it all ran downhill.
"Satan himself couldn't have designed a more effective vehicle for marginalizing black culture than modern hip-hop. In the early days rap music was scary social commentary, it was raw and real and it vividly described a violent street culture that white people didn't know about and didn't want to know about. But very quickly rap turned into a multibillion-dollar industry in which the same corporate behemoths who sold us crap like Garth Brooks and boy bands and Britney Spears made massive profits selling a stylized, romanticized version of black misery to white kids in the suburbs.
"That was bad enough, but even worse was the way black politicians and black intellectuals so easily bought into the idea that these endless video images of gun-toting, ho-slapping black men with fat wallets, rock-hard tattooed abs and fully-accessorized rides were positive living symbols of "black empowerment" and "black manhood." Like Tupac was the next Malcolm or something."
Why Black Women Are Angry
But, I enjoyed this post, and it was nicer to those on Oprah than I would have been.
Why Black Women Are Angry
I like that folks are coming
I like that folks are coming up with their own gestures.
Hm.
i'm not feeling Taibbi
even though he made some good points. Overall, though, I keep getting the feeling that he thinks he's the only one who knows what he's talking about...
Matt Taibbi's Perspective
"...I keep getting the feeling that he thinks he's the only one who knows what he's talking about..."
I think that when you are righteously angry about an issue that you believe too many other people are dancing around and refusing to name your "prophetic voice" can be seen as being representative of a kind of know-it-all attitude. It goes with the territory.
Me, I took his audience into
Me, I took his audience into account. Look who he writes for...Rolling Stone, which could easily get caught up in the indictment of the media and music industry.
Rolling Stone Magazine
Rolling Stone Magazine. A real blast from the past. I haven't read or purchased a copy of Rolling Stone since January or February of 1970 when I consigned it to my permanent virtual trash pile and canceled my subscription. I did so after the late music critic Ralph J. Gleason wrote a piece declaring that the responsibility for the killing of a young black man by members of the notoriously racist Hell's Angels motorcycle club at the infamous Altamont Speedway rock concert in 1969 was not the fault of the concert organizers and rock bands who hired those redneck thugs and criminals to provide security, but an entire generation of young people who loved music, sex and rock and roll.
I wrote a very brief letter to the editor of Rolling Stone Magazine pointing out who I thought were the real culprits at Altamont and I also declared that if the magazine continued to be sold for fifty cents then bullshit would always be a bargain. My letter wasn't printed. What was printed were a bunch of letters from people who agreed with Gleason's point of view. I decided that Rolling Stone, in my opinion, despite it's take no prisoners reputation, was no different than the San Francisco Chronicle and Examiner. Dissident and contrary views would not be printed on its pages. Pointing out that the Hell's Angels were dyed-in-the-wool racists and that the killing of the young man was not a generational responsibility apparently did not wash with the cultural commissars who owned and operated Rolling Stone.
I liked Ralph Gleason. He wrote often and lovingly about jazz. The liner notes he penned for Miles Davis' seminal album Bitches Brew are a marvelous and literate example of a marketing tool that, to be truthful, Davis despised and wished that he could rid his recordings of. More than a few of the video clips on YouTube of Davis, Coltrane etc. were initially recorded on Gleason's jazz program that ran on public television. He was a good person but he was wrong about Altamont. I never held it against him. Rolling Stone Magazine is another matter. I still won't read or buy it.