How We Stopped Caring About “Selling Out” (youtube.com)
This has always seemed a part of this ‘black culture’ movement. Cash only matters. What you do doesn't matter. Materialism. Rock and Western folk was rebellion, anti establishment, anti corporate. Rap (after the story rap of the 80s) was baseness.
How black is the movement? Can someone look at the white rappers and artists, and see how much the messages are the same? Are white or latino rappers also all about money before anything, let's do lots of violence, treat women and anyone like garbage? Do they tout violence and mercenariness the same way, even now 30 years after the first white kids started buying the CDs?
Did Michael Jackson sell out to Pepsi in 1983? Tina Turner and Bowie followed. Woodstock 99's corporatism was remarkable at the time. Napster erased sales revenue from 1999. Most people currently, youths and adults, want to be a fulltime influencer, perhaps the most abusive, monetizeeverythinginyourlife job out there. Faith in this seems weak though. I talked to some teenagers the other weekend and this came up. I led and said how disgusting influencers were and how you could never be friends with them, because everything you do with them they just want to turn around and make content out of it. They came in and said it was lame and bad and they didn't like influencers. In the old days, the number one job people want was musician or actor, and you would never be able to convince people these were bad or ugly jobs.
The missing thing here is options. People allow their politicians to make deals to enshine a small number of high priveleged CEOs of corporations that do everything people would otherwise share doing among many companies. No one wants to use YouTube, or Facebook, or support corporate musicians, people hate spotify, but there is no option to vote with their actions. It's a fragile stasis.
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For about 1 or 2 months now, podcasts have seemed passe to me. They had been hyped up to be ‘the new media’ and ‘the new authority’ and they were, but right now it seems podcasters are on the coolaid, and refer to themselves that way, despite it still being a boring, low production product, only turned to in the absense of any integrity by the better produced products. It should keep a place though in terms of the value of long form interviews, where it really is harder to give a fake impression to the masses if you have to sit and talk normally for 2 or 3 hours. You can't be manufactured the same way. Kamala and Biden avoided participating, and more genuine people jumped at the chance.