Wouldn’t it be convenient (orgasmic almost) to witness “the other” boast about all those things that are so much closer to your reach than to theirs?

Travestied in the glossy aesthetics of mass consumption spectacle, rap, hip-hop, R&B and pop music seem to all have become the same blob of status quo-inducing saccharine.

The phenomenon doesn’t limit itself to music. Cinema, for instance, can claim the same popularization (in the worse sense of the word). Indie films these days can be as sleek as big Hollywood pictures and as financially “dependent” on big studios as well.

Television news has also started to seem all alike. CNN and Fox News, while they may differ in their agendas — and in how overt they make these agendas known — both share similar formulaic structures. We want to make everything “fun” (a neo-synonym for “easy”).

Whatever works in certain shows becomes guideline for another one — anything but risk-taking.

Perhaps we got tired to fight, to denounce, to complain. Whatever was left from the ideological seeds of the ’60s must have died in the ’90s. The Internet appeared and along with it came a sense of complacency and impotence toward a world plagued by disparity for so long, a revolution started to feel too time-consuming.

And media became less shy about displaying the very pinnacles of the real American dream: ownership, sex, guns, superiority over “the other” (be that black, Arabic, Mexican, gay or just “not you”).

The reason why pop diluted the seriousness of rap is the same reason why journalism sounds so much like advertising in America. Once we start looking at everything as merchandising, songs become products, just products. And while songs may express ideas, products sell. So if every kind of music becomes just one kind of music, music loses its niche-natured limitations (they lose morality, character) and they gain marketability.

But the fact that we as a culture choose profitability over anything — over intellectual insight, personal growth, ideology, philosophy, fairness — isn’t new. And it isn’t shocking.

What is shocking is the social game that inhabits underneath this crust of business transactions and product placement that the music scene has been reduced to.

Looking at the way rap and its subgenres glorify that which is associated with underprivileged classes (lawless violence, promiscuity, label obsession) it is easy to wonder why is it that suburban white kids love it so much. While there is a factor of pseudo-rebellion in listening to lyrics your mother would not approve of, the social game behind black music for white consumption doesn’t die on that surface.

Wouldn’t it be convenient (orgasmic almost) to witness “the other” (the black, the poor, the colonized, the enslaved) boast about all those things that are so much closer to your reach than to theirs?

Rap music is about feeding the white ego with the reminder of who takes what roles in the social sphere. And expecting rap to “entertain” white partying seems as fair and unconsciously exploitative as expecting all gay men to serve us as personal stylists.

It is the most basic of all psychological fundamentals that we assert ourselves of who we are by imposing on “the other” that which we see fit that they be. So that we clarify our own existence by giving others the qualities we don’t want in ourselves.

In that sense the white adolescents of bashfully paranoid suburbia, laughing, rejoicing and shaking their booties to the beats of ex-cons-gone-millionaires is the ultimate act of social cruelty. An imperialist circus of sorts. It is the reiteration of “you are that” so that “I can be this.” You go to jail, you treat your women like bitches, you dream of driving the cars that I could own, you pronounce the swear words my mother won’t allow me to say so that I can dance.

Kind of like the “friend” who tells the other “Come on, tell me a joke, make me laugh.”

> Comments