My Mother. Barack Obama. Donald Trump. and the Last Stand of the Angry White Man. by Kevin Powell

Author:Kevin Powell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria Books

VOLUME 2.

The first time it dawned on me that JAY-Z was a major star was in the late 1990s, after the killings of Tupac and Biggie, and while I was in the midst of my own downward spiral with liquor and violence and a grudge match with low self-esteem in the aftershocks of those unsolved murders. I stumbled upon a party in New York City, it may have been a New Year’s Eve joint, and the vast majority of the attendees were White. And their soundtrack was one JAY-Z song after another, and they knew every single word to every single song. I thought I was dreaming, because the hip-hop I had grown up with, that I had known, even during my years as a writer for Vibe, had largely been populated by the African American, West Indian, and Latino communities who created the culture in the first place. But something had shifted, mightily, and this thing, this energy, now belonged to everyone. Pop goes the culture . . . I was both proud and mortified. Proud because Jayhovah, one of the many nicknames he calls himself, had come up from the ghetto, had escaped a life destined for an early death or prison, to become, as he put it, the best rapper alive. And as we know, the life options for the products of our environment are perpetually reduced to these three things: be a rapper, be an athlete, or be a criminal in some form.

But I was also wary of JAY-Z because of the things he was saying, how apolitical much of his music was, how visibly comfortable he was with the word nigga, how comfortable these White folks at that party were, and many parties I would roll to in the years to come, with all the foul things JAY was saying about his own people. It was as if he consciously, purposely, dumbed down his lyrical content to meet the masses where they had been pushed to, with no regard for anything except his own power and money and pleasure principles. We saw a tease of awareness, like when he would wear a Che Guevara tee-shirt or a red, black, and green wristband (the colors of Black liberation) during performances, or when he boldly detailed police racial profiling on his high-voltage song “99 Problems,” but otherwise JAY-Z chose to be silent, invisible, to not rock the boat of the America that was embracing him. This was maddening to many, particularly as he built, brick by brick, what was Blaxploitation on record, mind-spraying the most graphic tales about drugs, violence, and super-size ego boosts, while pushing forth an assembly-line montage of racist, sexist, and materialistic lyrics, with no remorse whatsoever. Save his Roc-A-Fella and Roc Nation inner circle, there seemingly was no community for JAY-Z, at least not in his music, it was just him against the world.

But obviously something has been lying dormant since the 1990s. JAY-Z and I are not that far apart in age,

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.