2014.26 Again

I haven't been looking too much at extra-textual stuff this year, but for Iggy I'll make an exception.
Before Obama, the White House wasn't just painted so. It was full of pink people from northern European countries whose names were safe and normal. The biggest election scandals were Jackson's illicit marriage and Kennedy's Catholicism. Now that Barack Hussein (gasp) Obama is our president, a lot of people are grumbling, but their arguments are stupid. The presidency isn't designed or designated for white people, and there's actually some injustice that we (I'm white) have had it so long. It has to do with the nature of the thing.
Let's look at the nature of Iggy. From what I understand, the blues tradition grew from tribal rhythmic patterns of eastern Africa that came here with slaves. Their music developed complexity and adopted new instrumentation, but blues were always very much a thing for the poor (you didn't even need an instrument) and the disenfranchised. The content was predominantly about how awful things were going (I've got the blues). When blues started spreading to wider audiences and performers, the nature of the songs rarely changed. Hill folk in the valleys of Kentucky don't have any more to their name than a black sharecropper in Mississippi. Most of the songs, even today, are about how awful it is here or how wonderful it will be there in heaven.
From blues have grown country and hip-hop. Country is still lots about heaven, but it's spread to be more than it was before because it has a much wider audience. It's now about sex and family and stuff. Country is mostly Southern, mostly white. Women and men get play and nobody thinks anything of it anymore.
Hip-hop music (by gum I will continue hyphenating it) is also wider than the blues it came from. Now it can be about sex and family, but the stand out songs are all about victory. That's the true difference. Blues was all about not having anything and getting kicked while down, but rap seems to have a lot of everything and want more.

Okay. Since I'm white and male and therefore an expert on privilege, allow me to talk for a moment. I've been given things because I'm white. I've never noticed them as they happen, but it's more like the lack of things. I have been pulled over once because I hit the rumble strip at 3AM. That's the only causeless cop stop in my whole life. I've been given things because I'm male. And it's less about the things I explicitly get and more about what people expect of me. People assume I'm strong or brave or skillful even though they have nothing but a societal bias. In fact, most of the assumptions about me based on my being male are positive. Now, are these tremendous advantages? Probably not. Nobody walked up to me and said "You're white. Have a thousand dollars." But the effects on my personal mental health and self-esteem have been wonderful.
Why talk about this here?
Because hip-hop music is about overcoming those odds and getting to a better place despite the disadvantages of people's expectations. It's about starting from the bottom and getting victory. It's about being black and poor and somehow finding yourself rich but just as black as before. Except: now Iggy Azalea comes in with seeming advantages. Yes, I know Work. If she can make excuses about being too young and too poor, I can make excuses about how she had the money for the flight or the obvious home she could slink back to. But she's white (very) and pretty (kinda). Now that she's rapping, it devalues a lot of rappers. It makes their accomplishments look a little sillier when a white girl is popular with the same fans who seemed to affirm their victory. Their songs look a little more like posturing and her songs look a little more like theft.


But then, I said almost all the same things about Miley Cyrus.

#12 - Can't You See It We Who 'Bout That Life

Miley Cyrus. I know that's not the title. But it's totally the line. You can't make me write the title. Don't you know things don't run we? This song does terrible stuff to my psyche. Turnt up or down is not the question, really. The question is how many homegirls can we get into this video to supplement the twerk? And really, though Miley is appropriating other cultures' jargon and imagery at a voracious rate, it's her mouth. She can say what she want to. Except not. Because there is a point at which owning other people's culture is hurtful, and not just to Miley's grammar. The more you take from another person's identity and the more often you use it for your own use, the more you dissipate their culture. I'll give an example. In the 1920s in Black Harlem, a huge number of poets, musicians, and other artists all started recognizing their frustrations and developing them into beautiful works that shaped the culture of the United States' black community for the next hundred years. Their group was so powerful and insular that outsiders recognized them as a cohesive movement and adopted James Wheldon Johnson's term: "Harlem Renaissance." Wikipedia will tell you that "The progress—both symbolic and real—during this period, became a point of reference from which the African-American community gained a spirit of self-determination that provided a growing sense of both Black urbanity and Black militancy, as well as a foundation for the community to build upon for the Civil Rights struggles in the 1950s and 1960s." Now, the Harlem Renaissance informs R&B and Rock and poetry and the political discourse of the country and the GLBT equality movement, but no one would say they are a member of the Harlem Renaissance anymore. It is dissipated. Every time a new person finds this culture and buys into it--every time someone new claims it as inspiration or identity--it dissipates, and it's a tragedy and a victory. When computers were new, and the Commodore 64 was the height of technology, personal computing was this incredible feat . The men and women who could write new and interesting programs gathered in cadres to discuss their culture and to geek out. But as more and more people joined them, loving computers became the norm, and now we all carry magical pocket rectangles that can give us the knowledge of infinity within seconds. As more and more people found value in computers and as they became affordable and popular, the movement dissipated and widened until essentially only the very poor in the developing world can say that they are outside the movement. Every person that bought a computer has dissipated the movement, and it has lost some of its unknown power and excitement and gained instead permanency.
Dissipation is far more important than anything Miley has to say. Every time she slurs the words "twerk" or "haters," she represents the slow and inevitable dissipation of the terms and the culture that spawned them, but increases the chance that they will have an impact on society (whether positive or negative) and that they will be remembered by humanity in generations to come. Dissipation. It's inevitable and acceptable, but for a person to dissipate is still a breach of the privacy and honor of the originators.

I just had a huge discussion (argument) with Delight and annoyed her to no end with my insistence (and other annoying things) that "twerk" is part of a worthwhile culture, but I think this discussion is worth having because it teaches me something about people and dissipation and society and myself. Delight and I watched the video and Delight said, forlorn, "She can't get up because of her huge shoes." So some good came of this. And even though it moved me much closer to understanding my thinking on dissipation and the worthiness of cultural insulation, I wouldn't buy this.

You can't dissipate a culture to a broader audience and expect it to be about the same things. You can't spread the blues and expect country stars and hip-hop stars to all sing about how sad stuff is. You can't spread hip-hop and expect only black people to like it. You can't.

But that doesn't make what Iggy did right. Just makes it normal.