Hip-Hop’s Huge Problem With Iggy Azalea Just Blew Up — And She Completely Deserves It, Tom Barnes, Mic, December 22, 2014
It turns out many people in the hip-hop community feel that Azalea is actively working against black interests because she appropriates traditionally black styles and totally divorces them from their political content. That’s why rapper Tyler, The Creator, A Tribe Called Quest’s Q-Tip and R&B singer Solange Knowles all came to [Azealia] Banks’ defense, thanking her for speaking openly and passionately about the issue of cultural appropriation. Kreayshawn also stepped up to the plate, accusing Azalea of ignoring racism in her home country as well as in America.
But it was New York-raised hip-hop legend Q-Tip who had the most inspiring response — he gave Azalea a full hip-hop history lesson in 40 tweets.
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Hip-hop is always political. Q-Tip took the Twitterverse all the way back to hip-hop’s very beginnings. He described the conditions black people were living under in 1970s New York, which hip-hop sought to address. He cited Vietnam, the rampant drug trade in New York’s ghettos and their crumbling school systems. These factors, crippled children’s support structures, “emasculated” their parents and forced children to turn to the streets and gangs for support.
But thankfully, hip-hop was born. With it, youth found a direction, and a way to channel their energies in a positive direction.
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It may seem mean, but she completely deserves it. Azalea has been manipulating hip-hop culture for her own gain, and she cares not at all for the broader hip-hop community or the music’s place in our culture.
[Emphasis in original.]
The propagandists have won: What Fox News and the pornography revolution have in common, Janine R. Wedel, Salon, December 21, 2014
In the past, there was little denial that porn stars were acting. In fact, an anthropologist who studies porn culture has discovered that these days, one of the most compelling selling points in online porn is that what you are seeing is “real,” performed by supposed “amateurs.”
Apparently, we so crave authenticity that we look for it even in an entertainment genre that is, well, staged.
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The sea change in porn might seem to be of little consequence to those who don’t indulge in it. And yet it pulls back the curtain on the personalization of the media and Internet and why today’s top power brokers, clothed as they are, can operate willy-nilly beyond accountability—and get away with it. Unlike with other arenas like finance or health care or national-security policy, however, we, the public, can hardly make a convincing case that the sweeping changes in the media just happened without our complicity. We have been, and are, ever-more-active participants in sowing this unaccountability.
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Mainstream news comes across as not-quite-real; in fact, it comes across as performed by both the media presenters and the newsmakers they cover. That is why so many Americans look to fake news—comedians Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are cases in point—because they tell it more like it is than does the so-called news. In short, these performers are more authentic, more believable, and, ironically, no more performed than the evening news on any major network. (Colbert’s enacting a caricatured conservative is intended to be understood as performance, while the newscaster is not.)
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According to Stewart, a central function in much of U.S. news media has shifted from informing the public to performing what he calls, [sic] scripted “political theater.” By this, he means that addressing important social and political issues[,] news media tends to use the language dominated by predictable, fixed, and repeated scripts and rhetoric, paying less attention to the discussion of substantive political issues and their meanings.
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This performance culture seems to have caused regular people to turn to parody in search of something more authentic—something I saw in my years in Eastern Europe during late communism. As we’ve said, the emerging distrust in the West of official news has also pushed citizens to a more personalized, “privatized” kind of content, taking their cues from family, friends, and like-minded “friends” and “followers” in social media.
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Today in the West we, too, increasingly eschew institutional arbiters in favor of ourselves and our own. Just like the consumer of porn who has rendered the central middleman redundant, we are assembling our news ourselves. This is possible because more and more people are getting all their news online, increasingly on the fly through smartphones and tablets.
[Emphasis added.]
