Almost every aspect of African-American culture, from their music, their patterns of speech, their food, their life-style, their attitudes to white people, mark them out as the descendants of slaves. Slaves. Displaced and conquered people. A people who were content to, for the most part, languish in servitude until their masters decided to set them free. Much of African American culture is about dealing with the legacy of that and attempts to recover, what people do not see it if you are still dealing with the trauma of an assault you are still a victim. You can smell the slavery on them still, the brokenness, the victimhood. There are fools among them who see the slavery as a badge of honor, as if their weakling ancestors should be congratulated or pitied or somehow deserved compensation. The problem is that to any person with anything even approaching self-respect, a history of weakness is something to be ashamed of. I cannot lose sight of the fact that these people allowed themselves to be subjugated, held down, and that these genetic qualities are still present. Rebels do not survive, slinking, grinning, sneaky, hypocritical, shuck-jive yes-men do.
It takes a lot of complacency and fear to remain a slave. An absence of courage, organization, logic, willingness to fight for long-term gain, in short, the same things that keep prisoners everywhere prisoners. It’s human, the herd mentality combined with mass hysteria, and there is no reason to believe that it’s race-specific, and since the African experience in America is unique, there is no control that would disprove it’s uniqueness.
Saturday, April 28, 2007
Does Country Music have any Value?
Corny, sentimental, more blatantly manipulative than any other kind of music except for hip-hop, Country is designed for people who do not read and have lived all their lives in one county. It’s simple, and simple things, being simple, are easier for stupid people to understand. Pick any country song in the entire repertoire of country somgs since the origin of the art form, and an 8 year-old can easily grasp everything the song has to say. It’s music written for people who don’t know much about life or about music. That said, it’s possible for even a nursery rhyme to have a catchy tune. Catchiness or singability do not good music make, though.
Friday, April 27, 2007
Jeff Foxworthy on CMT
Last weekend Jeff Foxworthy included a little spiel about why he loves country music into his CMT Award-show schtick. Supposed country music is about the important things, God,country, love, broken hearts, family, cheating etc., and that’s why he loves it. He said that it is not about violent thuggishness, or taking political sides (a little swipe at the Dixie Chicks and Hip-hop there). Foxworthy made his money entertaining retards with humor that is the very opposite of edgy or enlightening. His humor, the patented, repetitive routine, like that of Carrot-top, Pauly Shore or Gallagher, marks is fans as those of lesser intelligence. They like him because one joke is the same as the next, no variation means no thought, no need to try to understand, you can laugh on cue. Simple, unoriginal humor for simple unoriginal people.
Ron White, in an interview said that Foxworthy was better than Pryor or Cosby since his album sales have been greater than both Pryor’s and Cosby’s combined. Ron White is a brown-nosing hanger-on with an equally limited set of jokes that he repeats endlessly. Note that the humor of the aforementioned black comedians was more complex, full of nuance and depending on actual life-experience. A certain amount of sophistication is needed to appreciate Pryor/Cosby comedy, especially for white people who need to be familiar with speech and lifestyle that differs from their own. Jeff Foxworthy caters to the lowest intellectual class of white America. Note this
Racial Smartness
The idea that an individual black man could possibly be smarter than any individual white man is a notion never suggested at, never spoken, never recognized anywhere in American media. Ever. Not even if you pose a hypothetical case with a retarded white person could this be voiced in contemporary America. You can say that a black person is “smart” or “articulate” (one of my favorites), or you could even say that he/she is “well-educated”, but never in a way that compares him/her favorably to a Caucasian American.
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