Pop culture is all around me, but I notice little of it. My television is for watching sports when time permits. Otherwise, I would not own one. I do watch a car show from time to time, but I don’t think that qualifies as pop culture. Movies are just as foreign to me. I rented a few for the holiday weekend. All had been released last year or earlier and I know few of the actors staring in them. When it comes to music I am completely ignorant of what is current. Last night looking for the football game I bumped into a show featuring a sad looking Elton John and a hideous skank on stage playing piano. The TV said the show was Lady Gaga & The Muppets. Poor Elton appeared to have two black eyes so I assume they had to beat the hell out of him in order to get him on stage with the skank.

The point of the setup is to underscore my ignorance of pop culture. When I saw this on Drudge, I had to google the name “Kanye West” in order to learn why it is he is famous. I’ve heard the name, but I only know he married the Armenian women with the fat ass who is the current Paris Hilton. He is a singer, most likely of hip-hop, therefore he cannot sing without electronic enhancement. Therefore, his skill is pretending to be from the ghetto in a way that gets elderly Jewish men excited. That way they can sell his crap to suburban white boys who think it is cool to be an underclass black guy from the inner city. Pop culture, to quote John Derbyshire, is filth. Or, in Ebonics, filfth.

Using Wiki, I see that Kanye is about as authentically black as I am. He was born to talent tenth parents. He was raised by a mother who was a college professor. Some portion of his childhood was spent in China. All of his childhood was around upper middle-class pseudo radicals you see around universities. My guess, given the background of his father, that his parents were communists or Marxists. When that fell out of fashion they went onto other fads popular in over-class society. The point being that Kanye’s parents built their lives on pleasing upper class white liberals and Kanye was blessed with the same skills. Instead of black power he sells hip-hop to the little white boys and girls.

This seems to be a common theme with famous black people. There are plenty of whites and Jews who start from humble beginnings and make it big in pop culture. It strikes me that blacks, even in areas like hip-hop, most often come from middle-class families and middle-class lifestyles. They make their money pretending to be a type of black person in public, but live like Victorians in private, mostly surrounding themselves with whites from their class. The fat Armenian he married is from a wealthy real estate family, if I recall. Maybe I’m confusing her with the hotel skank. I get my skank’s confused sometimes. Regardless, I recall she is from a wealthy family. Kanye was not hooking up with a shorty from the ‘hood. Instead he went with a rich white girl.

This is nothing new. The dawn of pop cultures was Jews selling black music and black culture to middle class white kids. The popular stars of the 30’s and 40’s stole much of their acts from blacks. They white-washed it so it was not obvious, but they were peddling black culture. In the 50’s and 60’s it became explicit and eventually blacks were allowed to get in on the act. The formula was the same, even when blacks got on stage doing their thing in the raw. Rich whites selling black culture to middle class white kids. The folks back in the ‘hood never saw a nickel and most of the performers were ripped off by their handlers.

That’s the great change in the last two decades. Instead of Jews selling black culture through well-behaved blacks, the well-behaved blacks are selling black culture. In the old days, the black performers chaffed under the rules, often getting themselves in trouble by being too “authentic” which means too black. Today, the black performers chaff at having to be too black because otherwise they would resemble something closer to a British colonial officer. I think that’s why Kanye West blurts out a rant about Jews. In the ghetto, blacks hate Jews so Kanye gets to “keep it real” by channeling his inner Mel Gibson, laughing all the way to the bank.

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