Pop culture and the Negro
Mainstream really is an evil place. It’s ultimately predictable. It thinks for us and we become its products. It’s all products selling products. The underground is just as evil. It has evolved from separate sub cultures to a homogenous wretch of everything. Or it’s a youthful product promoting rebellion and urbanism. I’m bored with that as well. I guess it’s because we’re so saturated with what is cool and colorful that we often forget about what we really want. Pop culture provides us all with a fantastic reality. And it is fantastic. We get to see colorful signs every step we take.
Are you thirsty? Quench your thirst with a Coke.
Are hungry looking to stretch your buck? Go to McDonald’s and celebrate Black History Month all February!
I’ve decided to make it my life to decoding visual nihilism.
What is visual nihilism? Just as it sounds. Imagery that is harmful to the people of color in America. Everyday we’re with flooded with images, ads and movies that depict how our culture is visually communicated to the rest of the world. America is a big place and can be powerfully influential through the advertisement and the moving picture. In 2008, Hank Willis Thomas produced a body of work titled Unbranded that strips ads between the years 1968 and 2008 of their text leaving only the background image. By the text the being stripped away the true nature of the ad seems to be revealed to the viewer. We have a questionable photograph, graphic or illustration. The things that we’ve abhorred as a group of people are still alive in the advertisement. I fear that there are black people out there that continue to agree and believe the images that they see. It makes me wonder why they choose to continue to live within the Matrix of American reality.
Wake up, I ask you. From our clothes to our music, it doesn’t belong to us anymore. It belongs to those that are dictating our very well-being. The same ones that know we have the highest death rates by healthcare are the same ones that are pushing these products into our backyards.
Products are geared toward its individual demographic. Demographics meaning a particular or designated group of people that is the target market for a company’s product. It works on us all, we can’t avoid it. It makes us devoted to particular brands because images of black people are next to their products. Once upon a time, no company had images of black people. Then as black people became more and more recognized as a group with buying power, then more and more black people were dripping into advertisements and television shows and movies. Some will call it integration, I call it financial planning. We’ve began to learn that companies and their products are actually more harmful for us than they say they are. Cigarette ads have banned their mascots but when I walk to my neighborhood corner store, I still see black people smoking a fresh menthol pack of Newports as if they haven’t learned the high health risks that come with smoking cigarettes. It’s as if we’ve been left behind on the newly updated notion of an American dream. The part of the dream where we stop squandering our money on materialistic gains and precious items that have no significant value. We’ve been conned, duped and suckered into believing that our buying power states an important significance with the “rest” of the American community.
As I watched an old Soulja Boy clip in which he commented on his criticisms for saying ignorant phrases, his only point of reference was that he was a millionaire by the time he was 16 years old. In response to his comment was another video by Dr. Boyce Watkins in which he made a comment about how money truly operates. When you’re stupid with money those that are smart with money will take your money away. This statement resonated with me as I thought about how many of my black counterparts are only interested in money but not of real issues that affect our community such as poor healthcare, poor education and rising crime. On the inside looking further inside we can no longer continue to abide by certain ideals deemed as black culture as they continue to destroy our unity amongst one another.
For the Negro and Pop culture, we need to take a closer, personal look at how we view ourselves without the voice of a white male or female journalist telling us what our culture is. As far as I can understand Soulja Boy is not a part of my culture. He is the creation of decades and decades of harmful imagery placed in the black community to make us all seem like a gold-loving, money grubbing lazy ass nigga. He took the easy way out by cooning in front of thousands and thousands of other uneducated people believing that his word is as golden as the Gospels. I highly disagree. He makes me wonder if he knows the demise of MC Hammer. Losing all that money got him on the D-List forever. He’s not a popular item anymore. When it comes to money, I fully understand that if you’re not smart with it you can lose it at any given moment. MC Hammer was the example of poor financial planning and becoming a baby of pop culture by failing to understand that being a pawn is a bad thing. By being a mainstream darling and/or mainstream obsessor, we miss the bigger picture of progressing the betterment of our black American nation. The war with race isn’t over seeing as to how it is so engrained in our psychological DNA as a country but I’ll be damned if I’m going to continue to uphold black culture principles that will continue to be raped by mainstream visual nihilism forcing me to believe that what is black in the media is black in real life.
The media couldn’t survive my real life or anybody else’s that is black and as awakened as I am.
End the destruction of visual nihilism and take back your culture. This includes Middle Eastern, Asian, Native American, African, East European, South Pacific, Latino, Hispanic and the list goes on.
America, you ain’t ready for what I’ve got to say now.
3 months ago • 0 notes