Thomas Chatterton Williams, author of Losing My Cool: How a Father’s Love and 15,000 Books Beat Hip-Hop Culture (Penguin, 2010), finds much not to like in Obama’s choice in listening pleasure. One of his faves, Obama told Rolling Stone magazine, is Lil Wayne, who, says Williams in Wall Street Journal
is emblematic of a hip-hop culture that is ignorant, misogynistic, casually criminal and often violent. A self-described gangster, he is a modern-day minstrel who embodies the most virulent racist stereotypes that generations of blacks have fought to overcome. His music is a vigorous endorsement of the pathologies that still haunt and cripple far too many in the black underclass.
Which (surprise) violates Obama’ previous assertions to the contrary:
. . . I cheered when Mr. Obama, then a little-known state senator, inserted himself into the cultural debate during the 2004 Democratic National Convention: “Children can’t achieve unless we raise their expectations and turn off the television sets and eradicate the slander that says a black youth with a book is acting white,” he declared.
And it’s why I cheered again last year when he told an NAACP gathering that, “Our kids can’t all aspire to be LeBron [James] or Lil Wayne. I want them aspiring to be scientists and engineers, doctors and teachers, not just ballers and rappers.”
Well, as Rev. Jeremiah Wright would say, that’s politics for you. (Obama “made a bad decision [to disown Wright], but he’s still my child.”)
On the other hand, re: GW Bush as by CNN, April of ’05 whose Ipod playlist:
does reveal a rather narrow range of babyboomer tunes. Writing in the London Times, Caitlin Moran noted: “No black artists, no gay artists, no world music, only one woman, no genre less than 25 years old, and no Beatles.”
[Joe Levy, deputy editor of Rolling Stone magazine] agreed, telling the New York Times: “What we’re talking about is a lot of great artists from the ’60s and ’70s and more modern artists who sound like great artists from the ’60s and ’70s.
“This is basically boomer rock ‘n’ roll and more recent music out of Nashville made for boomers. It’s safe, it’s reliable, it’s loving. What I mean to say is, it’s feel-good music. The Sex Pistols it’s not.”
Safe, reliable, loving? Or “vigorous endorsement of the pathologies that still haunt and cripple far too many in the black underclass”? Pay your money, take your choice.
Blithe Spirit 