Dec 11, 2020

what? do you think i'm defending corporate entertainment practices???????? he's chiding rappers for taking advances! rappers below his level often have no other route to the money they need to record and live!

you have no idea how much money i do or do not make or what my life is outside of this forum and it's frankly incredibly creepy that you think otherwise

 

Dec 11, 2020

He's (rather crudely) advocating for self empowerment through independence rather than debt to rich and powerful white executives.

Considering you're a well known entity in music journalism, among the top rap journalists, and I have a rough idea what the top earners in that industry makes - it's not creepy at all to guestimate how much you make based on those very public facts.

 

Dec 11, 2020

yes, dude, i understand what he would say he's advocating for––my point about the ideological messiness is that he's putting the onus on black artists and black people generally to make "better" individual choices, under the guise that that will free them from oppression, an argument that is itself a function of that same capitalist system. like, if i'm a talented but flat-broke rapper from baton rouge who's trying to provide for his family, maybe i can't smugly tell atlantic records to kick rocks on principle. samsung isn't going to parachute in to save my sales, live nation isn't going to bankroll me. similarly: if i'm not an artist, but a black american working a regular job struggling to keep his head above water, "why haven't you saved money to buy an apartment block" is meaningless, because what's blocking me from that is capital, not pure choice.

and again: hearing those contradictions on the record is interesting! jay's worldview is clearly shaped by the fact that, through a combination of extraordinary talent, industriousness, and luck, it worked for him. hearing an artist try (and frequently fail) to prescribe that same advice to the population as a whole can be fascinating. but don't turn around tell me it's f---ing marxist lmao

just for kicks, and this is not relevant to anything, really: how much do you think i make a year?

 

Dec 11, 2020

Yeah, sure, again - crudely - but he's not advocating for capitalism or to use capital to keep other people down..
and I'm not sure where you think I said it was marxist, what I said was it's not bourgeois.

Outside the trust fund? jokes aside, how much do you think I make?

 

Dec 11, 2020

I'd guess paul makes around 65k, considering he's one of the more well known rap journalists. Which would be just under 3x my yearly at this current job I'm stuck with. But even if he made the same amount, I'd be receiving a far smaller portion of the capital I generate than him.

 

Dec 11, 2020

well, he's lamenting not buying up apartment buildings that would radically appreciate in value, lol. again––interesting! he's arguing for participation in capitalism to be more equitably extended to black people. certainly a better scenario than we have now, but decidedly not anti-capitalist. (which, again, jay is under no obligation to be; my issue here is not with him, but with you mischaracterizing his arguments)

and for the record, i was (half-jokingly) characterizing 4:44 as a bourgeois record for aesthetic reasons as much as ideological ones

funny!

 

Dec 11, 2020

uhhhhhhhhh what? how do you figure this?

 

Dec 11, 2020

All capital is not equal. I work on a golf course that generates millions of dollars - do your stories do the same? Not assigning importance here, fyi. There's a reason writers don't make much - they don't generate much.

 

Dec 11, 2020

you can't assign value so literally; there are publications i write for that are part of billion-dollar conglomerates and others that lose money. because vc and real estate speculation govern so much of the economy, a lot of this stuff has been almost totally abstracted.

 

Dec 11, 2020

He's arguing that participation in capitalism is a better path than remaining a slave class, he's not being pro-capitalist. Again, the success of the argument isn't what we were discussing, rather whether the album was bourgeois.

and you can walk it back, but that's the point we were arguing - you morphed this into a discussion of whether I thought Jay-Z was marxist (I do not).

 

Dec 11, 2020

no, no, no, no, no. not letting you wriggle out of this. you called me bourgeois for not liking 4:44. that's what happened here. lol

 

Dec 11, 2020

If I lived in the town I work in my rent would triple, so yes I get your point, but it doesn't invalidate what I said. My work doesn't provide insurance, 401k etc. either.

 

Dec 11, 2020

I called you bourgeois because you are. It's tangential to you not liking 4:44 because you used class arguments as a defense for that opinion.

 

Dec 11, 2020

Sure, but the point stands that in a socialist economy with say, proportional capital sharing I would potentially make close to what you do if not more.

Not undervaluing your work here - I think what you do is much more important than what I do. But I am also being taken advantage of at a higher rate than you are.

 

Dec 11, 2020

@Donkey Kong Cuntry you can fact check @WPG too lmao. Central mass isn’t Boston but it’s still Boston adjacent ya know?

 

Dec 11, 2020

to be clear, i didn't. i think 4:44 is first and foremost a formally clumsy record without many good songs. you then, for some clinically unstable reason (are you still running background checks on people you incorrectly think are my family members?) tried to ascribe my ambivalence about a late-period jay-z album to my being bourgeois, which i pointed out was absurd because we're talking about f---ing 4:44

 

Dec 11, 2020

Also, I work right outside of Boston - I commute from Central MA because it's cheaper for me to live there.