17 April 2009: "Some of my bros started a post-post-ironic rap group"

This post is about Jim Crow and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Carles' typically oblique and challenging analysis here pivots around this penultimate statement: "ughh…. so disenfranchised with hiphop/the scene/rap/art/everything." Using the schematic inverse of cultural disenfranchisement as a lever, Carles evokes the systematic disenfranchisement of African Americans throughout the 20th century and beyond. The contempt and disgruntlement that the spectacle of clueless "‘wannabe rap tribes’ in ur local scene" inevitably conjures serves as a rough parallel for the disgrace and outrage that should register with the denial of political rights to African Americans. The qualities Carles assigns to the insignificant hip-hop aspirants -- "I think the concept behind it is that they are ‘not black’, ‘privileged’, and ‘get’ global issues" -- are precisely those qualities that are presumed by the political establishment to qualify one for civic and democratic participation. This despite the token efforts to rectify the issue, solemnized as Jim Crow, in the wake of civil-rights protesting and rioting in the 1960s. And the crisis has perhaps deepened, as waves of immigrants pass African Americans by on the status ladder, a phenomenon Carles shrewdly captures with a reference to multicultural icon MIA: "Would u rather watch these bros or M.I.A., or are they ‘basically the same thing.’" Is there no difference now between privileged whites and heralded immigrant groups vis-a-vis the suppression of the more longstanding minority groups in America? How have the in-groups mobilized culture in an effort to preserve their privilege? Perhaps "beats" -- stolen or not -- have more in common than we are willing to admit with "beatings," like those traditionally handed out to dissident minority factions?