CVK
Is Hip Hop’s Audience Really 80% White?
from Davey D
“…The truth of the matter is that this 80% white Hip Hop fan myth has long been a nice marketing tool used by media corporations to justify ad revenues for Top 40 radio stations. Here’s a little background on this… According to Black radio programmers they avoided playing rap, because it was affecting their advertising…

…What wasn’t stated and this is where this 80% myth comes in, is the fact that the Top 40 stations had this Newsweek quote along with their CHR status that they could present to ad buyers. Essentially they were able to say, ‘yes we’re playing Public Enemy, NWA and 2 Live Crew’ which we (KMEL) was doing at that time, ‘but this is what the mainstream (white audience wants). Look at this Newsweek article. It’s proof positive that 80% of the people who like this aggressive music are the main ones purchasing it. I recall specifically seeing sales kits with that page and quote highlighted…”

The New All-White “Friends”
from blackprof.com
“…The Washington Post reports that this Fall CBS has a new tv show called “The Class.” It is about a group of eight friends in Philadelphia, and has the same producer as the hit show “Friends.” Like Friends, the cast is all white. In what has got to be one of the lamest excuses for apartheid employment ever, the producer David Crane said “When we wrote the script, we wrote it color-blind…and then we auditioned. For six months we saw just a huge range and diversity of actors and at the end of the day these were absolutely the eight actors who were absolutely right for the parts.” I hope nobody watches this show…”

The Afro-Asian Matrix
from Tripmaster Monkey
“…Betamax changed all that. Suddenly, even a kid in West Philly with no connections (except to the Jordanian dude who opened what was probably the first downtown video rental store) and no plane fare to HK could watch Wang Lung-wei deftly swing a gaun dao, a blade-topped pole, across an opponent’s scalp…

…The cowboy myth was remote and overdone. Military machismo had yet to return to fashion and Blaxploitation and Hollywood action films—although entertaining enough and filled with moments in which crooked cops and stereotyped South American drug lords received their comeuppance at the hands of gun-wielding tough guys—lacked a grand heroic vision. But in the Shaw films, the stakes were always high (at times, the very existence of China or, at least, the Shaolin Temple), the fighters were always unbelievably adept and the aura of tragic heroism hung heavily in the air. What more could you possibly want?…”

…Zzer!
from fourfour
“…And that, I think, is my major problem with Timberlake — I typically don’t buy what he’s selling because he pushes it too hard. He puts such an effort into emoting or, like here, copping a swagger, that it’s always like he’s playing some character in a sketch. As R&B is his primary template, I think we can chalk this up to the fact that he’s white. No, I’m not saying that he’s naturally inferior as a non-black R&B singer, but I do think that his awareness of his whiteness makes him feel like he has something to prove (i.e. this is a social problem, not a biological one). I guess what I’m getting at is that Timberlake has a version of double consciousness that makes it difficult to tell the truth, as it were, in his music. (And yeah, I know we’re talking about pop music, which is necessarily false, but the ultimate goal of the soul singer is to make the cliché believable.) Or maybe more simply, he just worries that people won’t think he’s cool. I don’t even know if I’d consider Timberlake a poseur, because as someone who’s been in the spotlight since before he had pubes (much less chin pubes), he really can’t be expected to have formed an identity to rebel against in the first place. Poor guy…”

Ringtone race wars
from Sepia Mutiny
“…I guess I’m behind the times: It hadn’t occurred to me that cellphone ringtones might be a medium for propagating nasty messages. But of course upon thinking about it, it makes sense. Here’s an unpleasant little situation from South Africa, as reported today by the BBC:

A racist mobile phone ringtone has been condemned by South Africa authorities in the city of Cape Town. The lyrics are in Afrikaans and advocate violence against black people in derogatory terms. … The lyrics of the song, according to a local newspaper, refer to a black person as a “kaffir” - an outlawed and derogatory term in South Africa. It describes how such a person should be tied to the back of a pickup truck and dragged around while driving. The chorus has a blatantly racist tone and ends with a call to set dogs on the black person.