Watching the NBA awards on TNT tonight.
It is almost entirely black.
The hosts, the award recipients, everything. It is a show about the NBA, but really it’s a
show about the ascendency of black culture, black power, black relevance and
black celebrity.
It’s not a great show.
It's like any other awards show….boring, self-agrandizing, etc. etc. and that is the point. Millennials couldn’t care less about other
award shows. A lot care about this one. This is a kind of a big
deal.
Black culture is without a doubt the dominate arts culture
in America. It’s not even close. When I was younger, smart people would say
that black culture was ascendant. It is
no longer ascendant. It's here. It is what every
kid wants to grab hold of and make it their own.
I was also recently watching a documentary about the Lakers
Celtics rivalry. One of the subtexts of
the story was how hard it was for Boston to sell out the garden in the 1970s and
early 80’s because of the amount of black players.
It seems ridiculous today, but in less than a generation
we’ve gone from a hegemony of black athletes being a loss-leader to the
absolute need for black celebrities/athletes/leaders being associated with a
brand.
Baseball was America’s past time. Baseball is fast becoming irrelevant. Basketball and football, two sports than need
black athletes just to open the doors are so much more popular. Baseball is a white sport and is associated
with old men wearing non-ironic hats.
Baseball today only gets by because of history and
weather. Baseball only exists because of
summer days, beer and an homage to your old man.
American industry used to worry about products and services
being too closely associated with black people and black culture. Now if you want to attract white kids and
Hispanic kids and Asian kids and middle eastern kids to a mass-market product,
you HAVE to use black culture and urban hip hop culture to market it or it will
never get out of R&D.
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