The Carrion (The Brainwasher Mix) in The Stuff That's Not Interesting But Is The Most Interesting Stuff I'll Write

I actually recorded a whole video entry which I shall not post because I was crying throughout the whole thing.

My grandmother is not well. She’s being affected by dementia and it’s causing her to lose touch with reality from time to time. I know that these things happen, but it’s really difficult to witness firsthand. I thought that my relatives were being overdramatic when describing my grandmother in such terms, but there was no exaggeration.

My grandmother is phasing out of this place and preparing to pass to another realms of consciousness.

My mother has been preparing me for this since I was 10 so I have a grasp on the situation, it’s just that my grandmother has been the single greatest influence on my life and I really cannot imagine life without her.

Her situation has forced me to think about things that I’m not sure I am ready to think about. I was talking with Chuckie, my littlest brother, about the situation. I told him that because of our age difference, when I was my grandparent’s age, they’d be right around our mother’s age. He looked me in the eye and said, “I’ll take care of you when you’re old, Justin. Don’t worry about being alone.”

How does a 16 year old know exactly what to say to make me feel better?

I suppose it’s a trade-off. I missed the first 50 years of my grandmother’s life, but I get to see fifty more years of my little brothers’ lives than she will see.

Somehow the guy I was interested in last summer detonated this race bomb on Facebook by posting an article about how Iggy Azalea is racist. Apparently all these rappers are taking her to task for being a white woman who appropriates an historically black art form. (Supposedly, the reason Eminem is exempted from this discussion is because he openly boasted that he was appropriating black culture)

Now I’m going to enter some really murky territory over the next however many paragraphs, so I’m warning you....

The conversation on this Facebook thread culminated in this guy from San Francisco (of course) writing this long dissertation on how “disco sucks” is a form of white supremacy and he used the phrase “smelling the color” and just went on and on about who knows what.... I hate these discussions because they don’t actually lead anyone to anything new besides the Thesaurus. People believe that in order for their opinions to be taken seriously, they must use the most bizarre display of vocabulary ever. Now, while I am a person who appreciates a well-equipped vocabulary, the thing I have learned in communications is to talk to the level of your audience… and maybe they don’t know what the sentence “it is solipsistic drivel that feeds balkanization” means, so you basically lost your audience. Why the fuck couldn’t you just say “it’s bullshit that creates racial and political divisions and tensions”? Does that not make you sound smart enough for your own good?

There is also another aspect to this that is largely ignored. Iggy Azalea is from Australia. Admittedly, Australia, like many countries around the world, has its own tensions with race relations, however, they are not on the same level as America. Hip-hop and rap is an art form that has been exported throughout the world and once an art gets exported, it becomes appreciated outside of its initial creative context. Especially when it is ported to another country with different reactions to race. The art becomes divorced from the creative history that precipitated the need for the art in the first place.... By the way, that is not exclusive to exportation, it’s also known as “commercialization.”

America is weirdly obsessed with race issues, and because of that, we cannot view race relations within other cultures properly. I didn’t understand this until I left the country and experienced alternate paradigms of race for myself. America is so fixated on race that it filters every discussion we have and it tints how we view other cultures, as well.

Iggy probably doesn’t know that the origin of hip-hop was in Harlem during the 1970s and that it started as a political form of expression. She wasn’t born, and when she was born, she was born in Australia and probably didn’t even hear about Harlem until after she had already heard hip-hop for the first time.... and I doubt the hip-hop she heard was politically charged, it was probably some booty-shaking 90s jam that is as far away from Harlem politics as her music is now.

You can’t expect someone who makes art to know the entire background of the art form. It would be nice, but it’s not required.

Just because someone makes a movie doesn’t mean they know the Lumière Brothers’ history or their competition with Thomas Edison to create motion pictures, and how that competition decided the way in which movies are viewed by an audience. Would you require them to know that? Would the person’s geographical location change your expectation of their knowledge level? Would someone in France or the United States be more responsible for having that knowledge than someone in Taiwan or Madagascar?

I don’t like having these discussions because even the framework of the discussions themselves are flawed. There is no attempt to expand the issue to incorporate greater perspectives that are at play because Americans have the sole-right to discuss race issues because of reasons that make no sense to me. When we are criticized for our race relations, we immediately tell them they don’t know what they’re talking about, which is partially correct, but on the other side of the coin, we don’t know that we don’t know why we’re correct when we tell them that they don’t know what they’re talking about because we don’t actually know what we’re talking about.

In the end, it means little to me one way or the other. Maybe my grandmother has the right idea. Losing one’s mind might be the only way to completely absolve yourself from this obsessive conversation about race in America. Because this dialogue is not about progress, it’s about feasting on the corpses of your enemies in a moment of victory. Revenge is really the only truly American trait that we all share as a country. We just have this nasty habit of confusing revenge for justice and thinking those words are interchangeable.