Kanye West doesn’t give interviews frequently, so there’s a lot to chew over in his chat with Jon Caramanica in the New York Times. The discussion about West’s pendular swings back and forth between lush, soul-influenced sounds and the minimalism of his upcoming album Yeezus is fascinating, but I was struck by two other sections where West is at his most political. In the first, West levels a critique of the Grammys and other awards ceremonies that he believes are biased towards white performers:

You’ve won a lot of Grammys.

“[My Beautiful] Dark [Twisted] Fantasy” and “Watch the Throne”: neither was nominated for Album of the Year, and I made both of those in one year. I don’t know if this is statistically right, but I’m assuming I have the most Grammys of anyone my age, but I haven’t won one against a white person.

But the thing is, I don’t care about the Grammys; I just would like for the statistics to be more accurate.

You want the historical record to be right.

Yeah, I don’t want them to rewrite history right in front of us. At least, not on my clock. I really appreciate the moments that I was able to win rap album of the year or whatever. But after a while, it’s like: “Wait a second; this isn’t fair. This is a setup.” I remember when both Gnarls Barkley and Justin [Timberlake] lost for Album of the Year, and I looked at Justin, and I was like: “Do you want me to go onstage for you? You know, do you want me to fight” —

The origins of the phenomenon West feels like he’s a victim of may be a matter of race or of a generation gap in taste: for all that hip-hop’s conquered popular music and won over critics, that doesn’t mean that the tastes of the members of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences have adjusted at the same rate.

But West’s concern for history, and his remarks about how he sees himself as an activist, particularly in the moment when he condemned George W. Bush’s response to Hurricane Katrina during a national telethon—as West puts it, “When you think about it, I was wearing like, a Juicy Couture men’s polo shirt. We weren’t there, like, ready for war.”—are also revealing. West may care about racial equality, and one of the many things he wants it for is equal economic opportunity. “I am my father’s son,” he tells Caramanica. “I’m my mother’s child. That’s how I was raised. I am in the lineage of Gil Scott-Heron, great activist-type artists. But I’m also in the lineage of a Miles Davis — you know, that liked nice things also.” It’s a sentiment perfectly in keeping with West as a middle-class, suburban hip-hop pioneer who’s made some of his greatest work on the subject of second-generation black affluence.

Kanye West’s debuted a new song, “New Slaves,” for a mass audience on Saturday Night Live this weekend, and as an art project last Friday, projecting a video for the song on buildings in London, Chicago, New York, and Sydney. Among those locations was the Prada store Fifth Avenue:

It’s a fitting choice of venue, given that “New Slaves” is a complex discussion of unpaid, bonded labor, and American consumer culture. At Salon, Natasha Lennard has a great discussion of the facts behind a central section of West’s lyrics in which he raps about the rise of private prison companies that pay prisoners far below minimum wage that’s in part become successful because of the demand for incarceration created by the War on Drugs:

Yeah they confuse us with bullshit
Like the New World Order
Meanwhile the DEA
Teamed up with the CCA
They tryna lock niggas up
They tryna make new slaves
See that’s that private-owned prison
Get your piece today

But where the track gets both more psychologically perceptive and less comfortable is in West’s look at the way African-Americans are treated in the luxury consumer market, and what it means to join a class dominated by people who do things like put black men in prison for profit. At the beginning of the song, West teases out an important dichotomy that explains how racism changes, but doesn’t dissipate, as African-Americans acquire wealth and the social capital that often accompanies it:
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Because this is apparently a week that involves a lot of me lowering my head slowly and deliberately to my desk a la Peggy Olson, First Lady Michelle Obama decided to trot out some very old talking points in her commencement address to the 2013 graduating class at Bowie State University:

“Today, instead of walking miles every day to school, they’re sitting on couches for hours, playing video games, watching TV. Instead of dreaming of being a teacher or a lawyer or a business leader, they’re fantasizing about being a baller or a rapper,” Obama continued. “Right now, one in three African American students are dropping out of high school, only one in five African Americans between the ages of 25 and 29 has gotten a college degree.”

But priorities should change, she said, because “getting an education is as important if not more important than it was back when this university was founded.”

While those statistics are absolutely worrisome, I’m pretty sure that the challenges of preparing a competitive resume, getting equal access to standardized test prep, navigating the admissions process, and managing the cost of financial aid are also relevant issues to this conversation. Some of those barriers have been priorities for her husband’s administration. Mrs. Obama acknowledged the odds that a number of the graduates faced to get to and complete their educations Bowie State, though she focused on the cost of tuition and difficult family situations more than other structural issues that might affect students’ abilities to get access to a college education. And she framed their success as a matter of personal will and determination. I can also see why she might have wanted to continue a conversation of long standing within African-American communities given the setting, and as part of her larger, and important historical lesson about the obstacles that black students have faced to get educated in America.

But this particular talking point, which both Mrs. Obama and the President use relatively frequently, could do more to address the structural elements that prop up a culture that values athletics over academics. Personal motivations may be a problem, but the massive public investment in college athletic facilities, the fact that coaches are some states highest-paid public employees, and the allocation of both scholarship money and admissions spots to athletes who are unlikely to complete their academic degrees before entering professional drafts. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to dismantle “the slander that a black child with a book is trying to act white,” but I’m not sure the fantasy career aspirations of black children are the only, or even the main thing, at issue here.

And if we’re going to talk personal motivations, wanting to be “a baller or a rapper” is not a dream that’s solely the property of African-Americans. America has three major televised singing competitions right now, American Idol, The Voice, and X-Factor, all of which promise that it’s possible to rise from anonymity to remarkable fame and a career in music, and the first of which actually became notorious for airing auditions of people who had neither the skills to realistically pursue their aspirations, nor the self-knowledge to recognize the gap between their abilities and their ambitions. Participation is hardly limited to African-American singers by design or choice. There are plenty of white folks who hope to make it big in the manner of Taylor Swift in the same way African-American boys might be dreaming of growing up to become Jay-Z.

The same is more true for sports than Mrs. Obama’s remarks would suggest. In Division I men’s basketball, 1,443, or 27 percent, of the 5,265 players who participated in the 2011-2012 season were white, while 3,158, or 59 percent were African-American. During that same season, in Division I baseball, the figures were most striking. 8,304, or 82 percent of the 10,093 players, were white that season. Clearly, in the college athletic programs that feed into careers in professional sports, there’s a great deal of white interest and participation, even if it isn’t evenly distributed by sport. Miami Heat star LeBron James may be an argument for skipping college in pursuit of a professional athletic career right out of high school, but so is Washington Nationals left-fielder Bryce Harper, who earned a GED and didn’t even finish high school in a classroom setting, all so he could focus on baseball instead, even though the idea that any ordinary person could emulate either of their paths is equally improbable.
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This post discusses episodes 13 and 14 of the first season of Veronica Mars.

“I thought being a private eye was about shooting dudes and making out with sexy widows,” Wallace teases Veronica in “Lord of the Bling,” the thirteenth episode of the first season of Veronica Mars. “The widows come later,” Veronica promises him, but these two episodes of the show are about what happens when people refuse to conform to the tropes that they’ve been assigned to. First, there’s Bryce Hamilton, the son of Percy “Bone” Hamilton, a hip-hop producer, who sets up an elaborate scheme to prove to his father that being good at science doesn’t mean he’s “soft.” And in the second, there’s Carrie, “the gossip queen of Neptune High,” who uses her acute understanding of the high school rumor mill to take the brunt of a student-teacher relationship scandal for the girl who really got pregnant, an act of courage that demonstrates how Veronica, who normally keeps her detective’s toolkit sharp and clean, succumbs to bias when her own social milieu is the subject of an investigation that rubs up against her own sore spots.

“Lord of the Bling” traffics fairly heavily in stereotypes, but it gets away with its cliches with some deft attention to the extent to which stereotypes are useful to the people that embody them and to code-switching, and by making those stereotypes the subjects of the case itself. “You know that boy could stand to get hit in the head with a dodge ball or two. Toughen him up,” sighs Percy when we first meet him, signing a waiver that will let Bryce get out of physical education so he can pursue an independent study in science. “How did a man like me end up with National Black Velvet and Urkel?” Percy’s identity, as we’ll learn throughout the episode, is a creation rather than a natural outgrowth of his personality. “He didn’t advertise the fact that much of his success was due to his comfortably upper-middle-class Jewish attorney,” Mr. Bloom tells Keith Mars. Later, Yolanda, Percy’s daughter, whose disappearance is what prompts Percy to seek Keith out to look for her, explains that she’s disgusted by the way her father treated the drive-by shooting that left Mr. Bloom using a wheelchair. “You let everyone believe you ordered it because it gave you cred,” she tells him, after running off with Mr. Bloom’s son. His wife even teases him in the opening about his insistence that Bryce isn’t tough enough. “And the street was tough and you lost a lot of homies. But this is Neptune,” she tells her husband, suggesting that Percy is clinging to a trope that may have outlived its usefulness for his family.

But clearly, Percy’s attachment to that stereotype has done real damage to Percy’s family. Bryce—though he turns out to be the architect of the ransom demand for Yolanda—is bitter that his father is resorting to a private detective, rather than calling the police, a gesture he believes is meant to protect Percy’s reputation as not cooperating with the cops, rather than to expedite the search for Yolanda. “He’s been in jail a third of my life, but I’m the embarrassment? State science fair winner three years in a row but I’m the one that’s soft,” he tells Veronica, in what turns out to be the motivation for his hoax. When Veronica and Keith catch Bryce and march him back to his father to explain, Bryce tells Percy, “You can be mad, Dad. But you can’t call me soft.”
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Last week, a controversy exploded over a new Mountain Dew ad created and directed by the rapper Tyler the Creator, one of the most visible figures in the hip-hop collective Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All, which Syracuse University professor Boyce Watkins—who is himself black—suggested was one of the most racist bits ad spots he’d ever seen:

If anything, I think the ad is nominally anti-racist. The cop initially tries to steer the victim to identify a black man in a do-rag as her attacker, which seems more like criticism of him for getting it wrong than an embrace of the idea that black men are criminals. And the entire joke of the spot is that a goat in a suit is much more threatening than a lineup of large black friends. I don’t think necessarily think it’s reasonable for Tyler to expect viewers of a Mountain Dew spot that’s aimed at a broad audience rather than at Odd Future’s core audience to know that the men he cast in the lineup are his friends, or that the goat is, in fact, Felicia The Goat, a bit of ongoing schtick. Even without that, I think the text of the add is reasonably clear, and while not that racist, it’s not particularly uproarious, either.

But what it does provide is an interesting exercise in interpretation and intergenerational communication. Tyler, in a long and intriguing interview with Billboard, said that he believed his differences with Watkins, who later said he believed Tyler’s intentions had not been malign, stemmed from a generation gap. “The things that he had to experience with racism and stereotypes and being a black man in this country, is different from mine,” he told Billboard. “I grew up in a generation where there’s white kids listening to rap and black kids playing hockey, breaking the norms and everything.” And he suggested that he was disappointed by Watkins’ negative interpretation of his work, in part because he believed that it would make it harder for black artists to get access to the kinds of opportunities that Mountain Dew gave him:

He has to realize that it’s a different generation now. He’s way older than me; he’s old enough to be my father. So I totally get why he would think that, but I also don’t understand why in life are you trying to point out the negatives. It’s a young black man who got out of the ‘hood and made something of himself, who’s now working with big, white-owned corporations. Not even in front of the camera acting silly, but directing it. I’m trying to be one of the directors. But instead of looking at the positivity from that, he’s trying to boycott Mountain Dew. Now that he’s doing that, not only is it messing up opportunities for me, but also maybe opportunities for another young black male who maybe looks up to me and wants to do that in the future. It’s ludicrous.

He’s not necessarily wrong that seeing creatively challenging partnerships attract negative attention may make it harder for artists to work with large corporations in the future. But one of the things I find intriguing about Tyler’s arguments is that they reflect a generational gap that I don’t think he’s acknowledging. Watkins may have experienced more direct racism that Tyler has personally. But it might also be that Tyler is less skeptical about corporate interests and corporate power than older people, and more willing to view corporate investment as a sign that racism is irrelevant or non-operative in this case. Making money is nice, but a corporation’s willingness to write a check to a woman or a person of color isn’t necessarily proof positive that said corporation is definitively anti-sexist or anti-racist. And whatever Tyler’s intentions were in making the ad, his interpretation of what he was giving Mountain Dew isn’t necessarily the same as the corporate interpretation of what they were getting from him.

I’m with Tyler that getting more women and people of color in a position to get money from large corporate interests, in part so they can finance their own products and win more freedom from the corporations who govern their day-to-day creative lives. But I also don’t see much of a problem with asking questions about why those corporations want to be in business with certain artists and what the results of their collaborations are. Writing a check buys you product. But that money doesn’t go to the general public. And it doesn’t buy anyone the ability to opt out of the critical conversation.

As I predicted back in February when the White House Correspondents’ Association announced that Conan O’Brien would be returning to host their annual dinner, O’Brien’s routine on Saturday was a fairly tame one that took harder aim at the media than at anyone in power. But in between his bit:

and President Barack Obama’s routine:

there were some decent gags. Here are ten of our favorites:
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I can’t decide if I’m relieved or annoyed that Brad Paisley and LL Cool J released “Accidental Racist” while I was off the grid in Mexico. But their awkward melange of country and hip-hop, and even more awkward effort at racial dialogue has produced some great writing, whether it’s Ta-Nehisi on the choice of LL Cool J to provide racial cover rather than another rapper to provide a real half of a dialogue or Alan Pyke on the song as an attempt to heal America’s racial wounds with a fist bump. What I’m actually most struck by in the song, though, is its title, and what the idea that you can be “accidentally racist” means:

Most definitions of “accident” require that an incident that fits that description meet two criteria: that the event in question be both unintended and unforseeable. And it’s characteristic of our conversations about race that when someone causes offense, they insist that they aren’t culpable because their actions or speech were unintended, ignoring the question of possible foresight. It’s a means of defending yourself that puts responsibility for offense on the person who is offended, painting them as paranoid, suspicious, and generally lacking in good faith, and that allows people who are careless about race to avoid actual responsibility for hurting others. And it’s a defense that would be impossible for most people to make if they stepped back and weighed the question of whether, despite their intentions, their actions or speech could be foreseen to cause harm or summon up painful history.

Paisley’s first verse on “Accidental Racist” follows this formula to a T. He wants “the man that waited on me / At the Starbucks down on Main” to know that he doesn’t intend to telegraph his racial politics, that “The only thing I meant to say / Is I’m a Skynyrd fan.” But it doesn’t require prodigious powers of prognostication to be aware that Lynyrd Skynyrd is a band with a complex racial history, and that the Confederate national and battle flags are hurtful emblems to a lot of people. Expressing confusion that “The red flag on my chest somehow is / Like the elephant in the corner of the south” isn’t genuine surprise: it’s playing dumb, denying foresight that’s available to anyone even mildly aware of American racial politics and history. And refusing to engage in that process of thinking before you speak, or sing, or put on a t-shirt (or hell, buy a Skynyrd shirt that has a hot lady and the American flag mocked up to look like a tattoo, instead) isn’t an accident. It’s a deliberate decision, one born out of a decision to place your own comfort or convenience over the needs of other people.

Defending the song on Good Morning America today, LL Cool J insisted that “Hate can’t drive out hate, only love can. So what we’re talking about is compassion.” I don’t necessarily disagree with that sentiment. But for an act or person to meet the definition of compassionate requires more than a bland and friendly neutrality. Compassion requires both engagement and consideration for other people, and often some sacrifice. It’s leaving the Confederate Flag in the drawer at home and finding a better symbol of anti-racist Southern pride, not expecting other people not to inconvenience you because you’re really a nice guy.
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In trying to dream up a #slatepitch on the new Brad Paisley-LL Cool J collaboration “Accidental Racist,” a variety of contrarian avenues spring to mind: “Why Brad Paisley, Like Skynyrd Before Him, Is Right About The Stars & Bars.” “If You Love The Band You Can’t Hate ‘Accidental Racist.’” “Good Intentions Redeem Gag-Inducing Lyrics In Paisley-LL Collabo.”

None of those headlines can sustain a valid argument. Taking the The Band-themed one first: “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” and “Tears Of Rage” would spit in your tea if you tried to use their rich portraits of confederate humanity to excuse “Now my chains are gold but I’m still misunderstood/I wasn’t there when Sherman’s march turned the South into firewood” (LL) or “Fixed the buildings, dried some tears/But we’re still sifting through the rubble after 150 years” (Paisley). In the case of the Skynyrd pitch, you’d just be retreading a million strained defenses of the Confederate flag that boil down to “…BUT I REALLY LIKE THAT FLAG DON’T TAKE IT AWAY!” Because again, there’s no comparing the subversive lyrical tenor of “Sweet Home Alabama” – arguably the only classic rock staple more widely misunderstood than “Born In The USA” – to the godawful writing of “Accidental Racist.” And the on-wax conflict between Neil Young and Skynyrd provided exactly what’s lacking from the simplistic detente Paisley and LL attempt to voice: the unblinkered honesty that combativeness brings.

In the case of the redemptive-intentions #slatepitch, Rembert Brown already provided the appropriate irate mockery of LL’s inexcusable offer to “forget the iron chains,” among other lyrical crimes. But Brown left just enough meat on the bone to make a separate point:

This is the Americans Elect of pop culture racial healing.

Americans Elect was the Thomas Friedman-inspired moneypit for earnest rich people who believe that our policy issues can be fixed by taking the raspy edge off our politics. That’s an old idea, supported by the constant poll finding that Americans claim to want a less-caustic politics, but gutted by the real, sharp divides which underlie our policy conflicts. We genuinely disagree over the proper balances of liberty and safety, of individual and communal interests, of private property and public resources. The federalist, tri-partide cauldron our founders built functions best when those disagreements flare up underneath it and cause the country to change somewhere between as quickly as is morally just and as slowly as is socially practical. Efforts to smother those conflicts rather than identify legislators capable of crafting them into a truly responsive politics are counterproductive, and born of elites who are tired of the shouting and incapable of seeing its potential value.

The post-racial aspirations voiced by Paisley’s narrator and LL’s “black yankee” interlocutor suffer from the same self-serving, battle-weary ignorance that drove Americans Elect. While the voices in “Accidental Racist” espouse hyperawareness of color, they’re also calling for an approach to racial differences that’s functionally identical to the colorblindness canard Alyssa’s gutted before. The performers call for racism to magically heal itself through major chords and willpower. It’s The Secret by way of Tinkerbell. Paisley doesn’t want to talk to the coffeeshop guy about racism any more than LL wants to talk to white folks about mandatory minimums or systemic disparities in educational outcomes. They each want to know that ‘We’re cool, right bro?’ without actually engaging the ugly substance and legacy of American history. “Accidental Racist” deserves every ounce of clowning it gets, but a song this earnest that actually grappled with racial divisions wouldn’t merit such epic shade-throwing. Unfortunately, the aesthetics here are exactly as simple, cheap, and foolish as the sentiments. Indemnity masquerades as forgiveness, and squeezes critical self-examination conveniently out of the picture for stars&bars fans.

Like Americans Elect, the failures of “Accidental Racist” at least offer a sort of negative-space sketch of what forward motion might look like. There may be a professional political class that exploits voter antagonisms for profit rather than progress, but the antagonisms themselves are real. A third party that severs some of those antagonists from the parties that are minimally responsive to them in policy terms might do some good, but one that wishes them away is both foolish and damaging. Similarly, imagine the good that might come of pop artists calling not for a peaceful, easy, made-for-Clearchannel conversation about how racism manifests in 21^st-century America, but for a difficult, contentious, honest, and combative one.

How appropriate that Paisley locates the initiating event for his narrator’s earnest call for getting over it all in a Starbucks. “Accidental Racist” is the shiny plastic version of a call to productive racial discourse, a cheaply made thought-jalopy that will break down the second anyone foolish enough to buy it drives the thing off the lot.

Over at Feministing, Mychal Denzel Smith has a great piece comparing Rick Ross and Don Draper as men who are very invested in building up fantasy worlds that justify their own privilege:

I don’t mean to compare the rapper and Mad Men’s leading character’s status as sex symbols, because the parallels go beyond the superficial. They are both products of fiction. They’re both identity thieves whose actual life stories hold the potential to ostracize them from their chosen communities. But more importantly, they both have constructed elaborate fantasy worlds around an idea of masculinity they know isn’t true to who they are. And neither one can escape.

Or it might be that they don’t want to escape. They both know that what they’re selling is bullshit, but they do it anyway because it affords them the opportunity to indulge every hyper-masculine fantasy they’ve been told would bring them happiness. In Don’s 1960s world it means he has a beautiful wife, a beautiful ex-wife, beautiful mistresses, beautiful kids, a beautiful home, a thriving business, the envy of Pete Campbell, and respect. Every night he should lie down to sleep feeling like a king.

The occasion for the piece was Ross’s decision that it’s super-cool to rap that he: “Put molly all in her champagne, she aint even know it. I took her home and I enjoyed that, she aint even know it.” After having it pointed out to him that this sentiment is less than charming, Ross insisted that he wasn’t advocating rape because that wasn’t the term that he used, and added that “”I would never use the term rape in my records. As far as my camp, hip-hop don’t condone that. The streets don’t condone that. Nobody condones that…I just wanted to reach out to all the queens that are on my timeline and all the sexy ladies, the beautiful ladies that had been reaching out to me with the misunderstanding.” Talib Kweli has been among the people who have pointed out that this sentiment is idiotic.

But Ross’s attempt at an explanation also points to a direction I think Smith could have taken his piece in: Ross is making the same attempt to narrow down what constitutes rape and sexual assault that characters on Mad Men make all of the time. Don Draper would never think of himself as someone who assaults a woman when he shoves his fingers up Bobbie Barrett’s vagina in a restaurant. Ken Cosgrove couldn’t possibly think that chasing a coworker down, dragging her to the floor, and pulling up her skirt to see the color of her panties is harassment or assault. Pete Campbell doesn’t understand that pressuring the German au pair employed by his neighbors is an ugly form of sexual coercion. And Greg Harris, Joan Holloway’s fiancee, doesn’t see himself as a rapist for years after he assaults Joan on the floor of Roger Sterling’s office—and maybe not even after Joan tells him that “You’re not a good man. You never were, even before we were married, and you know what I’m talking about.”

Because rapists are bad men, and a specific class of bad men. They’re men who can’t get a woman’s consent to have sex, rather than ones who just don’t, or won’t. Rapes happen in alleys, in bushes, late at night, rather than in martial beds, during the day. Rape only happens between strangers, rather than between people who know each other. A woman wasn’t raped unless she has cuts, bruises, was in fear of her life. If a woman had too much to drink, she wasn’t raped. If a woman consented to sex with a man before, she wasn’t raped. If a woman is unconscious and therefore unable to give a definitive no, it isn’t rape. If a woman ought to be sexually available to you, it can’t possibly be assault.

Rick Ross may have a better class of drugs available to him than the men who harass and assault the women around them and go on thinking of themselves as perfectly nice guys, if not world-conquering ballers on the same scale as Ross or Don Draper. But he’s a great illustration of how the same old excuses echo down the ages—and how they transfer from one set of men to another as men of different races and classes get access to the kind of privilege that men like Don guarded so carefully in the past.

With the Supreme Court hearing oral arguments in the case against California’s Proposition 8 yesterday, the consensus seems to be that deadline for politicians to come out in support of equal marriage rights and to get some sort of credit for it has passed. But beyond the field on which legal equality is adjudicated, stands for equality can still be interesting. And there’s something particularly telling about this Interview magazine conversation between rapper A$AP Rocky and Alexander Wang in which Rocky both speaks up for gay rights and outlines an important tipping point. He believes it’s now worse for hip-hop’s overall brand to appear homophobic than it once was for rappers to be perceived as gay-friendly:

So now that I’m here and I’ve got a microphone in my hand and about 6,000 people watching me, I need to tell them how I feel. For instance, one big issue in hip-hop is the gay thing. It’s 2013, and it’s a shame that, to this day, that topic still gets people all excited. It’s crazy. And it makes me upset that this topic even matters when it comes to hip-hop, because it makes it seem like everybody in hip-hop is small-minded or stupid—and that’s not the case. We’ve got people like Jay-Z. We’ve got people like Kanye. We’ve got people like me. We’re all prime examples of people who don’t think like that. I treat everybody equal, and so I want to be sure that my listeners and my followers do the same if they’re gonna represent me. And if I’m gonna represent them, then I also want to do it in a good way.

It’s preferable for people to be affirmatively welcoming because they truly want their lives to be full of different kinds of people and want the communities around them to be the same way. But even if they’re not, it’s one of the great victories of the gay rights movement to make an embrace of gay rights better for business than the alternative, both by articulating the size of the gay market itself, and by expanding that figure by adding in the market of straight allies, such that that combined buying power dwarfs that of anti-gay boycotters.

The full recognition of gay humanity and gay purchasing power for a wide range of products go hand-in-hand. Once you recognize that gay people are people who deserve rights, you will probably realize that gay folks are also not a monolithic block who listen only to house music, live only in New York and San Francisco, vacation only on Fire Island, and amuse themselves only with faaaabulous clothes. Like heterosexual people, it turns out that gay people live everywhere. They buy tickets to sporting events—and at those sporting events, buy beer, and hot dogs, and jerseys. They take out mortgages in places other than Chelsea, often for homes that require things like drywall, and gardening prodcuts. And they buy hip-hop records and hip-hop singles and tickets to hip-hop shows. There’s a more attractive order in which to recognize these things, and it’s the one that recognizes the diversity of the gay community first and its purchasing power second. But you can’t recognize one without being confronted with the other. Hip-hop may be slower than Home Depot to shift its brand. But it will be a relief when no homo, a phrase as lyrically lazy as it is intellectually cowardly, becomes an anachronism.