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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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.

Up and coming rapper Angel Haze took the instrumentals from Eminem’s efforts to exorcise his relationship with his mother, “Cleaning Out My Closet,” and laid down an account of sexual abuse she suffered as a child. The track’s been getting passed around a lot recently, and for good reason:

The physical details of the assaults and the way they were discussed in her community are horrific, and the song is powerfully emotionally precise, describing how Haze starved herself to avoid appearing attractive to everyone, and suggesting that she pursued relationships with women rather than men because her terror of male sexual attention was so deep-seated. “It happened so often he was getting particular,” she says of her abuser’s escalation. And I’m hard-pressed to think of a more concise explanation of what it means to come to terms with yourself in the wake of trauma than Haze’s line: “I’m sane, I’m not insane, but not the same as before.”

It’s rare songs like this that use hip-hop as a powerful confessional vehicle for women that make it disconcerting to listen to “White Dress,” Kanye West’s track for The Man With The Iron Fists, that began circulating around the same time as “Cleaning Out My Closet.” It’s ostensibly a song about a couple’s wedding, flashing back to their meeting—which includes Kanye letting her know that even though he met her in the club he still thought about wifing her, because obviously girls who wear form-fitting clothing aren’t normally marriage material, or something:

But in the first verse, there’s an unnerving line that’s meant to be sweet but that actually makes me, uneasily, think more of sex by surprise than a romantic seduction: “Just a satin gown, you asleep with no make-up / I’m just tryna be inside you ‘fore you wake up.” It says a lot that Angel Haze has to say the details of her own sexual assault are disgusting, an apology for recounting them even in a confessional song, but something like this Kanye verse is presented like it’s utterly innocuous.

When Nicki Minaj joked about voting for Mitt Romney in a recent song, rhyming “I’m a Republican, voting for Mitt Romney/You lazy bitches is fucking up the econ’my,” it was a useful reminder that, while hip-hop has, at times, been a genre that relies heavily on claims of authenticity, rappers don’t actually intend to follow through on every declarative statement they make in song. But while “To The World,” Kanye West’s leaked track from his forthcoming Cruel Summer album, is probably not a useful tool for determining whether Mr. West will vote for President Obama, or evaluating Sen. Harry Reid’s claims that Mitt Romney paid no income taxes in some years, the line “I’m just trying to protect my stacks, Mitt Romney don’t pay no tax, Mitt Romney don’t pay no tax,” is actually worth paying attention to:

One of the central goals of the Obama reelection campaign has been to firmly fix the idea that Mitt Romney is an out-of-touch rich guy, someone who likes firing people, who ships his money overseas, who refuses to release his tax returns, probably because there’s something truly awful in them. If that narrative is sufficiently accepted that West can use Romney as shorthand for tax evasion, that’s an indicator of the larger success of that strategy. I’m not saying that a single hip-hop lyric is a weathervane of the election. But it’s not a bad sign that an idea is gaining some traction.

The bridge is yours.

-Jaguar gets that product placement doesn’t always have to be sycophantically positive.

-SEK has a typically brilliant analysis of the camera work in “Blackwater.”

-Watching Curt Schilling blame the state of Rhode Island for the failure of his video game company is a study in conservative hilarity.

-I actually think this trolling of Community fans, myself included, is pretty funny.

-Of course Danny Boyle is basing the London Olympics Opening Ceremony on The Tempest and Frankenstein.

-Jay-Z and Kanye West take to the barricades:

Remember back in 2010 after the earthquake that devastated Haiti, when Wyclef Jean briefly emerged as a major spokesman for the island? His Yele Haiti foundation raised a fortune. He was briefly a candidate for president of the country. And then it turned out that Yele Haiti at minimum wasn’t providing much in the way of useful services, and at worst, was something of a personal slush fund for Jean and his family. Now, Kanye West’s foundation, which has a stated purpose of combatting “the severe dropout problem in schools across the United States by providing under-served youth access to music production programs,” turns out to have spent just $7,695 on programming that serves that purpose between 2008 to 2010. It doesn’t seem like Kanye was looting the foundation or anything—the spending on wages, salaries, and benefits seems fairly reasonable for a non-profit. But it does raise the question of why celebrities set up personal foundations at all.

I’m all for celebrity charitable giving. I think it’s just dandy that rich people feel obligated to give away at least some portion of their wealth lest folks get too angry at them for having it. And of course it’s well within people’s rights to give money to whatever wacky causes they wish. But I do wish that when celebrities started thinking about how to give their money away, efficacy was at the top of their lists.

Acting is a highly specialized profession. So is non-profit management. As is, say, rebuilding after an earthquake or running a music education program. So just because celebrities are invested in an issue doesn’t actually mean they’re particularly well-qualified to do work in that arena, or to know how to hire people who are. Creating a new organization in a space can be redundant, and create a burdensome grant proposal process that adds work for organizations who are better-qualified to actually spend that money. And if that new organization ends up doing essentially no valuable work at all, it’s an embarrassment. Having your name on the organization isn’t worth it if that’s going to be the final result. And it’s not as if there aren’t a plethora of organizations who would love to give celebrities a seat on their boards, ask them to do very little work, and ensure that their money gets spent in a way that’s efficient and useful. Being lazy about your charitable giving can end up requiring that you expend more effort in the long run when it’s revealed to be hollow or a fraud.

Mos Def, performing under his Yasiin Bey stage name, took a shot at turning “Ni**as in Paris,” the most recent single off Kanye West and Jay-Z’s joint album Watch the Throne, into a piece of biting social commentary:

I don’t necessarily think that “Ni**as in Paris,” which is pretty obviously about the distorting influence of wealth, needed a socially conscious-remix as an antidote. That said, the riffs on the original are pretty funny, turning a bathroom hook up into a parody of Cosby-like concern with how young black men present themselves; a joke about lesbians into a commentary on fast food and diabetes; and I pretty much lost it at “Prince Williams ain’t do it right if you ask me / If I was him I’d put some black up in my family.” I’m less compelled by the slightly apocalyptic stuff towards the end, but it’s a pretty comprehensive and clever inversion of the song.

And it’s also part of a noble semi-tradition of other rappers poking Kanye and Jay-Z about their politics. Kanye may have gone socially-conscious on his remix of his own song, “Diamonds from Sierra Leone,” but the line that everyone remembers from that song is Jay-Z declaring that “I’m not a businessman, I’m a business, man.” It took Lupe Fiasco to drop actual knowledge about the history of the contemporary diamond trade and talk jewelry depreciation:

The video for Jay-Z and Kanye West’s “Ni**as in Paris” isn’t exactly something we’ve never seen before:

Visually, it’s a clear descendant of both the Gnarls Barkley video for “Crazy”:

And the ghostly big cats seem like they probably strolled over from the menagerie on the set of Frank Ocean’s video for “Novacane”:

But “Ni**gas in Paris” does a really nice job of showing us a pulsing crowd that almost seems to be undergoing mitosis looks from the perspective of the men on stage. There’s something profoundly disconcerting about the way a normal audience suddenly splits into wild geometry or the passage through the crowd is suddenly full of horror-movie sets of identical twins. If this is what the world looks like when you’re an insanely famous person, it’s a lot less appealing than it looks from the outside.

The bridge is yours.

-Fans of Lizzy Caplan should be happy to hear this.

-Bad news for Egyptian comedians under the new regime.

-It’s so weird to me that Dave Grohl will be more identified with the Foo Fighters in history than he is with Nirvana.

-Taxing violent video games to pay for programs to combat childhood obesity and bullying.

-Kanye West will dispel your stereotypes about the Middle East.

-M.I.A. has a new video out:

I was packing during Kanye West’s latest Twitter Explosion of Crazy and traveling during the reaction to it, so forgive me this late pass. But while I think his latest plans to adapt a Jetsons movie and launch a think tank-cum-Entertainment-720-like organization (credit to BuzzFeed for realizing the parallels) are equal parts nutty and kind of fascinating, they also illustrate something that’s bizarre about our entertainment culture. Somehow, we’ve arrived at a place where success means not just killing it in one field, but EGOT-plus-a-lot-of-other-letters-ing. It’s one thing to launch a fragrance line because you can make bank on it while also singing or acting. It’s totally understandable, if you’re a rapper, or a singer, to try something new within the broader confines of your profession: I miss Cee Lo Green as a rapper, but I’m glad for him (and us) that he’s found the warble that lets him turn out effortless imitations of ’50s and ’60s pop. It’s another to insist that you’re capable of rapping, designing clothes, and pulling together an entertainment think tank.

Part of the reason this is nuts is because it’s not really possible for a significant number of people to be world-class level talents in multiple areas. Justin Timberlake may have his William Rast clothing line, but he doesn’t seem to spend the bulk of his time on it and also appears to be wise enough not to let its critical reception get to him. Being a serious musician and an increasingly serious actor is enough. The Kardashians, I think, are more on the commercial end of the scale, but there is something odd about pretending that you actually have your fingers in so many pies when it’s an impossibility.

But more importantly, it speaks to a huge, weird neediness. Kanye West is a generationally beloved hip-hop artist who turned himself from a producer into a credible MC by force of will, shifted fashion in the genre to a hipster-inflected, confessional style, and has pushed forward the integration of hip-hop with pop and indie rock. His legacy is secure. So why all the other stuff, when he’s exposing himself to stunning failures like his first fashion collection. Even if he’s arrogant to the point of delusion, it still speaks to a need to be validated that’s essentially unfulfillable.