It’s Hard To Be A Rich Radical

Welcome to Listening Habits, a column where I share the music and musical topics I’ve been fixated on recently. What could compel someone to spend four hours on a YouTube essay mostly about the rapper Killer Mike, a B-tier Dungeon Family affiliate who parlayed success as one-half of Run The Jewels to become a B-tier rap A-lister? In truth, it is no worse than sitting through six hours of self-assigned Super Bowl performer Jay-Z and Rick Rubin yap about rap and also therapy. Or watching a three-hour documentary on disgraced Silicon Valley fraudster Elizabeth Holmes in an hilariously, extremely sold out theater. Or watching four hours of Nick Saban coaching propaganda. Or one hour of an ESPN soft focus profile of Ben Simmons that tries to sidestep the questions of Simmons’ work ethic. I watch a lot of nonsense I guess it’s safe to say—and people are apparently greatly long-winded. Maybe a better question is who would actually be compelled to make a four-hour YouTube video on Killer Mike? For that answer, we’d have to get into who FD Signifier is and who Jared Ball is, and the importance of the latter’s book The Myth And Propaganda of Black Buying Power. Then we would have to talk about Black leftist politics and anticapitalist critique and how exactly we got to a point where a bunch of people think Killer Mike is at war with black activist streamers and content creators and shooting at them in random freestyles.

Read it at Defector ↗

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