I Just Can't...

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

I Just Can't...

I was looking at YouTube and decided to check out the number one trending video on the platform for today.

It's a music video called "Cardi B - WAP feat. Megan Thee Stallion"

So I fired it up and clicked play.

Ehhhhhgggg...

I'm not going to embed it. But here is the link. Over 42 million views and counting in two days.

I don't even feel old for not resonating with this kind of music for the young.

God knows I don't have sex hangups. As people who know me know, I'm pretty much live and let live--do your own thing and blessed be.

But when I look at that video, I feel clean for not resonating...

I stopped watching after about three minutes. It's not that I couldn't finish watching it. I didn't want to.

Your mileage may vary... But God help you if that's your journey...

Michael

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

I walked into that music video in all innocence. No frame other than let's see what is the top trending thing on YouTube.

Boy did I step on a sinkhole.

Let's call the video one extreme.

 

Here is the other extreme, a discussion of this video by Owen Shroyer of Infowars. 

Owen calls these two singers, Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion, "prostitutes for Satan" and he's not wrong. They are open about what they are doing and I believe they would love the designation.

Owen presents much truth, but he also goes way too far in the other direction, saying stupid shit like a woman will never be happy unless she learns how to take care of a man. Seriously, you can't make this up.  

But he is right that a lot of teenage girls will be influenced by this to become like this and then do stupid things they will bitterly regret later in life. He didn't say the following, but it's obvious that all their mistakes will all be on the Internet in selfies and will not go away. That includes filming themselves performing explicit sex. 

 

A Different Frame

But rather than go into a Christ versus Satan frame, I want to look at something more contextual. Christ versus Satan is not the motor of the recording industry. Money is. If people are buying it, they are selling it.

So I stepped back a bit. Why the sudden emphasis on Satan and demonic themes? I mean, there has always been some of that with heavy metal and things like that. But why the sudden explosion in popularity?

Then it hit me.

Kanye.

Of course.

He's the top selling rap star and now he's doing Christ. So, if I were a typical music industry person, I would thing that if somebody does Satan, maybe they will make boatloads of money.

And there it is. That makes sense to me.

 

Katy Perry

Incidentally, I haven't thought in these terms when Katy Perry did a witch coven with benefits during the 2014 Grammy Awards with the song "Dark Horse," but I bet there was a similar cultural influence where Christianity was making oodles of mainstream money.

Actually, I paused after writing that and looked it up. Yup. A 2013 TV series ratings juggernaut called "The Bible" sparked a spate of Christian religion-themed movies and other entertainment like Noah, God's Not Dead,  Heaven is for Real, Son of God, and so on.

But even then, the impact of Perry's witch coven was peanuts compared to the Ancient Egypt treatment she did for the official video of "Dark Horse."

(If you are not familiar with Perry's different thematic versions of "Dark Horse," here are links to the YouTube videos: Witch Coven version and Ancient Egypt version.)

Why? What happened in the world back then? 

Oh yeah. Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood had recently (2013) been overthrown in Egypt and new elections were happening. Thus, for all practical purposes, this spelled the end of the "fundamentally change the world" effects of the 2010 Arab Spring, Obama's pet project. All with Obama openly and frequently bitching about it. This was an open wound at the time in American culture on all sides. And the recording folks made indecent gobs of money from it by Perry appealing to magic mixed with Ancient Egypt--emotionally giving one side a feeling of surging power and the other side a feeling of looming malignant threat. There was also a feeling that Hillary Clinton would be the first female president, so Perry's Cleopatra theme touched on that feeling.

Whoever orchestrated Perry's career at the time knew how to turn the emotional focus of the world into serious moolah. The proof is they set aside the coven, despite all the moolah being made from a Christian revival in the mainstream, and went with the more universal collision zeitgeist at the time, the political vision for the world--which will triumph? They hit it at just the right time and in just the right place.

 

Back to Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion

In the terms I just talked about with Katy Perry, there is much to say about Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion. The world events are mostly Trump-related these days, but the cultural issue driving the particular success of their song is Kanye-related.

Dueling pop stars.

Big deal.

But it is a big deal in real world effects. The popularity of their song is is going to damage a lot of young girls. It's feeding them a visceral message that doing porn and worshiping the devil to get power over men is the way life should be. Why is that damaging? It's happening at the moment their bodies are being swamped with new sex-related hormones from the normal human growth cycle. In simple terms, if they are healthy, they are horny and not thinking straight at that age.

This is a perfect time for imprinting their subconscious in a Howard Bloom manner.  He lays it out in his book Einstein, Michael Jackson & Me: A Search for Soul in the Power Pits of Rock and Roll. Basically, his theory (a sound one in my opinion) is that when sex, attention and music convene in a moment of perception where all three are intensified to the max and you get a a feeling of leaving yourself and becoming part of a universal flow, this imprints your subconscious with an image and behavior you will imitate from their on out without even realizing it. This works more on the young than it does on more mature humans, but it still works on all. If you are interested, I made recent post giving an overview of imprinting on OL here.

In a certain sense, the popularity of this song is child abuse through peer pressure.

(Man, do I sound like an old fogy when I say that. Dayaamm!  )

Michael

[Dglgmut]

In a more general sense it's about equality--women imitating men (the men they are familiar with). "Oh, you're freaky? I can be freaky too." Why does this happen more with black women? Because black men are harder to get commitment from. The reaction from black women is to step up their sexuality, which they learn from men.

 

Satan isn't an alternative to God, Satan is the counter force required to get back to neutral.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

26 minutes ago, Dglgmut said:

In a more general sense it's about equality--women imitating men...

D,

Not to me.

That's quite a story you told about how black women feel.

 

Michael

[Brant Gaede]

2 hours ago, Dglgmut said:

In a more general sense it's about equality--women imitating men (the men they are familiar with). "Oh, you're freaky? I can be freaky too." Why does this happen more with black women? Because black men are harder to get commitment from. The reaction from black women is to step up their sexuality, which they learn from men.

How do you know WTF you are talking about?

--Brant

[Dglgmut]

For my actual evidence, from listening to and observing young people including black people. If you aren't aware of how sexualized young black women are, in particular, it's pretty extreme. For the theory on the "why" I've gotten most of it from this man:

 

Women copy men in some ways and men copy women in some ways. Men are creative sexually, while women are creative in terms of showing love.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

28 minutes ago, Dglgmut said:

For the theory on the "why" I've gotten most of it from this man...

You need a larger data sample.

[Brant Gaede]

5 hours ago, Dglgmut said:

For my actual evidence, from listening to and observing young people including black people. If you aren't aware of how sexualized young black women are, in particular, it's pretty extreme. For the theory on the "why" I've gotten most of it from this man:

 

Women copy men in some ways and men copy women in some ways. Men are creative sexually, while women are creative in terms of showing love.

A two hour video?

Look, I suspect if white women were socially reduced to black women you could say the same thing, out of many things, about them.

Up from slavery meant a different kind of slavery post 1865. This was shucked off in the 1960s only to be reimposed by "The Great Society" of Lyndon Johnson turning blacks into dependent welfare recipients along with poor whites destroying the natural family structure out of human biology. The man was functionally reduced to making babies, not supporting and raising his family. Now compare fucking time to working time when the man doesn't have to work. What's left? More time for fucking all over the place. And the girl-woman? What man is she saving herself for? Here today, gone today? Or, practically speaking, the man has more time not just for fucking but drug consumption and dealing. Prison time is just a change of venue. And knowing, at least subconsciously, your life is cheap and almost worthless killing anyone who gets in your way is relatively easy.

--Brant

welcome to the South Side of Chicago and a man named LeRoy Brown

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

5 hours ago, Brant Gaede said:

A two hour video?

Brant,

I listened to some of it skipping around.

In the parts I heard, there are men and women saying fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck...

Besides, the video is from 2006. It's been ages since I've watched Patrice O'Neal. He was actually a funny comedian back in the day. He died in 2011.

But to point, have you ever listened to modern rap? Especially male rappers? In a huge amount of it, they use the N word like that, like, say, seven times a line.

But then go hang around a bunch of black people--not younger inner city neighbor neighborhood dwellers, just normal suburban people.

They don't talk like that. They have a normal vocabulary.

 

I think the rap crap in the form it's in today is so popular because it's a big fuck you to the past for black people. I don't blame them, either. I know I would go along with that up to a point if I had been born black. (Oddly enough, I was part of the black music community in São Paulo through the Chic Show crowd. They used to tell me I was born the wrong color. But I was there mostly running behind a black woman I was in love with, the Playboy bunny I have written about before.  Still, I produced some good music and shows. Also, I helped them out when they brought down famous attractions like James Brown, Public Enemy, Too Short--this last and his insiders were a raunchy bunch of dudes, and so on.)

I don't think modern rap will last as popular as it is in that form, though. Maybe another generation or so because of the brainwashing that happened in public schools where many young people believe the antebellum attitudes of the 1800's are mainstream. This brainwashing is exploding in the recent Black Lives Matter surge, but since that movement was orchestrated and funded in advance behind the scenes and did not arise from a grass roots movement, I predict it will die out like a brush fire after November when the funding dries up.

The thing that bothers me about the call for young black teenage girls to do porn and glorify Satanic symbols is the visceral hook sex has with mirror neurons. There are certain subconscious reactions we have as humans that are involuntary. Observing explicit and near-explicit sex gets the attention of everyone, even if they override it right after and go tut-tut-tut. On the negative side, when we see someone near us vomiting, we get the urge to join them. These visceral imitative things are part of the human experience. They're the way the brain is prewired.

I think it's evil to put the entire media entertainment and publicity machine behind using this on young teenage black girls. Their teenage years are confusing enough without them being bombarded with calls to join in Satanic fads and porn as the good life, with peer pressure being ginned up for this by gobs of money and entertainment industry insider influence.

Like I said, a lot of damage and heartbreak is coming to many of those young girls.

This project is not as evil as sending young adults off to fight endless wars for profit so the elitist ruling class can keep their cash flow up, but it's close.

Michael

[Dglgmut]

12 hours ago, Brant Gaede said:

A two hour video?

Look, I suspect if white women were socially reduced to black women you could say the same thing, out of many things, about them.

Up from slavery meant a different kind of slavery post 1865. This was shucked off in the 1960s only to be reimposed by "The Great Society" of Lyndon Johnson turning blacks into dependent welfare recipients along with poor whites destroying the natural family structure out of human biology. The man was functionally reduced to making babies, not supporting and raising his family. Now compare fucking time to working time when the man doesn't have to work. What's left? More time for fucking all over the place. And the girl-woman? What man is she saving herself for? Here today, gone today? Or, practically speaking, the man has more time not just for fucking but drug consumption and dealing. Prison time is just a change of venue. And knowing, at least subconsciously, your life is cheap and almost worthless killing anyone who gets in your way is relatively easy.

--Brant

welcome to the South Side of Chicago and a man named LeRoy Brown

I don't disagree with any of this except I would add that a lack of police presence and priority is a big factor in the "killing anyone who gets in your way" part. I think a difference in the amount and type of violence in a child's environment probably has tentacles reaching all of the places in their life that are markers for black underachievement/oppression, and so there is also a partial feedback loop that can easily get, and has gotten, out of control. This also affects how status is attained and what qualities are signifies of status from the female perspective, as well as the purpose a woman serves, from the man's perspective.

 

What I said originally was not really about black women. It was about women, noting that black women are in a different situation and so their womanness is expressed differently. Also, that 2 hour radio show was one of 13, and there's also some more radio appearances from him dealing with callers and their relationship issues. I only linked that one because it's the first in a series that has some very good insight from a man with no significant formal education.

 

He actually stumbles into some Randian ideas, and some psychological theories that parallel things that Jordan Peterson says: "men test ideas; women test men," for example.

 

Here's a clip of just the insight, without as much shooting of shit:

 

[Dglgmut]

5 hours ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

I think it's evil to put the entire media entertainment and publicity machine behind using this on young teenage black girls. Their teenage years are confusing enough without them being bombarded with calls to join in Satanic fads and porn as the good life, with peer pressure being ginned up for this by gobs of money and entertainment industry insider influence.

Do you think this is a creation of the media and not a sample of real culture?

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

34 minutes ago, Dglgmut said:

Do you think this is a creation of the media and not a sample of real culture?

D,

I don't know what you mean by "real culture," but suppose I did.

I don't think in the "either-or" way your question framed it.

Black and white thinking, for me, is for issues that are relevant to black and white identifications. (Such as: are you pregnant or are you not?)

"The culture," real or not real, does not have a nature that comports such black-and-white identifications.

Michael

[Dglgmut]

16 minutes ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

D,

I don't know what you mean by "real culture," but suppose I did.

I don't think in the "either-or" way your question framed it.

Black and white thinking, for me, is for issues that are relevant to black and white identifications. (Such as: are you pregnant or are you not?)

"The culture," real or not real, does not have a nature that comports such black-and-white identifications.

Michael

My question was do you think the values and behaviors featured in pop culture, such as that video, are manufactured or discovered by the creators?

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

15 minutes ago, Dglgmut said:

My question was do you think the values and behaviors featured in pop culture, such as that video, are manufactured or discovered by the creators?

I don't think like that.

I just said that.

[Peter]

2 hours ago, Dglgmut said:

Do you think this is a creation of the media and not a sample of real culture?

Values are held individually. Then there are the words like ethos and culture. Sometimes a blockbuster movie or even a Disney film like Cinderella can change how kids and adults think, so the media is not just the news media, it is how many or most of us think "collectively" in a society . . . in a good way.  A South African actress, Chailize Theron?? in Entertainment magazine was talking about how little TV they had and how some movies had a tremendous impact on her as a kid. Interesting thoughts.

[Dglgmut]

"that movement [BLM] was orchestrated and funded in advance behind the scenes and did not arise from a grass roots movement"

Let's play WHO SAID IT? So an ideological movement can be explained in black and white terms, but not a music video?

Also: "So, if I were a typical music industry person, I would thing that if somebody does Satan, maybe they will make boatloads of money." Seems you are implying that the Satanic angle was the idea of a music industry person.

Here's an article from 3 years ago: Wait a Minute, is Satanism Actually Really Great?

[Peter]

46 minutes ago, Dglgmut said:

maybe they will make boatloads of money

I went back and looked at the Charlize Theron article. The movie that “changed her life” was “Aliens” with Susan Alexandra "Sigourney" Weaver. Before that she only knew male, action show heroes from shows like “MacGyver” and “Knight Rider” . . . “just all these dudes.” But the character Ripley in “Aliens” knocked her socks off. Here is an interesting fact. The original “Alien” was directed by Ridley Scott and “Aliens” was directed by James Cameron, age 65, who was once married to Linda Hamilton, who with her twin sister, is from a place near me. I always wondered about those like sounding names, Ridley and Ripley.  Peter

Notes with Wikipedia. In total, Cameron's films have grossed approximately US$2 billion in North America and US$6 billion worldwide. Avatar and Titanic are the second and third highest-grossing films of all time, earning $2.78 billion and $2.19 billion, respectively. As of 2020, Cameron holds the achievement of having directed the first two of the five films in history to gross over $2 billion worldwide. In 2010, Time magazine named Cameron as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. Cameron is also an environmentalist and runs several sustainable businesses.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

52 minutes ago, Dglgmut said:

Let's play WHO SAID IT? So an ideological movement can be explained in black and white terms, but not a music video?

D,

Who or what are you talking about?

What I said?

Heh.

Keep plugging. I have faith in you.

One day I am sure you will understand the nature of ideological movements and might even understand the limitations and applications of black and white thinking, although I'm not so sure.

At any rate, so far, you've got a ways to go.

Michael

[Dglgmut]

2 hours ago, Peter said:

I went back and looked at the Charlize Theron article. The movie that “changed her life” was “Aliens” with Susan Alexandra "Sigourney" Weaver. Before that she only knew male, action show heroes from shows like “MacGyver” and “Knight Rider” . . . “just all these dudes.” But the character Ripley in “Aliens” knocked her socks off. Here is an interesting fact. The original “Alien” was directed by Ridley Scott and “Aliens” was directed by James Cameron, age 65, who was once married to Linda Hamilton, who with her twin sister, is from a place near me. I always wondered about those like sounding names, Ridley and Ripley.  Peter

Notes with Wikipedia. In total, Cameron's films have grossed approximately US$2 billion in North America and US$6 billion worldwide. Avatar and Titanic are the second and third highest-grossing films of all time, earning $2.78 billion and $2.19 billion, respectively. As of 2020, Cameron holds the achievement of having directed the first two of the five films in history to gross over $2 billion worldwide. In 2010, Time magazine named Cameron as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. Cameron is also an environmentalist and runs several sustainable businesses.

Hey, that quote is not of mine!

edit: Sorry! I see you were quoting me quoting

[Peter]

Exactly. I was thinking about who made boatloads of money.  I guess I am a hundreds of dollars-aire. Would i want to be a billionaire?  Guess.

[dldelancey]

Young girls are not damaged by random music videos, even music videos that have 42 million views.  They are damaged by a lack of exposure to healthy relationships in their homes and peer groups.  They are damaged by not having adults in their lives who model how men and women should treat each other.  They are damaged by a lack of education and by emotional and physical neglect or abuse.

Their interest in random music videos is a reflection of the damage they've already suffered.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

51 minutes ago, dldelancey said:

Young girls are not damaged by random music videos, even music videos that have 42 million views.  They are damaged by a lack of exposure to healthy relationships in their homes and peer groups.

Deanna,

I agree with the random video part.

But how about a steady stream of videos glorifying Satanism and porn?

That is in the culture. Haven't you noticed? Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion merely put a super-production on one. There was nothing random about it. (As I mentioned when I talked about tapping into the cultural zeitgeist.)

Besides, why is this either-or?

Does criticizing a video for potential damage make a claim that bad relationships are not a factor?

Let me see.

Hmmm...

No.

It doesn't.

55 minutes ago, dldelancey said:

Their interest in random music videos is a reflection of the damage they've already suffered.

I agree with this, but with qualifications.

1. I think the steady stream of videos--not just random videos--reflects something, too.

2. Once again, here's the either-or thing on something that is not either-or. Why is a music video only a reflection and not a cause at the same time? In your opinion, is it that our brains can't chew gum and walk at the same time?

(I mean cause both to happen?  )

Paul Ekman and his people discovered how pleasant and unpleasant isolating and mapping facial muscles to expressions of emotions could get. One mainstream opinion at the time he started was that (1) an emotion is felt, then (2) a body reaction occurs. Not the contrary. As Ekman and company worked in front of mirrors on their own faces to isolate and map and see what that looked like, they discovered that purposely articulating muscles used in negative emotions caused them to feel these negative emotions. Ditto for positive. So if they were in a bad mood and they started working on the facial muscles predominantly used in positive emotions, their mood would lighten up a lot. And vice-versa.

It's not either-or. Felt emotions cause facial muscles to articulate an expression. But articulating an emotional expression and holding if for a while causes the emotion to be felt.

If you're feeling happy, you smile. If you're feeling, say, grumpy and you plaster a smile on your face and keep it in place, pretty soon you start feeling happy. It may not last depending on how intensely grumpy you are, but it does happen that way.

That process happens with music and culture in general, too. Sometime a bad mentality in an individual (whatever the reason) causes bad intensely-felt cultural choices and sometimes a bad emotionally charged culture causes said individual to make bad choices and develop a bad mentality. Both can happen at the same time and in the same individual.

Michael

 

[william.scherk]

For a little bit of bizarre to start your day. Joe Biden and Cardi B ...

 

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

1 hour ago, william.scherk said:

For a little bit of bizarre to start your day. Joe Biden and Cardi B ...

William,

Actually, that is one of the better things Biden has done during this campaign.

I think it did more for Cardi B among her fans than it did for his campaign, but it still came off to me as a positive for him.

It was weird seeing Cardi B saying she wanted stricter laws. Think about what that would look like according to her values--probably the execution of President Trump by hanging (paying him back for his so-called "racism"). And, of course, using the government to take from the one who produced it to give to the other who didn't because, you know, that's fair. With stricter laws to back it up.

And who would enforce these stricter laws, Ms. Cardi B? Why, the polic... er... oh...

  

Also, it was nice to hear Joe say at the end he always keeps his word, he has never broken it, ever...

Maybe this outreach will generate a few younger votes for Biden, a few votes from people who were not going to vote, but I don't expect a huge bump. Most of Cardi B's public was never going to vote for Trump in the first place.

On a serious note, it was nice to hear him without the Alzheimer rhetoric (and I mean that as a human being), but I did notice there were an awful lot of cuts for an online interview like that. After watching gazillions of hours of Blog Talk Radio, Google Hangouts, and so on, the number of cuts in the natural flow are annoying. They feel off.

But they also hide shit. Does anybody doubt what the stuff on the cutting room floor looks like if it is ever shown?

Biden's people should be careful, though. Cardi B's allegiance is not to him. It's to The Breakfast Club and people like that.

Michael

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

1 hour ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

On a serious note, it was nice to hear him without the Alzheimer rhetoric (and I mean that as a human being), but I did notice there were an awful lot of cuts for an online interview like that. After watching gazillions of hours of Blog Talk Radio, Google Hangouts, and so on, the number of cuts in the natural flow are annoying. They feel off.

But they also hide shit. Does anybody doubt what the stuff on the cutting room floor looks like if it is ever shown?

Here's an article that shows video of some of the more glaring cuts. The video takes are quite short, but the cuts are brutal.

Slow Joe Biden is So Diminished Elle Had to Severely Edit Him Mid-Sentence to Make Him Sound Coherent in Interview with Rapper Cardi B (VIDEO)

Michael