Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: And basically, it was about the death. What do we mean by selling out? You know? And so, like, when I look at this, I would say what you just described is selling out the black community, like, quite literally now. But as we talked about before, there's like the selling out. Like the traditional capitalism selling out. Like, you see with music artists, like, oh, yeah, your sound was one way before, and then now you make your sound another way so that you can sell more records or something like that, where you make your stuff more quote, unquote, accessible. So in order to. But not artistic enough, you know, like, you think of people who won't sell out. It's like Nirvana, like Kurt cobain in the 90s. And that's a dated reference, but nonetheless, they were gonna stay pure to the music. They didn't care how big the dollars were if they did something else. And so in that capitalist sense, I think that that's exactly what Jay Z did. The opportunity was that they needed a black face to help give them cover. And he was like, okay, well, if you pay me enough, I'll be the. I'll help give you cover with the black community.
And so, like, by that definition, I think that, yes, that's a sellout. That's somebody who sold out the black community, so to speak, or this mainstream group of the black community. Now, the question of whether, like, Jay Z's kind of said he's been about this the whole time. This is the guy who said, I dumbed down from my audience to double my dollars, you know, like. And he has many lyrics. They're talking about how he could go harder on the lyricism side or do this or do that. But everybody wants to say, holla.
But the other form of selling out, which I thought you pushed back on and made a good point, was specific to the black community. Kind of like the Uncle Tom's Cabin with the sellout in that sense, where you're actually going to become part of the oppression.
And so what Jay Z's doing now isn't necessarily that you could connect dots along. And if you make a long enough connection, you say, oh, well, he's part of the oppression because he's giving target an out and yada, yada, yada. But he's not directly, you know, becoming what is considered, you know, actually being a part of the oppression necessarily by this. He's being opportunistic, you know, from a capitalism standpoint. Capitalist standpoint, which, like I said, by one version of selling someone out, that's kind of that. And by the Other, it's probably not, you know.
[00:02:09] Speaker B: Yeah, well, one thing I'd say is a couple things come out of my thoughts with that Is one is there's a conversation that's been going on in our greater society in these recent years of the idea of kind of billionaires. Jay Z, clearly, I think he's worth somewhere between two and a half and three billion right now. And I believe that's without his wife's also net worth combined, and she's worth, I think, around a billion or more. So the idea is that clearly there's a certain mindset that it takes to get to that kind of wealth where you are focused a lot on growing your money.
And that is not for me to make an opinion on in terms of does that make someone a good or bad character. But it does tell us that where these opportunities are seen by people with that mindset, they're gonna go after them. Right? That's how you got to being a billionaire in the first place. There's a lot of other black Americans we could discuss that could be picked for this and may not be seen as selling out. Because part of the wind up to this discussion was that Jay Z has been seen as doing this before this.
[00:03:14] Speaker A: The other big time, there's been a couple of times. One time with Barclays and the regentrification that was going on in Brooklyn, and he's teaming up with the people doing the regentrifying in Brooklyn. The other big one that people talk about is when Colin Kaepernick was kneeling in the NFL and was creating a lot of issues with the players, more players started kneeling, all this other stuff. Then Jay Z comes in, the NFL comes in and pays him big money to be the one who runs the halftime shows. And so that was again seen as giving cover to someone who was having problems with black people in their sphere. So that just for the purposes of just.
[00:03:52] Speaker B: So I'm saying this people give because I think there's something like the parasocial relationship that a lot of people have with an artist like Jay Z. They see this and they immediately look at him. And I'm saying like, nah, you're right. My opinion would be then I would double boycott Target over this.
[00:04:10] Speaker A: Double boycott doesn't make any sense. You're already boycotting them. Like this would be. If you're boycotting Target already, then if Jay Z gets in the bed with them, then the question isn't what else do we do to Target. The question is, what do we do with Jay Z? Like, that's. I Don't understand, like, what you're. Like. It's not like they saying, okay, well,
[00:04:27] Speaker B: then there's no real conversation we're going to end up. Because, well, then, then, then I mean, I would say this. There's no real conversation for the public to have, because why even talk about Jay Z? Well, you mean that's just an example of the.
[00:04:38] Speaker A: Because he crossed. He sold out black people. So you talk about that and say, okay, is one. Is it legitimate, the anger that's had, you know, the people that are angry about him doing this? Is this legitimate anger, or is this just a result of a parasocial relationship, which you've talked about how. Well, Jay Z and I mentioned it earlier. Jay Z's always kind of been, hey, I'll sell out whoever for an extra dollar, you know, so whether that, that may be consistent with him, it still could be dirty, you know. And then the other piece, though, is whether this expectation, like, because here's, here's the piece I think that's really interesting about this. The expectation that Jay Z, only because he's black, the only reason why he has this expectation is because he's a black man. You shouldn't, quote, unquote, cross when somebody's getting boycotted by black folks or when the NFL is having trouble with black folks. You shouldn't show up, tell him to write a bigger check. Because basically, you're leveraged now to your initial point. You are in a position where you need me more. And so to a capitalist, what do you do? You say, okay, well, you got to pay me double. You got to pay me triple than you otherwise would have because you're compromised. You're leveraged in this situation. So he shows up, uses maximum. Uses the leverage that the pressure from the black community is creating to exert maximum pressure, maximum leverage to get a bigger, bigger bag. But again, the only reason why people say he has any obligation to the. The or people are holding him to this standard where he shouldn't necessarily leverage that for a bigger bag is because he's a black man. So is it unfair to him to say, okay, well, because you're black. We're talking about all this stuff like, hey, don't. Don't make people. People shouldn't have to do stuff just because they're black or not have to do something just because they're black. It's like, well, you're. The people who are upset at Jay Z are explicitly saying, because you're black, you shouldn't be doing this. And is that fair? So there are a lot of angles to talk about this from beyond just trying to excuse Jay Z. Like Jay Z. To me, the easiest part of this is that Jay Z did black folks dirty.
