Chuck D impressing me more and more.

Do you want fries with that?

Regarding Nitsuh's original post -- interesting, though surely I never sensed that Chuck D was anti-intellectual. Now, there are a few things I remember him saying ten years ago I'd take issue with -- his anti-gay comments, for a start -- but I'd felt he was perhaps trying to come up with an alternate canon, say, rather than ditching the academic approach entirely. All this said, I won't pretend to have tracked his every move over the moons.

This is a ridiculous overstatement, but it seems to have become the cliché of the month. Frank Rich said something similar in the New York Times, about what a frivolous decade the nineties had been, how our attention was taken by OJ and Monica while the real issues were left to languish. Etc. etc.

Fact is, during the Nineties the work week for the average professional rose to 50 or 60 hours (or at least that's the impression I got reading various analyses over the decade; I don't know the actual figures), welfare was drastically curtailed, U.S.'s productivity shot above every other country's. But what was missing was anything but the most superficial concern on the part of the electorate for the actual functions of government, for the actual consequences of tax cuts and economic policy in general, for the actual consequences of voting for mandatory sentencing, and so forth. Which is to say the work ethic, the idea of being responsible for children, for one's own fate, one's own life, was in strong effect, but the responsibility as citizens for one's government was missing.

Someone – not me – could jump in here and claim that the electorate's indifference, alienation, irresponsibility was entirely justified, and that gorging on entertainment and sports was more worthwhile and creative than being gulled into acting as if politics and voting could make a difference against the entrenched power structure. I don't buy this argument, but I'd like someone to jump in and make the argument effectively. Anyway, while supposedly gorging on frivolity, people in the U.S. worked extremely hard, and those with little money – despite the boom – had to work harder and harder just to stay where they were.

Hmmm???? Tracer, I meant actual access to the intellectual establishment in terms of people like Cornell West or Thomas Sowell or the many not-famous black intellectuals who now exist. I think my point was that as more and more black people enter this realm in reality, black culture as a whole will gradually cease to view it with suspicion or as a tool of establishment ideology or whatever else.

So ... yeah, not the records, I mean the actual folks. And that, to some extent, includes the fact that people like Ice T and Chuck D now have access to the mainstream intellectual ground of the college lecture circuit.

And I think maybe what Nitsuh is hoping for is for serious people like Trick Daddy to start taking people like Cornel West seriously, too.

mostly OTMFM
https://web.archive.org/web/20030109050757/http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/7.03/chuckd_pr.html

Say an independent label has a studio. If this label cuts a record, it has to go out and distribute 10,000 pieces of hard-software in order to get exposure. The Internet eliminates that need, so an independent can test a market without ever pressing a CD. The demo, as we know it, will be eradicated.

It's great for the musician. Instead of just depending on a song and a video, the Net will bring back live performances. Artists will be able to release a song every two weeks, instead of waiting six, seven months for a label to put it out. A band can become like a broadcaster.