In 1947, Simone de Beauvoir walked into a jazz club in New York and watched something happen that most of the room couldn’t see.
The white public stared in wonder. They wanted to be caught up in the whirlwind of primitive violence, to be shaken by vibrant poetry. The pianist jumped up and down on his stool. The bass player danced in place to a diabolical rhythm. They all showed their teeth and rolled their eyes as if possessed. And all the white faces wore admiring and foolish grins, unaware of the minstrelsy before them.
Then she wrote the sentence that sits under everything I want to say here:
Forgetting all the tragedies of racial discrimination — in the North they forget them rather easily — whites have opened their souls wide, and these appear soft and impressionable through the windows of their eyes, bathing innocently in the sophisticated music and the hatred.
Bathing innocently in the music and the hatred … the hatred isn’t gone. It’s in the music. The audience just can’t hear it because they’re too busy admiring the performance of the thing they took.
Growing up, what drew me to hip-hop was the words. Of course the hardened bass could prick my ear, but it was always the words that grabbed me most. The playfulness and the skill. The storytelling. The craft.
I have always been fascinated at what language can do.
I had a radio show. I threw concerts and rap battles. I wrote articles and show reviews for the local alt-weekly. All of it was in the name of keeping the craft alive — not because I was a preservationist, but because the craft was starting to affect me at the cellular level. I was building a life around an art form because the art form was building something in me.
That’s a specific feeling. It’s the feeling of finding the thing, the thing that makes sense of everything else. The thing you’d build your life around if nobody was watching, because nobody was.
De Beauvoir named what she saw at that jazz club with a precision that still drops me. Americans, she wrote, “have gradually emptied this passionate music of all its human and sympathetic content.”
Emptied. The human content was removed. The form remained.
She saw the extraction happening in real time. Jazz — an art form “so closely tied to the expression of the solitude of the black condition” — got hollowed out. What pleased Americans about jazz was that it expressed the moment. But since for them the moment was abstract, they also wanted an abstract expression. They wanted noise, rhythms — nothing more. We’re not making human connections here.
The pattern: find the art form, strip it of what it means, keep what sells.
The ’90s was a fascinating time to come of age. It was then that the American Dollar Machine figured out white America’s fascination with a particular kind of circus.
Gangster rap.
A sliver of the culture became the stand-in for all of hip-hop. The most marketable, most sensational fragment — the one that confirmed every stereotype de Beauvoir had watched white audiences project onto Black musicians fifty years earlier — got amplified. Everything else got pushed to the margins.
Before you knew it, white boys in every suburb had tales of bravado that they never dreamed of taking on, written in their rote memory. ‘Nigger’ never far behind their lips, like watermelon seeds they spit for sport.
It wasn’t hip-hop that got amplified. It was the sliver, the gangster rap fragment. The version that sold.
De Beauvoir had already named the economic engine: “Since blacks can earn their living only through a white clientele, they are necessarily complicit in this perversion.”
The artists who wanted to eat had to play the version that sold — the market rewarded the spectacle. The spectacle became the culture. The culture became a costume.
And here’s where it rhymes.
De Beauvoir on the “conventional image” of Black people that white Americans constructed: Magnificently gifted in music and dance, full of animal instincts, carefree, thoughtless, dreamers, poets, given to religious feeling, undisciplined, childish.
That’s 1947. Read it again and tell me it’s not the template for what the Dollar Machine did with gangster rap. Take the most extreme version. Flatten everything behind it. Let the fragment stand for the whole. Sell it back to people who will never understand what they’re consuming.
The pattern adapted to suit the times. The mechanism didn’t change.
The same machine, different stage.
Little Tom Cruise has to come out and give some weird speech before the World Cup Final. Perfect way to start buttoning up this edition of the tournament that has made us feel so unsettled. So many times die-hards and casuals alike have felt the sensation of smoke being blown firmly up our asses.
This tournament is a vehicle for pageantry. The sport is secondary. The spectacle machine is primary. The World Cup and by extension soccer itself — like jazz, like hip-hop — gets found, hollowed out, and sold back to you as an approximation of the real thing. Close enough that most people mistake it for what it was. Wrong enough that you can feel it in your chest.
De Beauvoir went to the circus at Madison Square Garden and diagnosed it in one sentence: It’s offered at a moment devoted to the shallowest amusements, and it is itself untruthful.
Real stakes reduced to entertainment. The tournament as spectacle. The sport as delivery mechanism for sponsorships and speeches and someone else’s bottom line. We won’t even speak of the halftime show.
Here’s what it costs.
It costs the craft. The craft that you loved being co-opted, simplified, and sold back to people as the uncanny valley version. That feeling — of watching the thing you built your life around get reduced to its most sellable version — doesn’t have a clean name. It’s not anger exactly. It’s not grief exactly. It’s the feeling of being steamrolled by a system that is rigged against you, a feeling I’ve contended with my entire life growing up Black and Mexican in Texas.
It costs the audience too. The suburbs that consumed the gangster rap sliver lost the full range of what hip-hop was. The crowd that showed up for Tom Cruise missed the game beneath the spectacle. De Beauvoir saw this when she saw America: The flight from boredom and solitude traps them in solitude and boredom; by wanting to lose themselves in the world, they have lost their grip on it.
The machine doesn’t just steal. It impoverishes everyone it touches.
This is something I’m way better-equipped to articulate now.
Not because I read de Beauvoir, because I lived it. The reading gave me the language, the living gave me the argument.
De Beauvoir went to that jazz club in 1947 and came out of the cave. She could see the pattern, she could name it.
I’m naming it now.
Not because it fixes the machine — naming the pattern doesn’t stop the extraction. The circus is still running. The sliver is still standing for the whole. The spectacle is still grinding.
But the naming is the counter-move, refusing to let the fragment represent the culture. Refusing to bathe innocently in the music and the hatred.
This will get more attention.