"Can you imagine what would happen if politicians started paying for people to endorse them. All hell would break out."

Said Donald Trump, quoted in "Trump demands Kamala Harris, Beyoncé, Oprah be prosecuted over 2024 campaign payouts: 'Totally illegal'" (NY Post).

What about paying them to not denounce you? Wasn't Trump prosecuted for that?

"Several Native influencers, performers, and academics took to social media this week to criticize Beyoncé or decry the shirt’s language as anti-Indigenous."

"'Do you think Beyoncé will apologize (or acknowledge) the shirt?' indigenous.tv, an Indigenous news and culture Instagram account with more than 130,000 followers, asked in a post Thursday. Many of her critics, as well as fans, agree. A flood of social media posts called out the pop star for the historic framing on the shirt...."

From "Fans criticize Beyoncé for shirt calling Native Americans 'the enemies of peace'" (AP).

What shirt? It was a T-shirt depicting the Buffalo Soldiers that stated that "their antagonists were the enemies of peace, order and settlement: warring Indians, bandits, cattle thieves, murderous gunmen, bootleggers, trespassers, and Mexican revolutionaries."

ADDED: The only Indians mentioned by the shirt are "warring Indians," so by definition they are against peace. If there were some Indians who were pro-peace, the shirt has nothing to say about them. I'm not seeing the NRA complaining about "murderous gunmen" or Mexicans complaining about "Mexican revolutionaries."

Are these the same celebrities who denounced anyone who resisted the mask, the vaccine, and the lockdown in Covid times?

I'm reading "Pop Culture Takes Up Smoking Again/From movies and TV shows to music, the habit is no longer taboo. It’s even being celebrated for the way it makes characters look cool or powerful" (NYT).

Both Lorde and [Addison] Rae have worked with the singer whom [Jared Oviatt, the man behind the Instagram account @Cigfluencers,] credits with the smoking revival: Charli XCX, the Brat Summer pioneer who is a proud smoker. She even once received a bouquet of cigs for her birthday from Rosalía, another notable smoker. (The bouquet evoked the bowls of cigarettes Mary-Kate Olsen reportedly set out at her 2015 wedding to Olivier Sarkozy, a subversive, very French detail.)

"Trump’s Win Leaves Democrats Asking: Where Are Our Bro Whisperers?"

That's a headline at the NYT. Subhead: "Democrats have widely acknowledged that they have no answer for the online ecosystem of conservative influencers popular with Gen Z men. Some have argued for a rethink of media strategy."

Celebrity appearances and paid endorsements from influencers come across as transactional and inauthentic, [some younger Democrats] said.

“It’s last-second, ‘Let’s get Beyoncé onstage to say we support women,’ but that doesn’t move anyone who wasn’t already going to vote Democrat,” said Ayem Kpenkaan, a liberal content creator.... He suggested that Democrats needed liberal versions of media platforms that are culturally right-leaning but not inherently political — like Barstool Sports....

“We have to make entertaining, engaging content that men want to watch and care about,” Mr. Kpenkaan said. “Then, over time, you pepper in more progressive views.”

So... make something authentic, then pepper in the political propaganda. How distasteful. 

Re "Let’s get Beyoncé onstage to say we support women": 

Can you pay celebrities millions to appear at your rally and report it as an "event production" expense to the FEC?

I'm reading "Did Kamala Harris Pay Celebrities to Endorse Her? Oprah Winfrey Speaks Out" (Newsweek)(examining various claims, e.g. Beyoncé got $10 million just to walk up to the podium and say a few pro-Kamala words):

Nonprofit fact-checking website FactCheck.org said that a Harris campaign official told them the claim "is not true." PolitiFact also said that it had found "no evidence" for the claim and that Beyoncé's publicist told them it was "beyond ridiculous."

Newsweek reached out to the Harris campaign for comment via email outside of regular working hours. Newsweek also reached out to representatives for other celebrities who endorsed Harris and have been accused of being paid for it, including Beyoncé, Megan Thee Stallion, Lizzo, and Eminem, via email. 

Some social media users pointed out that two payments to Winfrey's production company, Harpo Productions Inc, can be found under the Harris campaign's disbursements on the Federal Election Committee website. The payments, of $500,000 each, were made on October 15 and are marked as "event production."

"Marked as 'event production'"? I hope they didn't mismark anything! What was the "production" that cost a million dollars? Causing Oprah to appear onstage? The social media users are trying to help, but it looks as though they are calling attention to what might be a false statement to the FEC.

Wouldn't that be much worse than mislabeling the hush money paid to Stormy Daniels in private business records?

"'If it takes Vice President Harris to elevate the voices of women in Houston so they are heard in Madison and Kalamazoo and Pittsburgh, that’s what we’re going to do'..."

"... said Trey Martinez Fischer, the Democratic leader in the Texas State House. Just about everything related to Ms. Harris’s Houston trip is engineered to create news that will reach voters in the battleground states. Before the rally with Beyoncé and [Willie] Nelson, she is scheduled to record a podcast interview with the popular podcaster Brené Brown, a University of Houston professor and vulnerability researcher who has an audience of millions that skews heavily female.... No Democrat has won a statewide election in Texas since 1994. Ms. Harris’s Houston rally appears to be the first for a Democratic presidential nominee in Texas this late in a campaign since President Bill Clinton went to San Antonio in the final days before the 1996 election."

From "Why Harris (with Beyoncé in tow) is heading to solidly red Texas" (NYT)

Meanwhile: "Mr. Trump is planning his own Texas sojourn on Friday, heading to Austin to record Joe Rogan’s podcast...."

What ever happened to Harris's "talks" with Rogan? Here's what I wrote about that 10 days ago:

"Speculation was rampant over the past few days that the 32-time Grammy winner would appear at the convention... But the final speaker of the night, Harris, was followed by 100,000 balloons..."

"... and a piped-in recording of Beyoncé’s 'Freedom,' a song the Harris campaign has been using in campaign ads and videos that aired throughout the event.... Columnist Laura Bassett mused: 'teasing a huge surprise guest and leaking that it’s both beyonce and taylor swift just to get people to tune in is actually kind of funny.' In fairness, it wouldn’t have been out of the question. In 2020, Beyoncé seemed to endorse President Joe Biden and Harris: On the eve of the election, she called for Texas residents to vote via an Instagram clip that showed her wearing a Biden-Harris mask...."

From "Beyoncé at the DNC? It wasn’t to Bey. Speculation was rampant that the 'Freedom' singer would make a surprise appearance. She never materialized" (WaPo).

I was trying to picture "a Biden-Harris mask," and thinking of one of those rubbery Halloween things with celebrity facial features and finding it weird that Beyoncé would disguise herself like that. Somehow, Covid had slipped my mind:

 

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Beyoncé (@beyonce)

It's a bad move to trick people into staying tuned and then denying them what they thought they'd get, but I'm glad there was so little use of pop-culture celebrities. I was picturing one celeb after another, but I don't think they did that. I watched very little of the convention, but I got the impression that the Democrats went in the opposite direction and kept filling the stage with clusters of relatively ordinary people who exemplified one issue or another. That's good, though not enough for me to watch. 

"When Exit Here organized the funeral last year of Poppy Chancellor... who died at 36, guests shared photos of the 'leaving party,' as the service was called, on social media."

"Inside the West London crematory were big, beautiful banners emblazoned with slogans like 'Embrace joy today' and 'I want to see you dance again.' In one video, guests were doing the limbo to the silky vocals and pulse of Beyoncé’s hit song 'Heated.'"

From "They’re Putting Some Fun in Funerals/Modern, even hip, mortuaries around the world are hoping to answer one question: How do we commemorate death in 2024?" (NYT).

Is this hip? Big, beautiful banners with slogans like "Embrace joy today"? Seems too close to the "Live/Laugh/Love" approach to home decor — the antithesis of hipness, no?

But I'm not the arbiter of hipness, so I'll just say....

Inside the West London crematory... Beyoncé’s hit song "Heated"....

Crematory... Heated.... intentional?

"I think she does a magnificent version of it and it reinforces the civil rights message that inspired me to write the song in the first place."

Instagrams Paul McCartney, gently but pointedly pushing back those who are crediting Beyoncé with adding a civil-rights meaning to "Blackbird."

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Paul McCartney (@paulmccartney)

"The horse appears to be digitally composed because its front and hind legs do not represent any phase of natural movement at the walk, trot, canter, or gallop."

"Based on its leg position the horse appears to be trotting with his hind legs and cantering with his front!"

So says a commenter at the NYT Style piece, "Dissecting the ‘Cowboy Carter’ Cover: Beyoncé’s Yeehaw Agenda/On Tuesday, the pop star revealed her new album’s cover, a constellation of country signifiers reminding fans of her Texas roots."

The "Style Desk" writers are saying things like "I love how she and the horse have matching hair," "she’s clearly been trying to reinscribe images of Black women into the history of the cowboys and the West," and "Beyoncé is looking directly into the camera with her face forward and it really feels like a reclaiming" and "Beyoncé seems to believe she has to position herself as a cowgirl on a horse, wearing red, white and blue, holding the American flag on an album cover to drill it into people’s heads that her interest in country isn’t a fad."

Here's the photo/illustration under discussion:

Eminent songwriter Diane Warren asked "How can there be 24 writers on a [Beyoncé] song?" and ended up apologizing!

She'd added an eye-rolling emoji — the L.A. Times reports — and then softened the snark with "This isn’t meant as shade, I’m just curious."

The L.A. Times casually displays bias:

Bey’s empowering track “Alien Superstar” has 24 songwriters on it....

It uses the cute pet name "Bey" and designates the song as "empowering."

Here are the lyrics. You tell me if it's empowering: "I'm too classy for this world, forever, I'm that girl/Feed you diamonds and pearls, ooh, baby/I'm too classy to be touched, I paid them all in dust/I'm stingy with my love, ooh, baby."

"The word, not used intentionally in a harmful way, will be replaced. The road to success is always under construction."

Said representatives of Beyoncé, quoted in "Beyoncé to cut ableist slur from Renaissance song/Charities question why lyric was released weeks after similar controversy" (London Times).

The objected to line — on "Heated" — is "Spazzing on that ass, spaz on that ass." 

Who wrote that line? "The song has nine credited writers including Beyoncé and Drake, the Canadian rapper, but it is not clear which of them wrote the lyrics."

What was the "similar controversy" that happened recently? Lizzo used the same word, in the line "Hold my bag, bitch, hold my bag/ Do you see this shit? I’m a spaz."

"We don’t have any literature that says he made the painting for Tiffany... But we know a little bit about Basquiat... We know he loved New York, and that he loved luxury and he loved jewelry."

"My guess is that the [blue painting] is not by chance. The color is so specific that it has to be some kind of homage. As you can see, there is zero Tiffany blue in the [ad] campaign other than the painting... It’s a way to modernize Tiffany blue."

Said Alexandre Arnault, a communications vice president at Tiffany, quoted in "Basquiat’s friends ‘horrified’ by Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s Tiffany campaign" (NY Post). 

I was going to quote the expressions of horror by Basquiat's friends, but when I got to Arnault's defense of Tiffany, I saw that those expressions were surplusage. You've heard the phrase "The best defense is a good offense." But sometimes the best offense is a bad defense. Defense is self-serving, so when it works against you, it really works. 

Jean-Michel Basquiat died of a heroin overdose 33 years ago at the age of 27.

But Beyonce and Jay-Z are living well and posing artfully....

It's all so stilted, this "modernization." To my eye, Jay-Z is a tribute to the Maxell blown-away guy of the 1980s...

... and Beyonce is a tribute to John Singer Sargent's "Portrait of Madame X":

Not too "modern." 

Then again I could be wrong in my mental associations. At least they are — unlike Arnault's idea that Basquiat mixed that color blue to say "Tiffany!" — unaffected by commercial interests.

Making Reddit participants prove they are what they say they are: black.

Moderators of Black People Twitter, an online forum, asked participants to submit a photo to prove they were not white. Many black users came to believe that white users were pretending to be black to give their unpopular opinions more credibility. https://t.co/vQTf23FGyj

— The New York Times (@nytimes) October 8, 2019

Here's the subreddit in question, BlackPeopleTwitter. From the NYT article:

Many black users came to believe that white users were pretending to be black to give their unpopular opinions more credibility. Some of the posts casually dropped racial slurs. Others repeated anti-black stereotypes about crime, parenting and intelligence. Beyoncé was disparaged.

“These people are white,” said Tony Hinderman, 23, a black actor in Chicago. “Black people love Beyoncé. There is nothing to not love about her.”...

Like all Reddit moderators, [BlackPeopleTwitter moderators] perform tasks like approving posts and banning users; they work without pay, in exchange for mostly free rein to run their subreddit....

"If there is a single micro-genre of American journalism more nauseating than the 'Jay-Z and Beyonce woke discourse circa 2007-2019,' I can't think of it."

"Why exactly we settled on these two billionaire entertainers as the embodiment of progressivism is utterly beyond me. There was never anything revolutionary about 'Woke Queen Bey.' Her weird 2010s monarchist turn was the will-to-power artfully packaged for 20-something Teen Vogue editorial assistants; lyrics like 'I see it, I want it, I stunt, yellow bone it / I dream it, I work hard, I grind till I own it' are essentially Randian.... As for Jay-Z, his — gag me — 'feminism' is about as sincere as you might expect from someone who got rich mouthing along to lines like 'In the cut where I keep em / Till I need a nut.'... All of which is to say that I can't believe anyone is actually surprised, much less upset, by Jay-Z's recent partnership with the NFL on racial issues.... Nobody bats an eye when Rush Limbaugh says things like 'I think we're past kneeling.' Why should anybody be surprised when the guy who did 'Big Pimpin'' tells us the same thing? Of course he's 'the NFL's black boyfriend.' He's been upper-middle-class white frat bros' black boyfriend for two decades now."

From "Jay-Z's cardboard corporate activism" by Matthew Walther (The Week).

Interesting to call Beyonce's lyrics "Randian." I had to look up "yellow bone it." From the annotations at Genius.com:

“Yellow bone” refers to being black but having light-skin.... Bey’s considered “yellow-boned” opposed to “red-boned” because her complexion has more of a “honey” tone to it, and is thus “yellow.” Jay Z referred to Beyonce as a “high yellow broad” on his 2009 song “Off That.”

What does Ayn Rand say about race? From Rand's "Virtue of Selfishness":

Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism. It is the notion of ascribing moral, social or political significance to a man’s genetic lineage — the notion that a man’s intellectual and characterological traits are produced and transmitted by his internal body chemistry. Which means, in practice, that a man is to be judged, not by his own character and actions, but by the characters and actions of a collective of ancestors.

Racism claims that the content of a man’s mind (not his cognitive apparatus, but its content) is inherited; that a man’s convictions, values and character are determined before he is born, by physical factors beyond his control. This is the caveman’s version of the doctrine of innate ideas — or of inherited knowledge — which has been thoroughly refuted by philosophy and science. Racism is a doctrine of, by and for brutes. It is a barnyard or stock-farm version of collectivism, appropriate to a mentality that differentiates between various breeds of animals, but not between animals and men.

Like every form of determinism, racism invalidates the specific attribute which distinguishes man from all other living species: his rational faculty. Racism negates two aspects of man’s life: reason and choice, or mind and morality, replacing them with chemical predestination....

I'm not going to go any further into the study of whether Beyonce lyrics accord with Randian philosophy! If my head were full of Beyonce lyrics — which maybe they would be if my last 10 years were my teenage years — I might want to sort through whether Beyonce-ism is as left-wing as left-wing commentators had been presenting her up until this football foofaraw. But my teenage years were in the 60s. My head is full of Dylan lyrics. And I've already blogged about whether Dylan is as left-wing as some people seem to think or whether he's really somehow right-wing. So that's it for me for now about the political meaning of musical artists.

"Celebrities including Beyoncé, Arianna Huffington, Sachin Tendulkar and Hillary Clinton have arrived in the Indian state of Rajasthan for the wedding of the daughter of country’s richest man."

The Guardian reports.

Jake Tapper not pleased that the Obamas are "living their best life" when the Democratic Party is living its worst since the 1920s.

The Democratic Party is the weakest it has been since the 1920s, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ https://t.co/ATqKBx4bq0

— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) July 29, 2018

Some economist reacts to Tapper's tweet with "Don't understand the point of this conversation. Does @jaketapper think Obama should be back in US leading Democrats or blaming @BarackObama for leaving Democrats in an incredibly weak position or just making random observation?"

Tapper says: "Kind of a combo of 2 and 3. Glad he’s enjoying his life; he’s entitled. Also, FYI, as we begin focus on Nov 2018 and 2020, he presided over a historically precipitous decline of his party. Just a factual matter. Some Dems seem angrier at my tweet than at that fact. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯"

He says ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ a lot!

I'm just incredibly uneasy about HuffPo calling attention to that song title. I'm reading about this tweeting at IJR, in "Jake Tapper Roasts Former President Obama over the Current State of the Democratic Party," and nothing is about the song title and why HuffPo mentioned it.

My ideas are: 1. The song is so popular or Beyoncé and Jay-Z are such idols that no one noticed a problem with writing "N***as in Paris," 2. Though the concert was in Washington, D.C., the Washington, D.C. of the Obamas might as well be Paris, and that's why the song title seemed so apt (and "N***as" came along without much thought), 3. The HuffPo tweeter is black and therefore, like Beyoncé and Jay-Z, has a privilege to bandy that word about casually (but the tweets come from "HuffPo Politics," where there is no individual tweeter identified), 4. Knowing the song seemed cool, so naming it proved coolness, 5. HuffPo wanted to create agitation over the use of the word (and believed, because they are liberal, that more anxiety about race will work out well for their side), 6. They actually get a frisson of racist satisfaction when they put that word next to the Obamas' name.

After writing all that, I'm reading the Wikipedia article on the song, which I see is censored and just called "In Paris" or "Paris" on the radio:

The song received universal acclaim from many critics. Rolling Stone commented on the song by saying "Jay and Ye come in hard over a slow, menacing beat and icy synthesizer notes, but regardless, this cut is mostly memorable for including an unexpected sample of dialogue from the Will Ferrell/Jon Heder ice-skating comedy Blades of Glory. 'No one knows what it means, but it's provocative,' says Ferrell with deep conviction, essentially summing up the art of hip-hop lyrics." 

Some fascinating photography and dance at the Louvre...

... in this new Beyonce and Jay-Z video, which is called "Apeshit":



There's lots of "Mona Lisa" in that video, but there's other Louvre art shown very well. Watch for "The Coronation of Napoleon" (beginning at 1:37 and then at 4:01). And the "Winged Victory of Samothrace" and the museum's beautiful staircase make a stage set for lots of interesting dancing.

I've got nothing to say about the music, because I don't listen to this kind of music enough to be able to hear it, let alone have an opinion, but I'm extremely interested in the use of artwork — the long views, the closeups, the combination with dancers.

I can hear some of the words, and they seem to be just expressing gratitude about having become rich and famous. The title — which had me thinking about Roseanne's recent ape-related screwup — seems to be simply a reference to the enthusiasm of Beyonce and Jay-Z's fans — "Have you ever seen a crowd going apeshit?"

Let me look up the lyrics and read them. Here. I see there's something about pay equity:

Rah, gimme my check
Put some respeck on my check
Or pay me in equity, pay me in equity
Or watch me reverse out the dick (skrrt)

The annotation explains that last line as "a simple threat: she’ll leave projects and especially men that are cutting her a less-than-satisfactory check for her work."

He wanna go with me (go with me)
He like to roll the weed (roll with me)
He wanna be with me (be with me)
He wanna give me that vitamin D (D!)

I did not need to click on the annotation or use Urban Dictionary to understand the term "vitamin D."

When Jay-Z finally gets his closeup, he begins:

I'm a gorilla in the fuckin' coop
Finna pull up in the zoo
I'm like Chief Keef meet Rafiki
Who been Lion King to you
Pocket watch it like kangaroos
Tell these clowns we ain't amused
Banana clips for that monkey business...
Last night was a fuckin' zoo
Stagedivin' in a pool of people
Ran through Liverpool like a fuckin' Beatle
Smoke gorilla glue like it's fuckin' legal....

All that "ape" and "gorilla" business seems like an invitation to white people to Roseanne ourselves. According to the annotation at the lyrics link:

Jay directly quotes rapper, Chief Keef’s “Faneto”, the first of many animal references he makes throughout this verse.

I’m a gorilla in a fuckin' coupe, finna pull up to the zoo...

“Gorilla” is a racial slur directed towards black people who are perceived by some to be primitive or ape-like. Jay embraces this word proudly and uses it as a sense of empowerment.

“Coupe” or “Coop” are interchangeable. The latter continues Jay’s animalistic theme, saying he is a Gorilla among chickens.

ADDED: This is missing all the art, but musically, it's so much more my style (from 1970):



The lyrics are as fresh as ever:

I think I'm so educated and I'm so civilized
'Cause I'm a strict vegetarian
But with the over-population and inflation and starvation
And the crazy politicians
I don't feel safe in this world no more
I don't want to die in a nuclear war
I want to sail away to a distant shore and make like an ape man

We had crazy politicians and a threat of nuclear war back in 1970s. That's not just some new thing cooked up for you kids today.

And when you’re a female, they let you do it. You can do anything. Just bite. Don’t even wait. You can do anything.

Female privilege.

I'm reading "Sanaa Lathan confirmed as star who bit Beyoncé" at Page 6:

[Tiffany Haddish] describ[ed] the scene to GQ, “There was this actress there that’s just, like, doing the mostest. She bit Beyoncé in the face.”...

A source who was at the bash tells us, “It was a big thing in the moment at the party, everyone was talking about how anyone would dare to do that....

"Beyoncé’s at the bar, so I said.., ‘Did she really bite you?’” Haddish revealed, adding she told Beyoncé she was ready to beat down the barbarian... "[Bey] was like, ‘Tiffany, no. Don’t do that….. She’s not even drunk. . . Just chill,’” Haddish recounted.

Lathan has strenuously denied biting Bey, tweeting on March 27, “Y’all are funny. Under no circumstance did I bite Beyoncé and if I did it would be a love bite.”

Violence by women is brushed aside — a joke, a catfight, a quirky expression of "love." It's a privilege, but it's also how women are subordinated. What we do doesn't really matter. It's just a silly game. Move on. Compare Trump's silly playfulness that is the basis of my post title.

"Beyoncé is very beautiful to look at and it’s more like modeling kind of music — music to model a dress — she’s not a singer, singer..."

Carlos Santana gets himself in big trouble.