The Adventures...

My debut

About a year ago Maino delivered the swiftest attack to my growing ego. My first foray into the music videos ended, badly, in retrospect. Never fully recovered until now, a year later, which is a nice a prelude to the present: I had a hand in Maino's forthcoming video for his song, "Million Bucks". Shot about a week ago in Brooklyn. Ed deserves all the credit, honestly and actually. I just put the final nail in the coffin: the dramatic death of mediocrity. If I have anything to do with it, welcome to a new era in music videos: cinema videos.

It will all make sense, when you see the video. Redemption never looked better.

Play ball

A manifesto for a creatively-dry music industry

No socialite in recent memory has ascended the social ladder as swiftly or as enviably as Genevieve Jones. Jones, who finds herself at the center of some of the most elite social circles in New York and beyond, stands apart from her wedded, well to-do, Ivy League-educated counterparts. For one, she does not come from a background of privilege and did not bother to attend college. The other distinction is easier to detect, her appearance: she is black

This will be a hit on any network

Dependent woman in the house


Can you guess what the number one killer amongst black women is?

When a black network does not want to produce a moving black documentary by an intelligent black person, what's left to say?

No one on the corner got intellect like this

Before, I present the published version, here is the version that I intended to get published

For a while, it felt almost righteous to ridicule Soulja Boy, the 18 year-old rapper from Mississippi, responsible for the inception of a decently destructive dance. Unscrupulously, as it would turn out, millions of kids, from all backgrounds, have patronized the teenage phenomenon culminating in a weird watershed moment in popular culture. Although, he has breached general appeal, at the moment, he has become ostensibly our problem -a microcosm of black youth. To the professional black population, he represents the bane of black culture and proof black youth is poised to inherit barely a parcel of systemic progress.

Implicit to these concerns are institutional and historical overtures. To be clear, he threatens the legislation from which affirmative action was built; he has abused his success, offering little evidence he deserves it anymore than the next throng of impoverished teens or, if they are even entitled to it, in the first place. In his rise, the chemistry of success has become unbalanced and pared down, uninvolved with the process yet invested in the product. For these reasons, we cannot afford to continue rebuking Soulja Boy; since, black achievement is also invariably a statistical one, denouncing him only substracts from this rationale. With growing evidence that Soulja Boy is now the face of black youth, his success reserves less celebration and more caution, a measure that looks to regulate, not marginalize, his success in the interest of greater return in the future.

My purpose in scrutinizing the 18 year-old should be made clear: what are the implications of his success for black youth? Apropos, what troubles me most is his legacy, a meaning that is certainly at large, if elusive. In trying to assign meaning to Soulja Boy's legacy, invariably, another inquiry creeps up, inching closer to site of an unopened cultural wound: is all black success good? By "good" I mean is it worthy of observation; of admiration; of retention; of personal pride; and perhaps ultimately, worthy of emulation. If nothing, it is worthy of an appraisal.

As with any form of success, a market arises capitalizing on all parties: fans, detractors and the intermediate. The fundamental rule of any market is the presence of supply and demand. But, often, with black success, it does not reward its market. Instead, it feeds the market with inflated hope. This market, as you may recognize, is the sub-prime talent market which Soulja Boy comes from. The governing principle of this market is a lack of a formal education due to an indiscernible combination of decisions and circumstances, usually beyond the control of the subject. Clearly, a victim does not simply choose to become a victim. It is also part of a larger market, I like to call, the Black Market, where individual black success begets collective failure. In this market, black success is not unlike a bad investment; it is a lottery, awards one, slights the rest. It is not just Soulja Boy who is of this market; drug dealers, athletes, hustlers, rappers, unwittingly and to a degree, involuntarily, belong to this market and thereby keep it sustainable.

As a culture, it is their debt we bear and must settle.

Despite this reality of an impending Black Market, some have hailed Soulja Boy as an inspiration, a trailblazer, as some leader of the youth movement, the music industry's secret weapon, all claims I find troubling, unnerving and unforgivable (veracity will not even be entertained, to the benefit of the readers). In unambiguous terms, I'd like to suggest an alternate reality that he has been swept by the social winds of a Hip Hop draft whereby major record labels discriminate towards black youth. All this to say, Soulja Boy didn't become a rapper on his own; he was drafted to be one. If he needed help to become a rapper, it is, actually, less luck or what one would recognize as bad luck, he ended up as a superstar. Statistically speaking, he had a greater chance at becoming a doctor or a drop-out (on his own, mind you) and the myriad possibilities in between. It was not his destiny, however, to become a star, a truth that looks to strike down any sense of justified entitlement. There is little debate that he has irrepressibly become something else: a distraction to his problem.

To any seasoned economist Soulja Boy is fungible, he could have been anyone. And, here lies the problem with Soulja Boy's success - it is not a model, it cannot be replicated with predictable results; it is a nomadic pattern, untraceable, that continues to trespass the far reaches of black privilege. It should be understood that he is not a prototype therefore there need be no cause or way to aspire to be him. To better understand, there is a fundamental difference between praying for a miracle and betting on one; attempting to emulate Soulja boy would qualify as the latter. Everyday miracles like Soulja Boy falsely appease this notion. The culture bubble is bound to burst with expectation, if it is not regulated.

Fans of the 18 year old rapper will argue, he is a genius, a boy wonder, a serious talent. I will generously concede only this, he is an aberration, a rare confirmation that the zeitgest hand-picks no one in particular. To be sure, the Soulja Boy story has been told before. Recall, the "Chicken Noodle Soup" phenomenon, an innocent-enough song authored by a Harlem duo consisting of Young B, a winsome teenager, and her DJ, Webstar. Like "Crank That" the song was only as good as its requisite dance. To the surprise and benefit of no one, the song was a runaway hit for some time, outlasting patience and clear logic. Then, it met the fate like so many novelty songs before it: obsolescence. Continued stardom was predicted, promised, prayed for, talked about, until it became painfully clear, cultural relevance could not even be guaranteed. In this case, failure teaches a valuable lesson - miracles always happen but cannot be harvested from other miracles. A harsher assessment would be that black success, in the black market, in its infancy will abort itself unless it can survive.


The Soulja Boy problem can be dealt with and, in fact, has precedent. The NBA, like Hip Hop, recruits players in a similar fashion - it drafts them for a particularly rare talent. In this way, it stakes its greatest hopes on miracles - physical miracles, often. Unlike hip hop, however, there is a redeeming failure in their draft. Players who are not chosen as lottery picks or within the first couple of rounds, have almost every chance, as long as they are selected, at scoring a profitable contract. Still, the prevailing belief is that the lottery picks are the only real winners and therefore sought after, increasingly. Until recently, this logic was ensnared by the growing number of high school recruits, younger, better, and soon richer than the rest of collegiate field looking to enter the same draft, belatedly.

This high school market went through the traditional boom phase namely that of Kevin Garnett, Kobe Bryant and Lebron, high school imports, all successfully making the transition and becoming superstars, along the way. Just as quickly, the bust phase arrived with a number of high school players underperforming or left undrafted, altogether. In spite of the collective failure of the majority of high school draftees, the individual success of a select few kept the market alive. In economics, this is called a highly leveraged market, as when a market operates on more than it has, which almost always precedes a market collapse.

To remedy this, David Stern, commissioner of the NBA, instituted a new rule setting a mininum age-limit of 19 for all prospective and incoming draft picks. Now, the high school market and the NBA draft had intercepted each other at a common point: college. College was no longer a circuitous route, a footnote to fortune, or a climbing checkpoint; it had become both a point of origin and destination, filtering the ambitions and anxieties of countless teenagers of toxic hope.

What David Stern accomplished was a way to regulate the success of a tiny minority of extraordinary anomalies who had leveraged the market effectively requiring potential draft picks to reach further, farther, higher and deeper - essentially, mandating miracles to make more miracles. Averted was the practice many draftees and teams had already begun: betting miracles against miracles, a disastrous principle central to the Black Market.

Hip Hop has their first high school superstar in Soulja Boy and must now look to regulate his success in the same way as David Stern by installing an age restriction on subsequent signings. This will mean a new generation of hip hop artists whom are wiser, older and not married to miracles. That Soulja Boy became a star is a miracle, but to entrust him as a role model for black youth would be to forget that his legacy will be determined by another lottery: the unlikely odds that black youth will choose the unlikelier odds of being miracles over not. Hopefully, more and more, kids will want to be like Soulja Boy, less and less.

The author can be reached at rodney.dugue@gmail.com

This is bad news for me.