Is This Fair?

Is this fair?


   The designer is frowning on Lil Wayne. It is also a condemnation of new music. It’s sarcasm translates in both the photograph and the musical notation.

But more.

   The designer is accusing Lil Wayne and the musical era he is to represent of deviating from a historical path. But that is as problematic as older black folk asking why younger black folk put their jeans off of their asses. But older black folk: you put it there. Way off their asses. You ‘put’ Lil Wayne in Babylon music machine and produced for him his song ‘A Milli’.

   You see, ina Babylon, young people of all backgrounds rebel. They wear ‘bad’ hair, until the time comes. They listen to ‘bad’ music, until the time comes. They do all the “bad” things they can to distinguish themselves from other generations. Until the time comes. What is the ‘until the time comes’? That is a phenomenon that occurs in any industrialized nation with a substantially visible middle-class, when youth put away these ‘rebel’ things and join mainstream and leave adolescence and fight their way into an illusory acceptability, (be it a 9 to 5, child rearing, and so on blah blah blah). So too do black boys rebel and put their pants as far from where they should be, but they often do it past when the ‘normal’ ‘until the time comes’, (but still you will only find it restricted to a specific age group of black men). It is important to note that their decision making is seen and imitated by the rest of the world: yes our youth of black America lead from their underwears.

   So to be full of profanity, oversexed, and super-baggy, among other things, is just not enough of a ‘rebel’ -generates no substantial post-modern difference from their parents (for now). They have to have it hanging off so far that they might as well just wear underwear in the street. Now, many other generations see that and wonder why they don’t just wear underwear in the street. Wear their pajamas in the street (though some do). But dammit…you put it there. You put the jeans off their ass so far by the degree to which you allowed poverty and racism engineering to delay or completely destroy their ‘until the time comes’ mechanism. Which may be a good thing or may be a bad thing. Lil Wayne's slavish dedication to 'A Milli' shows the destruction of something in our youth, that we let happen, no?

So.  Is this (image) fair?  Let the designer of this political image and 'other generation' black folk answer the question for themselves.  idren pause for an answer.