beyonce been on the dance music ting since she done that lion king afro/gqom album with all them south african man pfork ra only just started sucking off
it might be commercial but hows it exploitative when shes bussin scenes and being a shitty gateway that gets ppl lionizing the real thing (even if its perfomative), at worst shes a parasite with mutually beneficial motives like drake if anything
fuirthermore certain, actually gay, actually black ppl r saying she diana ross levels of gay icon n while thats obviously wild gas idk if u man r even allowed to question it if we're doing this superwoke billionaires r bad rah rah shit
I agree with a lot of what you say here, and yet...
I don't think she's exploitative, i mean not relative to anyone else in capitalist society who has access to appropriate means of production.
It's just boring tho isn't it? this need to constantly present dance music to be the underdog. For sure dance music has been whitewashed as i said up thread but its just this long ting when mans are like save the underground. fam the underground was kaput when them lot went to fucking beefa and brought that shit back to london. let's get real now. The face, nme and melody maker were hardly writing about Ron Hardy in 85 were they? If you want social commentary and dialogue, you'd be better following rap, which is always generating and regenerating ways of presenting that. But almost 30 year old pastiches? Most people writing about this stuff just want to think they can disavow being indie wankers. and it's like, nope, I ain't swallowin it.
Personally I don't even have an opinion on the record. Like it's not bad enough for me to hate, but it's not good enough for me to like.
But I should probably come clean and say I'm also too old for pop music as pop music itself. Like, I have listened to enough music in my life that when I talk about pop music, I have frames of references, be that hip hop/rnb, funk, middle eastern stuff. I'm not consuming pop music (even that i like) on its own terms necessarily, I'm looking at it from a slanted angle. Reading it right to left or something i dunno. So if it brings awareness of house being black music with black roots into the mainstream culture then of course that is a good thing, i just don't think I can talk about that adequately, because even if I wanted to, I'm not in pop cultures garden of Eden. I know too much. and I think this is where poptimists end up being rockists in denial and get it wrong.