Myron Magnet's C-Rappy Article

Giant shocker here. 

Last week City Journal ran an article entitled “Cut the C-rap” seething with rage over Jay-Z having the audacity to criticize Trump for being racist when, um, actually it’s black people who are racist and the cause of black people’s problems by Myron Magnet that was widely and justifiably eviscerated by the entirety of the Internet for a couple of reasons. 

Here’s an excerpt from the hysterical article from the frothing-mad racist moron: “If Jay-Z wants to see someone truly hurtful to blacks—by contrast with Trump, under whose administration black unemployment has plunged to 6.8 percent in December, the lowest rate on record—he might usefully take a hard look at himself and the tribe of rap “artists” he leads. What is keeping down American blacks today is not racism, oppression, or lack of opportunity. That’s over. Black Americans are now free. What holds them back is the ideology of “authentic blackness”—a black identity rooted in the urban underclass culture of hatred of authority (especially of  the police, the teacher, and the boss), indifference to learning, misogyny, sex stripped of love or commitment, hustling, resentment, drug trafficking and using, tolerance of lawbreaking, and rage, rage, rage, the hallmark of keeping it real.”

Rage, rage, rage should be reserved for angry old white men lecturing black men about morality, not for people with no reason to ever complain because racism is totally over, except for the awful anti-white racism that causes black men to disrespect their social bettors like Magnet and Trump. 

First and foremost, there’s that title. I’m astonished that someone in 2018, no matter how clueless, myopic or ancient would imagine that calling rap, an art form that has been an essential component of American culture and life for nearly four decades, “crap” was clever or insightful. In seemingly any other context, a headline like “Cut the C-rap” would be poisonously ironic and sarcastic, a way of poking fun at all the angry, oblivious white-haired snobs impotently shaking a fist at the kids with their damned jungle music because they just don't get it and never will. 

There’s Magnet’s stupid fucking cartoon name but also his even more ridiculous appearance. The 73 year old asshole’s personal style can best be described as “Old Timey Racist.” With his giant muttonchops, snow-white hair and scowling expression—in every picture I’ve seen of Magnet, he looks like he’s just sat on a nail and is intent on making humanity suffer for his pain—he looks like a ridiculous caricature of an ancient white racist asshole. 

Also, eating the poor is a more solid idea than you might imagine. 

He looks like the kind of guy who gets asked if he plays Scrooge the same way seven foot tall men get asked if they play basketball. He looks like Scrooge but he acts like Scrooge as well. 

I don’t think Magnet’s editorial would have enraged me as much if I hadn’t just seen someone on my Facebook timeline complain about Kanye West being nominated for dozens of Grammys despite not being, in their eyes, a real musician because he doesn't play conventional instruments. 

For what it’s worth, Kanye West plays keyboards and synthesizers in addition to sampling, but that doesn’t seem to matter to this dude on Facebook. In his mind, rap is sampling, which is stealing from other people and not art or music, and consequently Kanye is not a real artist or a real musician.

I thought we settled this shit a long, long time. It’s been nearly forty years since “Rapper’s Delight” brought hip hop into the mainstream. Rap is art. Sampling is art. Rapping requires incredible dexterity, creativity and talent, certainly more so than writing pompous editorials about the kids today. 

The only people who pretend otherwise are folks like Magnet with a deep-seated ideological need to depict the music of the black underclass as hopelessly ersatz and inauthentic, as a violent, anti-authority, anti-white pathology responsible for keeping African-Americans poor and dependent and oppressed, despite the best efforts of white saviors like Donald Trump to save them from themselves. 

With the authority that comes with being an angry, Trump-loving, Obama-hating 73 year old Martin Van Buren lookalike, Magnet assures us that “racism”, “oppression” and “lack of opportunity” are all “over” for African-Americans. 

Great news! Hundreds of years of slavery and over a century of Jim Crow now have zero negative effects on black communities. Kindly white Americans like Myron Magnet have completely eliminated any real white-on-black racism. Now, apparently, African-Americans’ problems are attributable to other African-Americans like Jay-Z or Magnet’s bete noire Barack Obama, who Magnet spent eight years wagging a finger at and lecturing for not fitting his image of an appropriate black man (think Ben Carson, but meeker and more deferential towards the Myron Magnets of the world). 

It amazes me that the clearly racist rambling of a delusional old man was even published in the first place. Before Trump’s election, and the awful, reactionary social shift it signaled, I would have said that the rap-hating mindset that Magnet embodies, rooted in generational prejudices and also just being a racist, evil old fuck, would die with him.

Now I’m not so sure. Trump’s ignorance and undisguised contempt for black culture and black people has empowered other awful white people to be more bold and open in their bigotry. So perhaps we should brace ourselves for a sad revival of the “Rap isn’t real music” debate I honestly imagined we’d retired long ago. 

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