The sad thing is, Juan Williams has done good work in the not so distant past. His civil rights histories are near definitive, his op-ed work for the Washington Post was better than respectable, and he could always be counted on for insightful commentary on NPR. Then he hooked up with Fox News...
I don't know if they're spiking his coffee or what, but he hasn't been the same since.
I caught an interview with him on Wisconsin Public Radio today. It seems he has a new book out which is based on the premise that contemporary African-American politics, culture, and social life repreent a betrayal of the Civil Rights Movement.
While he made some fair(though debatable)arguments about the quality of Black American political leaders since the 1960's, he spent most of the hour bitching about what he considers the base nature of much of the entertainment currently being produced by and for African-Americans.
What a sanctimonious asshole.
Apparently, it hasn't occured to Mr. Williams that people, no matter what their shade, religion, or nationality have always enjoyed art feauring overtly sexual and/or violent themes. As Bill Mahr once noted, if you check out the ruins of ancient Greece and Rome, you'll see painted on the walls a lot of pictures of dwarves chasing large breasted women. Somehow, I doubt that our collective taste for salacious entertainment is going to go away any time soon.
Not to mention that yesterday's lowbrow often becomes today's highbrow. Blues music, for instance, was held in such low regard by the cultural gatekeepers of past decades that, as B.B. King once claimed, being a blues musician was like being black twice. Listen to any number of vintage blues records and, besides terrific music, you'll hear a lot about:
drugs
alcohol
devil-worship
voodoo
rape
murder
the size, shape, and consistency of various male and female anatomical parts
and, of course...
FILTHY, DIRTY, SEX
Flash forward to today, and you'll see blues museums and PBS documentaries. Blues music in TV advertisements. Blues music as background muzak in suburban restaurants.
Is it likely that we'll ever see Lil' Jon and The Yin-Yang Twins on postage stamps? Probably not. But the fact that millions of young black(and white and asian and latino)people enjoy their simplistic, boobie and booty-centic krunk jams isn't something anyone needs to lose any sleep over. The same goes for dumb sitcoms and T&A laden BET videos.
Juan Williams would do himself good to lighten up and(dare I say it?)Get Low.