A M E R I C A
I'm a 52-year-old hapahaole (half-Hawaiian/Okinawan, half-white) who's spent most of his life listening to white people dominate white spaces, and I've learned a few things. This page won’t be for everybody, but it is honest. Brutally so … just like life.
“I’m a 52-year-old hapahaole (half-Hawaiian/Okinawan, half-white) who’s spent most of his life listening to white people dominate white spaces, and I’ve learned a few things. This page won’t be for everybody, but it is honest. Brutally so … just like life.”
The Myth of the Drug-Free Workplace
Employers who test for pot are brilliant. Who doesn't want to be surrounded by repressed, frustrated, uncreative alcoholics?
Chess (Whites Only)
Chess, but the white pieces keep telling the black pieces to “act white”
Chess, but the white pieces keep telling the black pieces to “act white”
Starts with P, ends with Dejo
Screengrab of AOC tweet where she dunks on Tucker Carlson. “This is the type of stuff you say when your name starts with a P and ends with dejo.”
New Conquistador, Same as the Old Conquistador
There are two sides to gaslighting. Those who are gaslit and those who do the gaslighting. After setting up a $10 banana of a strawman, Neil then wants to let everyone know he's the sheriff here to straighten things out.
[laughter]
Stop me if you've heard this one before. A loudmouth white guy thinks he's smarter than everybody else.
[crowd roars]
[cold open]
Neil Young pulled his music from Spotify because it's allowing itself to be used as a mouthpiece for Joe Rogan's idiotic anti-vax propaganda. On his own website, Young says:
"Most of the listeners hearing the unfactual, misleading, and false COVID information on Spotify are 24 years old, impressionable, and easy to swing to the wrong side of the truth. These young people believe Spotify would never present grossly unfactual information. They unfortunately are wrong. I knew I had to try to point that out.”
Ladies and gentlemen, looks like it's time for another edition of ---
[crowd and host simultaneously] CRITICAL RACE THEORY!!!
[loud applause]
On the surface, Mr. Young seems to present a fairly straightforward case. Rogan is outsourcing his lying and people with Covid are dying. But, a few things about this quote trouble me. The most obvious is the idea that ANY 24-year-old believes everything he hears on Spotify. Is he fucking serious?
[laughter]
"These young people believe Spotify would NEVER present grossly unfactual information." Really??? Forget about 24-year-olds. How many 10-year-olds would actually believe that the entirety of the Spotify network would somehow NEVER present grossly unfactual information? Is the number of 10-year-olds meeting that criteria larger than zero? That it's a logical fallacy isn't inherently bad, but when it's doing the heavy lifting for Neil's justification it matters. Does he actually believe something so obviously untrue? Is he like Lucille Bluth asking, "How much could a banana cost? $10?"
[laughter and applause]
However, the next two phrases are where the action is. Young says Rogan's audience is "impressionable and easy to swing to the wrong side of the truth." Duh. White American culture is fundamentally based on gaslighting and control, so the fact a 24-year-old white man is easily manipulated is no more remarkable than a 48-year-old white man or 76-year-old white man being easily manipulated. It's baked into the culture.
[laughter and applause]
By the way, this is true of conservatives, liberals, rich, poor, middle class, educated, uneducated, it's quite democratic in its applicability. But, I wanna hit the phrase, "They unfortunately are wrong. I knew I had to try to point that out.”
There are two sides to gaslighting. Those who are gaslit and those who do the gaslighting. After setting up a $10 banana of a strawman, Neil wants to let everyone know he's the sheriff here to straighten things out.
[laughter]
Stop me if you've heard this one before. A loudmouth white guy thinks he's smarter than everybody else.
[crowd roars]
White people are so cowed by iconography and status that when a rock star like Neil Young says something dumb there's no critical apparatus in place to call him on his bullshit. Neil knows this. He wrote "Cortez The Killer," a badass guitar jam steeped in delusional white savior nonsense. He romanticizes the Aztecs, but it's not about the Aztecs. It's about us seeing Neil as a NEW kind of white savior, a liberal hippie conquering the militaristic right wing. His audience then human centipedes this self-congratulation, so all the white people feel better about themselves without fundamentally doing anything because they don't actually have skin in the game. New conquistador, same as the old conquistador.
[crowd roars]
Zuma contains "Stupid Girl," one of Neil's dumbest, most misogynistic songs. Thankfully, we know he's not a misogynist because a misogynist would portray himself as a majestic bird (danger bird?) riding a naked girl on the cover, his talons having complete control over her. Oh Neil, you rebel.
Neil says later in the same statement, "I was reminded by my own legal forces that contractually I did not have control of the music to (leave Spotify). I announced I was leaving anyway because I knew I was." White people lost their damn minds when they read this, but I'm seeing a guy who wants it both ways. Neil wants to make a $150 million profit off his catalog, but then make a very public and very dramatic demonstration about the catalog he no longer controls, as if he didn't sell it for $150 million.
[laughter and applause]
Audience, you know what that sounds like?
[crowd and host simultaneously] WHITE PEOPLE!!!
[laughter and applause]
What's most off-putting about the statement on Neil's website is that if it was just about vaccinations, the statement would stop there. But it doesn't. In fact, it's strange how he spends more time discussing audio quality than he does vaccine misinformation. He writes:
"There is an upside for my listeners, people who may be listening to the 60 years of music I have made in my life so far. It is this: many other platforms, Amazon, Apple, and Qobuz, to name a few, present my music today in all its High-Resolution glory -- the way it is intended to be heard, while unfortunately Spotify continues to peddle the lowest quality in music reproduction. So much for art."
It's almost as if Joe Rogan and vaccinations are just a smokescreen for Neil Young's weird and pointless obsession with perfect sound. I've never been able to square the fact that this guy spends so much waking energy searching for "High-Resolution glory" and yet his best albums sound like crap in the absolute best sense of the word. Time Fades Away, On The Beach, and Tonight's The Night are transcendent precisely BECAUSE they're not high-res. They’re dark and murky and don’t particularly want to be liked. And please don’t mansplain to me how good these albums ACTUALLY sound, as if somehow I haven’t been writing and proselytizing about them for literally 30 years. I know they sound awesome. But, they sound awesome because Neil wasn’t trying to be Roy Thomas Baker twiddling knobs for Queen or Jeff Lynne constructing orchestral wedding cakes or even The Eagles, new kids in town circa the Ditch, but already a poppy commercial force. Tonight’s wanted nothing to do with that shit and it’s why we love it.
Now, do I want a stream of Tonight’s to be as good as possible? Of course. But, Neil’s grandstanding about Hi-res — again, after claiming this is really about vaccinations — is a rich man convinced that his obsession with sound is about the audience getting the best possible experience and not a nakedly capitalistic and consumerist pursuit where "Young, the restless, pioneering innovator saves the stupid audience from itself."
[crowd erupts in laughter and applause]
The contempt Neil has for his audience -- and music fans in general -- is consistent with white men who think they're smarter than everybody else. He doubled down the next day, writing on his website:
"Amazon, Apple, and Qobuz deliver up to 100% of the music today and it sounds a lot better than the shitty degraded and neutered sound of Spotify. If you support Spotify, you are destroying an art form."
[host laughing] Everytime I think Neil is George Lucas, he goes full-on Lucille Bluth.
"Everything they do is so dramatic and flamboyant! IT MAKES ME WANT TO SET MYSELF ON FIRE!!!"
[laughter and applause]
Caucasian please. The idea that anyone is destroying art because of their platform choice is classic gaslighting behavior. “If you don’t do this thing I want you to do, you’re basically killing puppies. YOU WANT DEAD PUPPIES???“ Remember how Neil was making a principled stand against vaccine misinformation? He dedicates all of 1 1/2 sentences to that at THE VERY END of his follow-up post. Again, which is it? If this is just about sound quality, I get it, but you don’t have to bring up Rogan. And if it’s about Rogan, there’s no need to mention sound quality. But, he does and as I said before when a rock star like Neil Young says or does something unseemly there's no critical apparatus in place to call him on his bullshit. If anything, he’s rewarded for it, which means he has no incentive to not gaslight.
Which brings us back to Joe Rogan and his audience of testostedrones. You know what they have in common with Neil Young? They ALL think they're autonomous, independent-minded, fully realized individuals who analyze every choice with a fastidious eye for detail and nuance. You know, they do their own research.
Audience, I think we know who deludes themselves like this.
[crowd and host simultaneously] WHITE PEOPLE!!!
[laughter and applause]
Bo Burnham: How The World Works
Neil, like so many delusional, middle class whites, genuinely believes that if you just turn people onto the right information, they’ll come around. No dummies. Racists are racists because they like being racists. They like that it pisses off the libtards. We have hundreds, if not thousands, of years of data that says white people are binary thinkers not interested in the truth, so much as a story that puts them at the center as heroes. Whether it's "Cortez The Killer" or MAGA or ‘60s nostalgia or Birth Of A Nation, white people exist in a society that incentivizes their ignorance and coddles them from reality. Do you think Neil’s any different? He named his damn digital service Pono after the Hawaiian word for righteousness. What the fuck is righteous about a haole exploiting Hawaiian culture for his weirdo rich guy obsession? The motherfucker courted Donald Trump as a Pono investor and it wasn’t like this was in the ‘90s. This was less than seven years ago!
Neil Young is a great musician and a calculating opportunist. Always has been, always will be. And this isn’t about good, bad, or cancelling him. I’m gonna like the same Neil stuff I’ve always liked. Nothing really changes there. I’m more interested in pointing out The Great White Pantomime, where caucasians like Neil grandstand about issues, not because they’re personally invested, but because they need to control, dominate, and win, especially a narrative. And the narrative here — at least until the goalposts inevitably started moving — is that people aren’t getting vaccinated because Spotify has a magical algorithm that possesses the listener into believing everything it says. No. Vaccination numbers are down because white men always know better than everyone else and do what they want, when they want. They all wanna believe they’re autonomous, independent-minded, fully realized geniuses who analyze every choice with a fastidious eye for detail and nuance.
And then they make the same dumb decisions over and over.
[crowd roars]
As a wise man once said — and that wise man was me — you cannot fix a man incentivized to be broken. However, if you do somehow fix this problem, congratulations. You’ve fixed America.
Thank you! You've been a great audience. I'll talk to you next time for another edition of --
[crowd and host simultaneously] CRITICAL RACE THEORY!!!
[extended applause]
[cut to ad for Pono]
White Tears
"White Tears" is inspired by the latest round of book bannings from simple-minded, perpetually fragile post-Europeans, America's infected perineum since slithering onto Roanoke Island 437 years ago. #whitetears #whitenonsense #whitefragility #weaknessdisguisedasstrength
"White Tears" is inspired by the latest round of book bannings from simple-minded, perpetually fragile post-Europeans, America's infected perineum 437 years running. #whitetears #whitenonsense #whitefragility #weaknessdisguisedasstrength
