“Okay, when I was a kid, there were some wiggers, talking like badass black dudes, hat on sideways, generally the lowest pieces-of-shit you’d ever meet. That’s understandable, people who are zeroes wanting to appropriate someone else’s thing. But now, most white Americans under 40 are into Hip Hop, are still listening to marginal music that glorifies drug-dealing, pimping, gangbanging, all in this black American context. Have any thoughts on that, on Hip Hop being the driving force in American culture for over a generation?”

-Iggy Epsilon

First, America has always been predominantly a cultural nullification matrix in the form of an exploitive economic zone masquerading as a nation. Public schools were started to erase ethnic identity and included schools specifically purposed for eradicating American Indian identity.

The fact that we were ever at the point where non-traditional music was the well-spring of culture, instead of an expression of existing culture as in healthy societies, tells us we were ripe for the fall. As a teen American, I knew that my grandparent’s nation had once been about two things, winning wars and making money, and that my parent’s nation was just about making money, as I grew up during the long defeat of the greatest industrial nation by a dirt poor nation of rice farmers. None of us expected to become better off than our parents and most identified themselves culturally according to music and sports; what did you listen to and what did you watch?

In this light, wiggerism makes all the sense in the world.

How are you going to get respect in an economy in which your parent’s and grandparent’s generation was moving the work overseas so you never had a chance to equal or surpass them? The steel mills were closing, the coal mines laying off and to make decent money we were going to have to go deep in debt for a college education. Just about everyone I knew my age knew we were probably not going to be able to equal our parent’s standard of living. They all had houses. Half of us don’t own houses.

Then came the divorces. My parents were the first couple I knew to give up on raising their family. The guys that were being born when my parents were getting divorced in the late 1970s, very few of those guys had intact families.

In such a climate the ultimate rebellion would be to adopt the hip hop values of immorality, violence and crime, to embrace what your shitbag parents feared—the behavior of the ebon felon. The only thing of any substance about American culture was the prosperity gospel and when that failed you got the vicious little caricature of the prosperity gospel with some sissy thug snarling disrespect at a society that deserved none as he flashed the cash that represented the urban American prosperity gospel, a knot roll of money enough to get weed, booze and pussy for the weekend.

Keeping in mind that African American masculine culture had already been destroyed before hip hop rose as the nihilistic anthem of a generation with no cultural inheritance, then it was ready made for the failure of the weakest culture of them all, the idea of universal whiteness, of civility for money’s sake and money for civility’s sake, of the lack of distinction as a core social value. I would have to say that the deep seed for our current paleface mania for cultural appropriation of African American criminal stylistics was planted in the 1860s with the replacement of the idea of the Christian ‘who believed in something’ with the idea of the Whiteman ‘who had something.’ Possession of wealth as an identity must be the most fragile form of social construct imaginable. I don’t know anything about the music business, but I’m taking a wild guess that those businessmen who promoted music as culture in the 1960s and 70s, and thug music as cultural replacement from the mid-1980s onward, both movements done in lockstep with burgeoning new drug markets, were “White” and were not Christians.

Just a suggested line of inquiry for someone with more courage than I.