The following text was written one year ago today by Sir E.U, Washington, D.C.-based emcee and visionary artist—January 14, 2018.
Sir E.U, Polaroids by Maxwell Young
There is no level of voyeurism that can suffice when trying to accurately entail something's true worth when you are not it.
I recently read an article about Australian Psych-Rock that was written by a dude from/living in Los Angeles, CA. Such juxtapositional authority has become typical & out of hand. It reminds me of how Malcolm X once lamented about the voice of the civil rights movement at the time being primarily clowns as he called them—entertainers and beloved athletes who's prominence in society was mainly derivative of their commercial appeal rather than focused resolve in origin.
So many articles/lists/BRANDS/COMPANIES capitalize & feign focus on regions that they're most often absent from, feigning informed authority. This is blatantly disrespectful to the intersectionality that the parties in subject present; Constantly one-dimensionalizing entities by providing a narrative based on the most evident and superficial consistencies, more than likely physical or consistent themes in aesthetic or likenesses. In most digital journalism these days, the content and character of the subject in observation is boiled down and sacrificed to the omni-limited palette of the apathetic and disconnected consumer, more than likely on the basis of likability much more so than real world viability and applicability. I realize that it has been like this long before I was born.
Underprivileged communities, under represented individuals, and artists suffer the most when outsiders define the narrative that the rest of the world tunes in to & gathers empathy from their character. We all have heroes from our hometowns in our psyche who could have genuinely produced game-changing results in their fields had someone with resource been able to witness their ability in the proper context and environments. I have vivid memories of groups of children cranking D.C artist Lightshow on the A6/A8 etc, community type, but someone from out of town has no access to these memories, and the chances are zero to none that a kid on the bus follows the newspaper reporter making the next regional top 10 list that'll define the local hierarchy for the next few months.
It is gentrification. The communities & artists featured by the media are always either the creme of the most mainstream applicable (w/ honorable mentions going to the most pretentious non-conformists), or the archetype bad examples who we are taught to either reject or learn from their missteps. All who get their first impression from the outsiders' (mis)interpretation of what really goes on are none the wiser. The causes of what made these entities are no where near close to being initially considered. The myth of the self-made entity is the root of all consumerism and a revisionist's apology for capitalism, and it is a fountain of poverty and wealth begetting each other. Us electing officials and accepting the narratives of outsiders to our home interests breeds the craving for authenticity that works us and our idols to death in search of, vainly and vampirically draining our company of all savvy from the world outside of our chosen focuses and feeds.
We so often opt to accept, and, even more prevalently than ever now, we strive to invalidate or propose superlative parallels to what is plead rather than to simply empathize with someone's sharing of their understanding so far, which is definitely not to say that people are predominantly apt to be inoffensive when sharing theirselves either.
As long as we look to essentially uninformed and unbiased entities to determine our savvy's as our guides to the unknown, we will never escape the cycle of sampling our salvation until the next issue of it brands it obsolete. There is no level of voyeurism that can suffice when trying to accurately entail something's true worth when you are not it.
