POINT/COUNTERPOINT.

From January, Victor Davis Hanson:

A few hours before delivering that State of the Union, President Obama met with rapper Kendrick Lamar. Obama announced that Lamar’s hit “How Much a Dollar Cost” was his favorite song of 2015. The song comes from the album To Pimp a Butterfly; the album cover shows a crowd of young African-American men massed in front of the White House. In celebratory fashion, all are gripping champagne bottles and hundred-dollar bills; in front of them lies the corpse of a white judge, with two Xs drawn over his closed eyes. So why wouldn't the president’s advisors at least have advised him that such a gratuitous White House sanction might be incongruous with a visual message of racial hatred? Was Obama seeking cultural authenticity, of the sort he seeks by wearing a T-shirt, with his baseball cap on backwards and thumb up? 

To play the old "what if" game that is necessary in the bewildering age of Obama: what if President George W. Bush had invited to the White House a controversial country Western singer, known for using the f- and n- words liberally in his music and celebrating attacks on Bureau of Land Management officers...

From the Grammys last night, Kendrick Lamar:


Kendrick Lamar Grammy Awards Performance 2016 from Jamie Apps Media on Vimeo.

Take a fuckin' seat VDH.

UPDATE. In comments, a very worthwhile reaction by dauwhe:

I'm the worst kind of music snob, listening only to Jazz for the last three decades. Curiosity lead me to Kamasi Washington's "The Epic," which bothered many of the critics, but on first hearing had me dancing around my living room in a transcendent state. Many of the same musicians contributed to Kendrick Lamar's "To Pimp a Butterfly." And so I ended up with a CD in my house with a parental warning (Thanks Tipper!). I'd never bought a rap album. I don't listen to the radio... Yet Kendrick Lamar blew me away. Staggering ambition, searing emotion, musical genius at the smallest and largest scales, and a dramatic political statement—I feel lucky to have experienced this music. I can only surmise that VDH did not listen, or did not recognize the profound humanity and intelligence of the music and its creator. His loss.

Yeah; it must suck to be so committed to an ideology that requires constant blinkers and earplugs.