To gauge where the ruling class is headed, we can look at which styles of music the industry has been pushing as of late. The relationship between what kinds of art are getting boosted, and what moves the bourgeoisie intend to carry out next, is apparent from the shift that music has seen during these last few years.
It was right when the Trump 2.0 era began that hiphop got discarded as a tool for social control, after American capital had viewed it as highly useful for over a generation. The 2024 presidential campaign was when the bulk of the bourgeoisie embraced a decidedly more conservative cultural aesthetic, now prioritizing generic pop and country while pushing hiphop to the side; by 2025, the only rap song that could get helped by the algorithms was Ye’s “Heil Hitler.”
Is it a coincidence that during the same time rap lost favor from the system, we were seeing songs like Macklemore’s “Hinds Hall?” Both the MAGA wing and the liberal wing knew they needed to suppress art like this, so they’d decided to form an alliance based around combating these and all other forms of pro-Palestine sentiment. Then there were songs like Prince Swanny’s “BBQ Badness,” released in June 2024, that was about Haiti’s popular revolutionary leader Jimmy Berbecue.
These artists were threatening to fuel mass counter-hegemonic sentiments in a way that the system couldn’t contain, because they were directly connecting their art to the liberation struggles of today. No amount of industry co-optation or Diddy-style blackmail could neutralize this trend, so since then the ruling class has been trying to simply kill hiphop itself. The selling-out of hiphop was always a deliberate counterinsurgency strategy against the hood, designed to stop new Tupacs from emerging after the ruling class killed him. At a certain point, even the controlled opposition version of hiphop would be undermined. If hiphop stays pushed to the margins, as it likely will continue to be, it will gain a greater niche inside revolutionary political culture. And this will give us the memetic strength to continue galvanizing mass support behind revolutionary politics, even with all the ways the class enemy can repress us.
“In the world today all culture, all literature and art belong to definite classes and are geared to definite political lines,” observed Mao. “There is in fact no such thing as art for art's sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics. Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause; they are, as Lenin said, cogs and wheels in the whole revolutionary machine…Revolutionary culture is a powerful revolutionary weapon for the broad masses of the people. It prepares the ground ideologically before the revolution comes and is an important, indeed essential, fighting front in the general revolutionary front during the revolution.” It’s this historical reality that our enemies are responding to when they uphold “trad” aesthetics as a counter towards rap.
Another tactic they’ve employed is to transform mainstream rap, or what remains of it, into something repulsive. This was the function of the operation where sinister actors groomed Kanye into becoming a fascist, and gave him drugs that fueled his mental problems; it was after he became a Nazi that the quality of his music became objectively much worse. He turned from a maximalist in his art, into a minimalist who projects disheartening aesthetics. As Mao helps us understand, when these kinds of problems arise in the world of media, it has everything to do with politics.
The decline of Hollywood movies came from the geopolitical shifts over this last generation; after the Cold War ended, and we entered the “War on Terror” era where media’s priority became demented Zionist propaganda, the incentive became for movies to function as slop. The U.S. sees that China and modern Russia aren’t as big a soft-power threat as the USSR was, which indicates a real strategic weakness for the anti-imperialist side in our global conflict. So far during the new cold war, there isn’t as much globally explosive media coming from Washington’s challengers as there should be. (A notable exception is the Lego videos that an independent Iranian company has been making about the war.)
How can we respond to this issue? Not by talking about what Russia or China should do, but by becoming active agents in today’s battle for control over mass consciousness. By filling the void left by the system’s recent acts of sabotage against art, and using art to gain an advantage in the memetic class war.
This front in the revolutionary struggle is something that those within our ranks have already recognized as important; and this has given the American communist movement a chance to break free from the conventional left aesthetic, which is completely devoid of memetic appeal. I’m talking about how Infrared, the collective of eclectic Marxist thinkers who’ve waged a revolt against the movement’s gatekeepers, took a critical part of its inspiration from Kanye West. This of course being the past version of Kanye who’d successfully captured popular consciousness.
It makes perfect sense that Ye’s original resonance would be adopted by those striving to make communism mainstream again, because the brand he built was one that could capture the favor of the masses without its creator pretending to be something we wasn’t. Kanye didn’t have a gangster background, and he was further from being lumpen than even some white rappers like Eminem. And instead of trying to be a fake gangster, he explored the psychedelic in extreme ways that demanded attention. Ultimately the psychedelic ended up consuming him, which is a story that we should all take as a cautionary lesson; but these explorations led others to build upon them, starting a chain reaction that may actually be part of what brings communism to victory.
This example of when someone can capture the masses through displaying sheer unencumbured energy, without having to put on a false front about their social class or anything else, is so instructive to us because far from all communists are lumpen or working class. Many of us are petty-bourgeois professionals, or disgruntled professionals. Those of us in these categories cannot so easily go into the actual working class, not directly; this is a task best suited for those who actually have experience as workers. And no one can organize the lumpen besides the lumpen themselves; they already have their own organizations, they’re called the Surenos and the Bloods.
A popular revolutionary leadership is capable of unifying the gangs, like has happened in Haiti; but if this does happen in the USA, it certainly won’t come from any of the people falsely claiming to be lumpen, or acting like they can seamlessly join with a class they aren’t part of. Anyone can have success in mass work, but they need to know where their role is; and for many of us, the right role within the masses can be found through simply nurturing your community’s morale and material strength, without any gangster posturing being necessary.
The genuine lumpen elements in revolutionary organizing, and in music, will gain strength on their own; and no doubt their popularity will go up as the rest of America becomes increasingly like the hood, leading culture to become more renegade and counter-hegemonic. We can’t pretend we’re now part of the actual hood, though. The hood can save itself from cultural co-optation, and in a way it already has; the period where the ruling class promoted a sold-out version of hiphop was always going to be temporary, the authentic art form just needed to survive underground until it won the war of attrition.
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