Maybe you’ve followed Miley Cyrus’s transformation (or self-destruction). The singer has broken forth, at 20, from her former Disney persona as Hannah Montana with two or three sexually-explicit performances; and Sinead O’Connor has warned her that she’s being exploited. Cyrus has been defiant. Lately she said that she doesn’t get advice on career moves from a 70-year-old Jewish record exec.
In an interview with Hunger TV, Cyrus revealed that she’s very much running her own ship and is not the industry puppet that some make her out to be.
“With magazines, with movies, it’s always weird when things are targeted for young people yet they’re driven by people that are like 40 years too old. It can’t be like this 70-year-old Jewish man that doesn’t leave his desk all day, telling me what the clubs want to hear,” Cyrus said. “I’m going out, I know what they want to hear. I know when you’re in a club, what makes everyone go crazy and when the time is where everyone’s like, ‘All right, I’m going go get a drink.’ I know when people walk off the dance floor and I know what’s driving it, so I’ve got to be the one doing it because they’re just not in on what 20-year-olds are doing.”
The Jewish press is on this; I’m late. And some are calling the comment anti-Semitic. But I just watched TMZ live on Fox and while one commentator criticized Cyrus for stereotyping, two others gave Cyrus a pass. A young man said, who’s kidding who, Hollywood is run by Jewish people and he’s OK with that. A woman said, jokingly, Talk to the Jews, Jews know show business. Maybe this moment signals a more open and neutral conversation about the Jewish establishment? I hope so, but I could be wrong. I’m 58.
(Do I watch Fox? The TV was on that channel from the baseball game last night. The ambassador’s team won.)
The rise of hip hop is one interesting facet of Jewish-Black relations. There are prominent rappers who have multiple references to ‘Jewish lawyers’. A lot of media execs in hiphop are Jewish.
One hiphopper even called for less Jews in hip hop(that is, in the manegement positions) because he felt their/our tastes diluted ‘real hiphop’, he later apologized(but only half-heartedly).
Read Tablet’s summary here:
http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/music/131254/requiem-for-a-racist-rapper
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Addendum:
The story of Jewish music execs pushing black music to the white mainstream is not new. (Although these days the mainstream is a lot more diverse). Michael Jackson’s career was boosted in large part by Jews, who helped him reach MTV. Of course, we wouldn’t call his music ‘black’ today but that’s because of his evolution(both in music style and skin tone) post-MTV.
Additionally, I think a lot of these old Jews grew up with a counter-cultural sensibility.
For many of them, boosting blacks became a way to attack the white (WASP) establishment many of them were antagonistic about, even though they had more or less made it by that point(this was post-1980s), so it was more posing than anything with real substance. I remember in my family, there was a lot of pride during the 80s when every single dean of the Ivy League universities was Jewish. If that happens, you can’t claim to be outsiders anymore, it’s ridicolous so I think hip hop became a way to channel that kind of necessity to see yourself as the progressive outsider who calls racism on the establishment(even if you’re since long part of the same establishment).
The Black/Jewish political alliance has long fallen apart, especially in wake of Crown Heights. The future of Judaism, if we are to believe the Pew poll, is Orthodox and their relations with blacks in Brooklyn today is hardly ideal.
There is also almost a patrician element in all of this. Jews are their managers, lawyers and owners of their labels. When they rise, Jews help them. When they fall and go before the court, they come to Jews.
Jews are their fixers, patrons and managers. The subservient role is eternal for blacks. This is also how it was during the civil rights movement.
Jews were the nice white liberals, the kind of white folks you could trust, but ultimately Jews had the ability to assimilate into white society and to reach the upper echelons of power, whether cultural, financial or political. Blacks by and large haven’t had this opportunity. Jews can one day work for underprivileged kids and pat ourselves on the back for doing Tikkun Olam and by the end of the day, retreat into our lily-white communities. But if you live in the ghetto, there’s no escape.
Also, as an aside: who owns BET(the premier black TV channel before it got sold a few years ago)? Viacom, owned by a Jew(Redstone) and whose CEO is Jewish.
Will BET in Jewish hands have the same agenda as it had before? A lot in the black community does not think so. Of course, the previous owner of BET sold it for financial reasons but I can understand the frustrations in the black community, but is it racism or not? I think these are tensions people don’t talk about, and when they do, like the rapper that Tablet highlighted, Jews do get antsy, because it does not gel with our “we’re the better white people” image.
In some ways, our relationship with blacks is similar to the black/Korean relationship in LA back in the day. Blacks and Jews probably have better relations, but there’s never any doubt who has the upper hand, even the whip hand if it comes to it, and who is in the subservient role, whose primary function is to be a victim and grateful to the nice Jewish people who are very rich and very well-off and whose lily-white gates communities there is no access if you’re black. But you’ll see them do Tikkun Olam once in a while in your community – and you better be grateful, and then they’re gone.
I think your description of the power dynamics is true for the past, even recent, but in an era of JZ, Diddy and a few others, its hard to say whites of any background have the upper hand in black cultural production.
And the founder of BET became the first black American billionaire so I wouldn’t worry too much about him as a symbol of victimhood either. I think in fact he got the better deal over Redstone.
Some Jews, like Rick Rubin seem to have been in a different mold than say the stereotypical mildly less racist but still racially exploitative managers of the Spike Lee Mo Better Blues stereotype. Rubin has never been described by the black musicians he has worked with as other than a partner and peer, from Run DMC on. (Russell Simmons being a bit bit of a capitalist himself).
There was a moment where Jews served as intermediaries between black and mainstream white society but all the dynamics have changed (for the better mostly) and that moment is over.
Here’s a bit more on Miley’s POV: http://www.thehollywoodgossip.com/2013/10/miley-cyrus-to-old-jewish-men-shut-up/
RE: It can’t be like this 70-year-old Jewish man that doesn’t leave his desk all day, telling me what the clubs want to hear,” Cyrus said.
SHOULD HAVE BEEN: “It can’t be like this 70-year-old man that doesn’t leave his desk all day, telling me what the clubs want to hear…”
P.S. What was the purpose in adding “Jewish”? It’s very suspect.