How BET promotes Biden-era enslavement
Lizzo opened this week’s catastrophic BET Awards dressed as a disco ball. She wore a spangly, form-fitting outfit designed to accentuate her 260-pound figure, recalling the symbol of ’70s dance-hall libertinism for her new song “About Damn Time.” Her appearance was a throwback to subcultural licentiousness symbolizing the Biden era’s approved identity for American blacks. As a model of #BLM #MeToo #TimesUp self-acceptance, Lizzo represented exactly how the disco ball originally functioned: a spherical object whose many fractured facets dazzled and confused.
Deception was the aim of both Lizzo and the BET awards. In the next instant, the show announced Lizzo had contributed $1 million to Planned Parenthood. Coming just days after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, Lizzo bankrolled her opposition. The gesture was not only individual lunacy (like Barbra Streisand transferring part of her personal Disney stock to George Floyd’s children out of white liberal guilt); it was Lizzo’s egregious publicity stunt. She shifted roles from entertainer to corporate-sponsored ideological puppet.
Born Melissa Viviane Jefferson, in Detroit, the 34-year-old Lizzo, who attended music school in Houston, Texas, is a product of corporate media and its political bias. Her music, but especially her 5′ 10″ rotund appearance, represents a redefinition of Millennial race and cultural standards. She performed “About Damn Time” with a retinue of plus-size male and female dancers culled from her Amazon Prime reality-TV show, Lizzo’s Watch Out for the Big Grrrls, further promoting one of the demographics — obese people — that politicians insisted were highly subject to Covid-era complications.
Lizzo’s co-morbidity chorus line mirrored her own stylized aggression. The Afro-American Big Grrrls phenotypes are derived from the white radical feminist concept Riot Grrrls, perfectly linked to the dubious approval of Biden liberals, thus a cultural devolution. This demagogic stampede, headed toward that industry-favored Planned Parenthood contribution, degrades Lizzo’s part in black showbiz tradition; she updates the slave-era mammy-wench stereotypes.
By not addressing Planned Parenthood’s origins in Margaret Sanger’s eugenicist racism, Lizzo and her handlers align with the similarly thoughtless Billie Jean King, Megan Rapinoe, and Janelle Monáe, lesbian celebrities who appropriate abortion as part of their political radicalism. (Monáe took the BET stage and cussed out SCOTUS.) In this cultural trap, black performers and their audiences reduce their social choices. Their sycophantic allegiance to the pro-abortion feminist movement confirmed how black showbiz is easily exploited by a Democratic Party Plantation mindset.
This ideological enslavement goes deep: Since BET’s 1980 founder, Robert L. Johnson, sold the network to Viacom for $3 billion in 2005, it is no longer simply a black-owned media network. Now BET is owned by Paramount Media Networks, which is the parent media organization of companies that include the former MTV Networks and ViacomCBS Media Networks. A 2015 estimate of BET’s black-themed programming claimed that the network was received in 88,255,000 households (75.8 percent of television-owning households).
In media terms, BET is a new plantation, and an artist like Lizzo is among its hardest workers. But you can no longer simply enjoy such sweat-equity minstrels. Their images, signs, and meanings — Lizzo’s double-barreled obesity and politics — get in the way.
On her 2019 breakout track, “Cuz I Love You,” Lizzo cried out frustrations felt by unhappy black women who feel misunderstood and abandoned by men (the song’s music video specifies a throng of incarcerated black males). The witty plaint about thwarted desire — Lizzo’s emotionally fractured signature song — took advantage of cultural stereotypes, placating the self-destructive, psychopathic reasons for bad decisions, poor health, and emotional wantonness.
Ironically, Lizzo’s Cuz I Love You album was recorded for Atlantic Records, home of Stax Records and Led Zeppelin, which makes her representative of where the music and media industry stand. But unlike the blues of an Aretha or Mary J. Blige, Lizzo’s music forces a political response, and sometimes repulsion. This change in showbiz precepts realigns our cultural standards, more proof that in the Biden era, a generation of black celebrities is easily exploited — and with its own eager consent.
Lizzo’s mirror-ball routine reflects all our political pathologies. Even if you missed the BET broadcast of her self-display and her Planned Parenthood bequest, it symbolizes race-culture deprivation and you must deal with it.
