"The ethnography of poverty that we coat
in metaphors and similes to help cope
in beloved communities that are deficient of hope
that’s why the young and the music elope,
there no way you can denote,
The syncopation that gave voice to the streets
or blackball us from the poet elite
we’re owed a canonized seat
right next to Solomon and Sinclair Belize
the Beat Writers who wrote poems to beats.
Lyrical vandals that graffitied the streets
The Beat Writers who wrote poems to beats." — Steven Willis
Art in the capitalist world exists in a frightening position: the people who have the money to support it either congregate into exceedingly narrow cliques of approval, or its subcultures and practices are eventually co-opted, homogenized, and exploited to make the form as welcoming as possible for the widest audience. The ultimate endgame of these sorts of arrogant integrations is commodification. As things become commodities — items that are sold in the name of profit — control over these items (or practices, or aesthetics…) tends to leave the masses of people and instead become aggregated into the hands of a relative few who can profit from it. Those who lose control are usually the very people who helped birth the form.
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