Is Hip Hop Growing Up?
Instagram has cultivated my feed quite well, and I do, in fact, spend time watching videos that I did not specifically seek out. It was through the almighty algorithm that I came into contact with multiple black social-media influencers. Many I follow because they are funny, while others caught my attention because they highlight music, athletes, or other subjects that interest me.
But I’ve noticed something else: several black influencers are delivering surprisingly sophisticated messages while speaking in a distinctly urban black vernacular, using the slang and cadence associated with rap and hip-hop culture. The presentation may sound ghetto, but the substance could easily come from a weekend seminar on personal development.
They are offering dating and relationship advice that goes well beyond familiar stereotypes, discussing discipline, responsibility, money, family, and self-improvement. They are also exploring political and social questions outside the traditional boundaries associated with either mainstream black politics or hip-hop culture. The contrast between the style of delivery and the seriousness of the ideas is striking.
Is urban black culture, for lack of a better term, maturing and becoming more self-reflective?
Here are a few samples:
Marvin Goodly
This guy is really interesting. He offers dating advice for men, and his assessment of women is brutal but insightful. He tells men not to grovel or think of themselves as lesser. This is a common message among men who discuss dating online. There are some pissed-off men out there.
But Goodly goes beyond complaining. For a fee, he offers to fly to a man’s location, revise his client’s appearance and social media presence, and help improve a man’s dating life. It’s an interesting business model and, I must say, sheer genius in an AI-driven world. If a man just can’t get it together, hiring a human being to help is a very good move.
This is a bit long but the message is clear as a bell.
ZPocketx
This guy is funny, and be warned, he uses the word ‘niggar’ a lot. Most black social media stars are over the word, they use it constantly, they don't care about it, and everyone else should defang its sigma as well. But listen to his message. He’s telling men to grow up, to be men, to take responsibility while explaining the differences between a B.A.M. or Bitch Ass Nigga and a P.A.M. which is a Pussy Ass Nigga. Ghetto examples, highly mature message.
Ni_kki6946
Maybe dialogue like this has been going on in the black community for years, and I was simply isolated from it. But I’ve noticed that there is a strong strain of black conservatism that is now firmly wedded to black culture.
Black conservatives of the past always had a certain tweedy aspect. They dropped the accent when articulating their conservative political or economic views, while those in the hip-hop scene generally tracked left. Not anymore. Listen to this black woman. She is deeply rooted in black linguistic conventions, but she isn’t holding back.
Dihantatted
Another development is the effort by black digital creators to distance themselves form the more destructive elements of black culture. They are succeeding, have goals, and do not wish to be held back by the ghetto criminal orientation. This attitude could formerly only be expressed in an environment were crazy things could be said out loud, such as stand up comedy
Here is Chris Rock from 30 YEARS AGO!
Only a comedian could say this thirty years ago, but now, a black man can stone cold sober say the same thing. He isn’t particularly ghetto in his voice, but just a few years ago, if you saw this person, you might rightly conclude that he would be unlikely to delver this message. Look at Chris Rock above, and look at this man below. Something different is happening.
Moneymitchszn
Here is a guy who speaks often of the lessons he learned form his grandfather. His grandfather was apparently a wise man who spoke clearly and with authority and Moneymitch soaked it up.
I’ve often asserted that there isn’t a separate black culture from me because I’ve been living within a larger American culture that is itself highly influenced by black culture. White Americans have gravitated toward the cultural habits, music, language, and style of black America for a long time.
But rap and hip-hop were different from, say, Michael Jackson, Marvin Gaye, or Prince. They were much more aggressive and, at least in some forms, associated with antisocial attitudes and outcomes.
What I find interesting about this new wave of black quasi-celebrities is that they are hip-hop in voice and appearance, but often highly mature in their messaging. They retain the language, cadence, and style of hip-hop culture while delivering messages about responsibility, relationships, discipline, ambition, and personal development.
And many of them are they are funny, like this guy:
mr_everythings_cool
The Zero Units
The Wall Street Journal is out with an excellent one-hour documentary about the final days of American involvement in Afghanistan. It’s called The Path to Zero, and it is well worth watching. The film provides a concise account of the disastrous decisions, bureaucratic failures and battlefield improvisations that culminated in the chaotic American withdrawal. But one of its most disturbing subjects is the CIA-backed Afghan “Zero Units”—forces trained, armed, funded and supported by the United States to conduct the kind of clandestine and brutal operations that conventional American forces could not.
Afghanistan had always been a place of shifting loyalties, personal bargains and survival-driven negotiation. In that environment, a ruthless proxy force had obvious utility. The Zero Units were built for precisely that world. They operated outside the restraints imposed on ordinary American troops and developed a reputation for extraordinary violence. When Kabul collapsed and desperate civilians flooded the airport, these were the men brought in to impose order.
According to Marines interviewed in The Path to Zero, that order was imposed by methods American troops themselves would not use: firing into crowds, shooting civilians and driving vehicles through masses of people. Those allegations are extraordinary, and they deserve far more attention than they have received. What is not in dispute is that the Zero Units helped clear Kabul airport when conventional American forces were struggling to do so, allowing evacuation flights to resume and the United States to accelerate its departure.
I’ve written before about China functioning as a kind of American industrial “Shabbat goy.” We prohibit, regulate or politically reject certain forms of dirty, dangerous or undesirable production at home, then outsource them abroad and continue enjoying the benefits.
The Zero Units represented the military version of the same arrangement.
They were a proxy force created and sustained by the United States, but capable of employing methods American soldiers could not openly employ themselves. In the closing hours of America’s longest war, when the evacuation descended into chaos and the runway had to be cleared, America turned to men operating under a different moral and operational code to do the ugly work.
I’ve read war literature and enjoyed the genre throughout my life. I read Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five when I was a teenager, and since then I’ve consumed stories from many of America’s wars. I’ve also read war literature from other nations, particularly German accounts of the Eastern Front. Most are harrowing tales of survival, random death, heroism, and men caught inside forces far beyond their control.
I haven’t read any books about the long, 20-year conflict in Afghanistan, but the news reporting has not exactly whetted my appetite for more. The landlocked country seems to contain nearly every pathology of both the past and the present, combined with a great deal of historical bad luck. The Americans spent 20 years there and changed virtually nothing of lasting significance, except that an unknown number of people died for reasons that had little to do with a revolution of ideas capable of producing a better, more prosperous and economically advanced Afghanistan. There was no Afghan George Washington. If there is a happy story to be told about the American experience there, I haven’t found it.
In a world that produces no shortage of bad news, few stories seem as consistently brutal and morally troubling as that of the Zero Units created and supported by the CIA—essentially elite Afghan special-forces units used for clandestine counterterrorism operations.
In the Wall Street Journal documentary, these forces are credited with helping clear Kabul airport after it was overrun by civilians, making it impossible to continue evacuating Americans, their dependents, and others from the country. Tens of thousands of Afghans poured toward the airport, jammed the runways, and it was during this period that one of the defining images of the entire war emerged: Afghans running alongside a massive American military transport aircraft, some desperately clinging to its exterior as it moved down the runway.
That image—an enormous American warplane being chased by Afghans in sandals and oversized shirts—is as metaphorically powerful for Afghanistan as the iceberg was for the Titanic. Images of Afghans falling from the sky were carried around the world. The airport had to be cleared.
The Marines could have done it the old-fashioned way—with overwhelming force, gunfire and terror—but they were neither willing nor generally permitted to treat a crowd of desperate civilians that way. There were few good alternatives.
There was, however, one brutally effective alternative: turn to the Zero Units and allow them to do what they had already developed a reputation for doing—using extraordinary violence and intimidation against Afghans to compel compliance from a frightened, chaotic and increasingly desperate crowd.
Long before the sad and painful ending in Afghanistan, the Zero Units were already well known to the miserable Afghan people.
If you value great journalism—and believe, as I do, that the true journalists who put their lives on the line to get the story are heroes, as opposed to the propagandists who populate so many news organizations around the world—then you might appreciate the reporting of Lynzy Billing and her 2019 work from inside Afghanistan on the night raids carried out by the Zero Units under American direction.
Billing’s reporting documented a shadow war that most Americans knew little about: heavily armed Afghan units, backed by the CIA, conducting nighttime raids against suspected militants in villages across the country. Her work helped expose the human cost of those operations and the degree to which these units had become feared by ordinary Afghans long before the final collapse in Kabul.
She writes in her opening:
This story is a deep look inside what happened after America embraced the strategy of night raids — quick, brutal operations that went wrong far more often than the U.S. has acknowledged.
As one U.S. Army Ranger ruefully told me after the Taliban’s triumph last year: “You go on night raids, make more enemies, then you gotta go on more night raids for the more enemies you now have to kill.”
The origins of these units are not in dispute. They were created by the Americans to conduct raids and other operations that were beyond either the capacity or the willingness of the conventional U.S. military. They were composed of Afghan men, but they were trained, equipped and supported by the United States.
This was part of a much longer post-World War II pattern in which low-level conflicts ground on in the twilight—wars fought through proxies, intelligence services, special operations forces and local militias rather than through the kind of formally declared, conventional warfare Americans once associated with military conflict.
In 1967, the CIA’s Phoenix Program famously used kill-capture raids against the Viet Cong insurgency in south Vietnam, creating an intense public blowback. William Colby, then-CIA executive director and former chief of the Saigon station, conceded to Congress in 1971 that it wasn’t possible to differentiate with certainty between enemy insurgents or people who were neutral or even allies.
Despite the program’s ignominious reputation — a 1971 Pentagon study found only 3% of those killed or captured were full or probationary Viet Cong members above the district level — it appears to have served as a blueprint for future night raid operations.
No military official ever argued that a 3 percent success rate was acceptable for night-raid operations. U.S. commanders in Afghanistan, including Gen. David Petraeus and Gen. Stanley McChrystal, publicly claimed that the kill-or-capture rate was dramatically higher—often cited at roughly 80 percent.
But former members of the Zero Units later told Billing that the numbers appearing in post-operation reports were often generated by the units themselves. Naturally, those reports did not describe anything resembling a 3 percent success rate.
Billing tracked down at least two former Zero Unit soldiers who agreed to speak with her. Both were still in Afghanistan and keeping a low profile. One of them she identified as “Baseer”:
When he returned to Afghanistan at age 16, he lived in yet another refugee camp. “I wanted to be a politician, but there were no jobs.” Baseer eventually became a bodyguard for his father, a police officer, before signing on with the police as well. The poor pay pushed him to join the military and then the 02 unit in late 2016, where he said he was paid about $700 per month in American currency — more than three times what regular soldiers made. He also received eight months of training from Turkish and American soldiers at several locations in Afghanistan. “The 02 had the weapons and power, and I liked the idea of duty related to operations and fighting,” he said.
Hadi transferred to the 02 from the Afghan commandos in 2017. “It was my dream to join ‘the Infamous Zero Unit,’” he said. “I thought I would be part of building and securing a new Afghanistan, and as the Americans say,” Hadi briefly switched to English, with an American twang: “‘blast them out of their holes’ and ‘send them to hell.’ I wanted to get the bad guys.” He paused. “At first, the thrill was intense. But the job wasn’t this clear in the end. You know, I became the bad guy, or maybe I wanted to be the bad guy all along.” He looked away, fingering a frayed edge of the carpet.
Once in the units, the men said, it often seemed like they weren’t fighting Afghanistan’s battle at all. The CIA, with the aid of American soldiers on the ground, they said, ran the show. “They point out the targets and we hit them,” Baseer said, adding that about 80 soldiers go on a raid and “10 Americans, sometimes 12, join every operation.”
Billing interviewed an American Army Ranger who explained the details of these raids:
I was startled to learn that military planners baked potential “collateral damage” into the pre-raid calculus they prepared from overhead photography and other intelligence. “Ninety percent of the casualties are because you just can’t see them,” Jason said. “We have something we call a slant, which predicts the number of people in the compound. So 3/6/8 is 3 men, 6 women and 8 children. But because the women and children are hidden inside, that slant in reality will end up being 3/14/36, and a lot of times it’s the kids and women who get caught in the crossfire.”
In other cases, he said, civilians just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. “There’s a time we threw a grenade into a hole where an ISIS guy was,” he said. “But there were a bunch of women and kids and in the crossfire a pregnant woman got shot. She was fine, but obviously the kids’ eardrums exploded and everything like that.”
During his four months with the Zero Units, Jason said, Americans were often present at every stage of the operation. The questioning of suspects at the scene was done by the Afghan soldiers, and the “verification” of terrorists was typically done by the American soldiers through biometrics “or people at the site of the raid saying they are terrorists.”
“While the unit did get some known bad guys,” he said, it was also sent after the wrong people or just low-level Taliban to boost their count.
So, one can see how an 80% bad guy to civilian ration turns into a 3% bad guy to civilian ratio reality. It was just a seriously fucked up place and all operation there were ugly.
She ends her report with a follow up on the Zero Unit (what she called by its local name: 02)
Only one of the 02 unit commanders picked up my call. He’d just arrived in Sacramento, California, after five months at a U.S. base and 20 days in a hotel in Los Angeles. There is no plan yet for him or his men. They’d been dispersed across the country, “but our skills and abilities are not being utilized and we are jobless.”
The full article can be found here.
So, these were bad guys in a bad situation in a very bad time in an otherwise bad country. After years of raiding where they had killed scores of civilians, they were called upon to move thousands of civilians out of an airport after they knew they would be leaving, but only if the plane could land. That brings us back to Kabul in August of 2021.
On August 15, the Afghan population could tell what was happening, and so thousands and thousands swarmed the Kabul airport, overwhelmed the gates, and poured onto the runway. This was the Hamid Karzai International Airport, by the way, and Karzai was our guy, widely seen to have administered a deeply corrupt government for nearly 10 years. The footage seen so widely of Afghans clinging to the side of a US Air Force cargo plane and falling to their deaths was on August 16. At that point, everyone knew that if the masses of civilians weren't driven out of the airport, there would be no further evacuation. US Marines tried—they fired shots over people’s heads—but outside, the Taliban were at the gates and trying to keep people in. they weren’t there to help out. And these civilians were desperate. At this point, the Marines turned to the Zero Units to get the job done. Paul Gigot at the WSJ picks up the story in a conversation with Michael Pack, the producer of The Path to Zero doc.
Michael Pack: So the airport was totally overrun, and these people were desperate. They were afraid that if they left the airport, the Taliban would kill them. So for one night and one day, the Marines tried to clear the airport. As you said, if they didn’t clear the airport, no evacuation, no planes could take off or leave. And they used every non-lethal method they could think of. They shot in the air. They pushed them. But these people wouldn’t leave the airport because they figure if they leave the airport, they’ll be killed. And you could see their desperation. Those are the people that were clinging to the C-17 that took off until they finally fell. So they’re afraid for their life. So the normal methods of the Marines did not work. So the military brought in these Zero Units who were trained by the CIA. They were kind of guerrilla units were working under the CIA for a bunch of years.
Paul Gigot: They were kill... the kill squads against the Taliban, basically is what they were.
Michael Pack: That’s right. They might have done things that our troops wouldn’t do, but they were fighting the Taliban. They were on our side, and now they were brought in to deal with their own people, their civilians. And the only way to clear the airport, which is what they did, is they shoot into the crowd and run them over with cars. So they’re shooting and killing innocent civilians because only that could change the calculus. Now, if you stay in the airport, the Zero Unit’s going to kill you, so you’re better off going out. Who knows what the Taliban will do? So that did do it, but it was a horrible thing. And to get the Zero Units, who, even though they’re kill squads, they were in their minds, patriots defending these very people, to shoot their own people, their own... civilians, their own countrymen, the CIA had to promise they’d be the first to be evacuated. So 30,000 of them, they and their families were evacuated. 30,000 of the 124,000, almost a quarter. So it’s a horrible thing to contemplate. Frank McKenzie, head of CENTCOM, says, and I believe him, “There was no other way to clear the airport.” But the fact of the matter is these Zero Units killed innocent civilians under American control, and these Marines had to watch and do nothing. It’s part of the moral injury to watch people kill innocent people while they sit and do nothing is also a horrible thing to live with.
Paul Gigot: And it’s part of the moral quandary that the military was presented with by our political leaders.
Michael Pack: Indeed.
The American way of war is technically brilliant, strategically confused, and, with the wrong commander in chief, morally abominable. We didn't make the Afghans like they are, but after 20 years, we were a part of the culture, too. And we should never have stayed that long or done so much. And now, the Taliban is back and, as far as I can tell, they are the rulers the Afghans want. We should re-label all the maps, and where that bedraggled country is, it should read: ‘Here be monsters. Stay away.”
A transcript of that podcast is here.
The Musk Supply Chain
A potentially good investment strategy might be to buy up every domain name beginning with “Star,” given Elon Musk’s habit of naming everything in his universe either “Star” or “X,” on the theory that you’ll eventually be able to sell the domains to him. Then again, he has probably already thought of that.
SpaceX is planning a new venture called Starpipe, a natural-gas pipeline that will run from the Port of Brownsville to Starbase, where the gas will be processed into liquid methane to fuel SpaceX’s rapidly multiplying Starship launches.
It’s really amazing what Musk is undertaking. His broader plan is a sort of massive conglomerate, or what was called in the old days, a Trust, that has every component needed to fuel massive transportation projects o earth and equally as massive projects in space. When he says he’s going to mars, he isn’t kidding. His companies operate like parts of one vertically integrated machine.
SpaceX, xAI, X and Starlink — approximately $1.9 trillion: SpaceX is now the center of Musk’s empire. It supplies rockets, satellites and global communications through Starlink; xAI supplies artificial intelligence through Grok; and X supplies users, information and distribution. SpaceX is also developing natural-gas infrastructure, AI data centers and, eventually, computing systems in orbit. Musk owns roughly 40%–48% of the shares, depending on how options and share classes are counted, while controlling more than 80% of the voting power.
Tesla — approximately $1.25 trillion: Tesla supplies the physical machinery: electric vehicles, robotaxis, Optimus robots, batteries, solar equipment and large-scale Megapack energy storage. Musk beneficially owns roughly 20%, including exercisable options. Tesla increasingly acts as the manufacturing and energy arm of the larger Musk system.
Neuralink — approximately $9 billion: Neuralink is developing brain-computer interfaces. Its immediate purpose is medical—helping people with paralysis control computers—but Musk’s longer-term ambition is a direct connection between human intelligence and AI. Its most recent reported financing valued the company at about $9 billion.
The Boring Company — potentially $20 billion: Remember this? I think this is a holdover from when Musk lived in California. The Boring Company builds tunnels and underground transportation systems, typically using Tesla vehicles. It has been seeking new financing at a reported $20 billion valuation, although that valuation remains provisional until the financing closes.
So, the overall design is becoming clearer. X collects attention and information. Grok turns information into intelligence. Starlink moves that intelligence around the world. SpaceX launches the communications and computing infrastructure. Tesla supplies the batteries, energy systems, vehicles and robots that bring AI into the physical world. Neuralink could eventually connect the system directly to the human brain, while the Boring Company builds some of the physical infrastructure through which it moves.
The companies already exchange employees, technology, investments and products. SpaceX and xAI buy Tesla batteries and vehicles; Tesla incorporates Grok; SpaceX is building power and chip infrastructure for AI; and Boring Company tunnels carry Teslas.
Musk is no longer simply building cars and rockets and other miscellaneous stuff. He’s building the most valuable business empire in the history of the world. It’s breathtaking in its scale and scope. Will it work? Sure, it might work perfectly or some of it will not work, but even if only 50% survives, its a huge impact in the earth ad humanity. I’m watching SpaceX stock and will probably jump in soon.
Essential Music
I’ve asserted many times here and elsewhere that country music is the genre best positioned to survive the onslaught of AI-generated music while retaining its essential human creative spark. The genre emphasizes live performance, and much of it remains relatively simple music played on instruments of nonelectronic origin. Still, country can lean heavily toward either rock-and-roll or pop, and the genre regularly produces new artists.
One such newcomer is Tucker Wetmore. Here is one of his songs, which cleverly uses its lyrics to describe the “bad girl” he loves—a woman who is 98 percent angel.
The lyrics contain a few clunky rhymes, but they are largely composed of well-matched couplets:
Girl, go ahead and call me crazy
Damn sure it ain't the first time
Ain't no way you could see we
Couldn't cut this tension with a knife
Looks like that Little Miss Perfect
Got a little more under that surface
You come walkin' in here with a purpose
(And it's workin')
Well, it might be coincidental
But it won't be accidental
When I run up incidentals
in my hotel room with (You)
Dancin' like you know I like it
Ain't no way that you can hide it
Why you actin' like there's something to (Prove)
Girl, don't even try
'Cause you're 98% angel
Showin' off the other two tonight
Yeah, I admit I haven't taken my eyes off
you since you gave me that look
Scenario I'd love to try on
My night go right by the book
Wings might get a little bit ruffled
Somethin' might come a little unbuckled
Kinda lookin' like my kinda trouble
There ain't nothin' subtle 'bout (You)
Dancin' like you know I like it
Ain't no way that you can hide it
Why you actin' like there's something to (Prove)
Girl, don't even try
'Cause you're 98% angel
Showin' off the other two tonight
Well, it might be coincidental
But it won't be accidental
When I run up incidentals in my hotel room with (You)
Dancin' like you know I like it
Ain't no way that you can hide it
Why you actin' like there's something to (Prove)
Girl, don't even try
'Cause you're 98% angel
Showin' off the other two tonight
I’m bringing back my Sunday Stories series because I believe these stories are useful and capture some of the trends I see shaping the world. If you agree, please share this edition and help me bring a little more attention to the series.
Have a great week!