Prince and Tom Petty

Madonna and the dead fans

There are millions of you paying to go see a handful, or one, of them. They don’t want to see you, the individual, but you want to see them badly. They have power, but you don’t except as a part of the crowd that they control.  One individual bee does not matter to a beekeeper, and you the member of an adoring audience numbering into the thousands, don’t matter either. You are faceless.

People with that kind of power have to arrogant because everything in their lives show them to be better than each of you. They have more money, they get more attention, they have less stress. You give of your wages to make them more wealthy in return for a few hours around a stage with them on it. They have to see themselves as gods because you keep telling them that that’s what they are.

Do you seriously think that any act of kindness that they perform is not done purely for their own benefit? Do you think that Madonna seriously gives a shit about the anonymous worker-ants, the nameless cattle that get caught under her stage? The only bad thing about this for her is the potential for lawsuits and the inevitable bad publicity. I am not sure she is wrong. When people abase themselves they have to expect to be seen in that way, to be judged as less than.

Brilliant Nike Marketing Strategy re: Jordan Crawford

So you are looking down the road at your next big marketing project, a kid named Jordan Crawford, and you need to get his name out there, get him in the market’s consciousness before he goes pro. You know this about the market:

1) It loves access to a secret
Like sex tapes or hidden cameras. People are voyeurs by natures, creepy little Chuck Berry’s desperate for access to a peephole. 

2) They have tremendous faith in the Internet
The belief that the Internet is a “wild west” not yet controlled by corporate or government interests means that people think that they might be allowed to see something that those in authority do not want them to see.  This “scandal” thrives on the fact that people have been searching for this video.  
 
3) A great many people dislike LeBron James
So much so that daring to compare him to Michael Jordan still puts you in great danger of being shot in certain circles. Many believe him to be an over-marketed Nike mascot who gets away with cheating on a regular basis. They actively want to believe that a kid, particularly one named “Jordan”, dunked on James.

4) There is a lot of sports-withdrawal going on right now
If you are not into baseball this time of year sucks. You want to go into football mode, but you are scared. You go into it too soon and you have to suffer till the season starts. You don’t even want to start thinking about basketball yet. Still any little bit of news grabs and holds your attention, like news of the girl that dumped you a decade ago. You pay attention even though you know it’s pointless.

5) Sports-fanship is largely about recalling things
What happened in such and such a season, the names of the positions, plays, colleges, who got drafted where, by whom, and in what year. Nothing is more important than knowing the name of people. It’s hard if these people are from a different country, or culture with strange names, but that just makes it more of a challenge, something for the true sports geek to feel proud of. This gets Nike and Lebron James even more deeply implanted in the media than they were previously.

It’s easy to fabricate a story like this
Seriously, the whole thing is about tantalizing rumor that seems to make somebody look bad, which, of course, is the most tantalizing kind of rumor. It has elements that have to get you hooked but that are not really verifiable. Meaning they can be easily disproved and dismissed at a later point. Whether or not you actually ever view the footage you know the name Jordan Crawford.

Diana Ross and Little Richard

Murder-suicide is a little bit too neat

What part of this whole thing is there that could not be faked? A murder suicide is very neat, it gives police a bunch of reasons to not do any more work, and it's dramatic, which means that the press will love it. Furthermore they are very simple to pull off, any cop who has been at the scene of one could replicate it easily.

People who might want to commit a murder-suicide in the McNair-Kazemi case:

• Keith Norfleet
  Cuckolded ex of Sahel Kazemi.
  

• Mechelle McNair
  Cuckolded ex of Steve McNair
  

Those are just the obvious ones, everything about this could be staged by somebody who was blackmailing him, or maybe people in Vegas getting payback for games he didn't play the right way. The possibilities are endless.

His major influences

He was a kid who got isolated, cut off from the real world and became so self-involved and image-focused that it made him weird. Obsessions are like that.

His influences were Dianna Ross and Little Richard. Diana Ross for the diva attitude and the reinvention of self with plastic surgery. Little Richard for the diva attitude and the skin-bleaching. These people, the Little Richards and the Eartha Kitts and the Diana Rosses and even, to a certain extent, Harry Belafonte, they represent an eccentric subset of African American culture. You find them in the bigger, historically black communities like Harlem and parts of New Orleans. They are usually light-skinned and ostentatiously civilized as if trying to prove something. Their houses have lots of knick-knacks.

The later episodes of the Cosby Show often delve into this sub-culture, also an 80s TV show called Frank's Place
which almost nobody remembers, but which was decades ahead of its time.
 
It's the product of self-hatred, a need to have an identity, and a need to respect that identity. They want confidence and the trappings of a cultured person, but the definition of "cultured" was formed by an older America that collected tea-sets and art.