From NPR · · 3m
Spend Dat and the grift economy
Yung Miami's summer hit becomes a mirror for America's pyramid scheme, from Elizabeth Holmes to predatory loans.
In brief
Yung Miami's summer hit becomes a mirror for America's pyramid scheme, from Elizabeth Holmes to predatory loans. Yung Miami's Spend Dat reflects how hip-hop has become complicit in celebrating the same exploitative systems it once opposed. Originally reported by NPR.
The perfect theme song for a scammer
After watching the documentary You Can See Everything, writer Rodney Carmichael thought Yung Miami's Spend Dat would be perfect closing credits music for a story about someone who blows money fast.
A song about consumption and corruption
Spend Dat is dedicated to scammers and boosters. Behind its seductive surface lies the sadomasochistic loop of late-stage capitalism, making it an inflation indicator and America's most American anthem of the year.
The video echoes early two-thousands excess
The Spend Dat video feels like a throwback to the early two-thousands, when making it rain in strip clubs signaled selling the dream.
India.Arie calls for a boycott
India.Arie publicly denounced Spend Dat and called for Black folk to boycott the Billboard-charting song of the summer, saying everything you listen to, see or eat will influence you.
“Everything you listen to see or eat is going to influence you.”
Boots Riley's film offers a counterpoint
The same week as the Spend Dat controversy, Boots Riley's film I Love Boosters hit streaming.
Riley calls all art propaganda
Boots Riley, an avowed communist who switched from fronting Bay Area rap group The Coup to screenwriting, says art magnifying the status quo is uncritical regurgitation of elite indoctrination, not benign representation.
“Don't call us that unless you're calling everybody that. Because what it then made it seem like was as if everything else was just what it is.”
DuBois warned a century ago
In his essay Criteria of Negro Art, written one hundred years ago this month, WEB DuBois wrote that Black people are ashamed of their worst side because it has been shamelessly emphasized by white patrons.
“Our worst side has been so shamelessly emphasized that we are denying we have or ever had a worst side.”
Yung Miami defends the song
When Spend Dat went platinum, Yung Miami appeared on The Breakfast Club to promote her solo debut Watch Dis. She defended the song as inspirational music that builds people up to want to be somebody.
Hip-hop became the establishment's tool
Rap started at the bottom but the script flipped. The systems hip-hop rebelled against became the metric for its success. Commercial rap made itself a useful tool of the establishment and a racial scapegoat.
The American Dream is a pyramid scheme
The nation's founders created a system even the lowest caste could be constrained and cajoled into aspiring to. The grift is so complete it is almost impossible to distinguish the mark from the con artist.
“You can't buy your way out of a system that was built on selling you.”
The perfect closing credits for now
In a year when prediction markets and predatory installment loans drained us, inflation skyrocketed and tech billionaires quickened the apocalypse, an ode to America's hustle might be the closing credits theme we all deserve.
What to remember
Yung Miami's Spend Dat reflects how hip-hop has become complicit in celebrating the same exploitative systems it once opposed.
