The Press Box - The Chaotic Evil of Trump’s Immigration Policy | Damage Control (Ep. 485)

Episode Date: June 20, 2018

This week on 'Damage Control,' The Ringer’s Justin Charity and Kate Knibbs discuss the political chaos surrounding children being separated from their families and detained at the U.S.-Mexico border (1:10). They also delve into the incredibly fraught life and legacy of rapper XXXTentacion, who died on Monday (19:46). More from The Ringer: The Unsolvable Difficulty of XXXTentacion’s Death Odd Future: The Death of XXXTentacion and Rap’s Generational Crisis Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I'm Justin Charity. And I'm Kate Nibbs. Welcome to Damage Control on the Channel 33 Network, a podcast where we unpack what upsets, excites, and divides us in popular culture. The death of Triple X Tintoshione. The 20-year-old rapper was gunned down in Miami on Monday. In his wake, he leaves a victim of physical abuse,

his own unsolved murder, and a substantial, uncomfortable musical legacy. He's left fans, music critics, and victims of domestic violence, searching for words this week, and we're going to try to make sense of it all here. But first, we're talking about the Trump administration's attempts to spin its policy of separating families at the border between Mexico and the U.S. The national outcry about these policies has only grown louder over the course of this week,

as the Trump administration's policies have created not only despair, but also confusion. We'll explore it all here on this week's damage control. Okay, so first of all, Kate, it's June 20. 20th. Do you know what today is? World Refugee Day. That's right. Do you know that the U.S. State Department recognizes World Refugee Day? I knew that it did in the past. I wasn't sure about this current administration state department. They do. They put out a statement. Do you know what the statement?

Do you want to take a guess it with the statement the tone of the statement is and the nature of the statement is celebrating World Refugee Day? Was it ironic? No. I wish it had been ironic. said the statement is sort of, it's the U.S., it's basically, it's the state department listing all of the humanitarian aid amounts that it's given to various countries in the world. That's rude. So it's been a demoralizing past couple weeks for the Trump administration and all who live under it.

I think maybe the most. The most, yeah. The Trump administration has spent the past week struggling to justify its policy of separating children from their parents once families are caught crossing the border from Mexico into the United States. When we say separating families, there's photos of what this means. You've seen the photos, right, Kate? Yes.

You want to describe what the conditions of these separated families are. I mean, they're in makeshift jails. They're in cages. I mean, I think it was the today. show. There was some morning news outlet who, they said the officials were disputing their characterization of the children being cages, not because, and it was, it was inaccurate, but because it was just like. It's not a good word. They were like, yeah, but they were, they admitted that it was accurate to say they were in cages. They're in cages. And. Children, the children are. The children are,

the children are in cages. The adults are also in cages, but separately. But separately. Right. They're And they're being, it's an internment camp. Right. Or multiple internment camps. And this has been going on since the spring, but, and it's also been being reported on since the spring, but we've finally had access to a lot of photos, which I think have had a huge impact in like stirring empathy with mainstream Americans. And so we've seen images. There's like a really, like, instantly iconic image of a child crying. as her mother is being handcuffed.

There's the images of the kids laying in those little, like, tinfoil disaster zone blankets and crying. And it's, the images coming out this week have made me, like, very, very ashamed of our country. Right. The thing about the separation is that it's not just people are being detained for illegally crossing at the border. Which is a misdemeanor, by the way. Right. And that they're being, you know, a mom being in one cage and their daughter being in another. It's specifically that the adult parents and the minor children, they're basically separate legal tracks.

The New York Times reported a story about a Guatemalan family that inspired a lot of backlash to the Trump administration. But basically, the deportation process for the parents is faster than the deportation process for the parent. And so you end up with these situations where these kids are in cages. and meanwhile their parent is deported. They're put on a plane and sent back to their home country. And meanwhile, their kid is stuck in the United States and processing. It's insane. So you have this bureaucratic nightmare, this dystopian reactionary bureaucratic nightmare.

And the Trump administration has spent the past couple weeks trying to justify it. And when I say trying, I mean struggling. It's been really hard to keep track of, like, who is. said which lie and who was the worst? Well, it's, the administration's dispatched like six different officials to offer 10 different irreconcilable, incompatible, rationales, either defending the policy, disavowing responsibility for the policy or claiming that the policy doesn't exist. Sometimes the same official will do all three things. It seems like it's like a full court press confusion campaign.

Right. They're like, okay, so no one. explanation is going to fly here. So let's just like give everyone as many explanations as we could think of and sort of like so confusion in that way. Right. So far basically Trump himself, President Donald Trump is taking, he's basically taking the line of this is the Democrats' fault. This policy exists and it's the Democrats' fault. The Democrats invented this policy. Which is a lie. Jeff Sessions has defended the policy Stephen Miller

the White House advisor has defended the policy and then you have the Homeland Security Secretary Kirsten Nielsen who has she's the one who's been the most confusing she's both denied that the policy exists defended the policy and been the subject of a New York Times report that says that she internally lobbied Trump against enforcement

of the policy and she Kirsten Nielsen has become I'd actually say that Kirsten Nielsen and Stephen Miller are kind of splitting the difference right now in terms of who people are making the avatars of the forced family separation policy. But Kirsten Mielsen is the person who last night in D.C. got heckled out of a Mexican restaurant. I mean, why did she go to a Mexican restaurant? Yeah. She was asking for it. But she's on video, basically, like, protesters running her out of a restaurant.

and what looks like somewhere around McPherson Square or like near the White House in D.C., she's sort of shamefully walking back to her motorcade. And that's where we're at right now. There is a, this is the biggest, this just seems like the biggest anti-Trump backlash that we've seen. Yeah.

And it's led to this weird. At least since the Muslim ban. Right, since the Muslim ban. Which the Muslim ban is like the first month. That's like the opening days of Trump's presidency. Well, he had to wait a while between atrocities, I guess. But okay, so actually, like, the most recent thing is that I'm not sure if it's going to happen today, but basically Trump is prepping an executive order. It's really remarkable because he usually never walks back on anything.

And the backlash has been so severe against this policy that it seems like he is caving a little bit. So the executive order, Trump actually used the phrase, we've got to be keeping families together when he was discussing his plans. And that was notable because there was like a sort of rallying cry, hashtag keeping families together from the protesters of this policy. So he's kind of co-opting the language of protest. You know the last time when that co-opting happened, it was DACA. Remember the whole part of the DACA debate where Trump's, the plot twist was Trump loves the Dreamers. Trump is like, let's, we got to protect the Dreamers, folks. I don't know.

And then like that did not end well for the Democrats or the dreamers or anybody on the pro-doc side of that debate. But there was that brief window when everybody thought Trump saw the light. And it feels like this is a rerun of that. Yeah. And I'm worried that people will be like too placated by the executive order. Because the fact is even if this does end the separation. And I'm not going to lie. Like obviously it's a good thing that children won't be being ripped from their parents' arms.

the fact of the matter is the executive order plans to detain families indefinitely who are just seeking asylum, which isn't even a crime. Like he's not, he's fixing a small part of the inhumane thing, but he is still allowing like the larger frame inhumane thing to continue. I'm holding my arms up. It's a dark bureaucratic joke in a way, right? It's like a bunch of people come to you saying, you're being inhumane. And the thing you fix, it's like, it totally misses the point of what the whole argument is and seems to deliberately miss the point. Well, I don't know if it misses. Like, I think that most Americans, they've pulled people and most Americans are against the separation of families.

So he will be placating people in that sense. Many people, myself included, think that it's still extremely terrible and inhumane for family. to be detained together at the border. Like we want decriminalization. We want ICE to be abolished. People with progressive immigration beliefs will still continue to be horrified by what the Trump administration is doing. But I think that's like a smaller segment.

I think the people, a lot of like the Republicans who have sort of crossed the aisle on this issue, a lot of moderates and just like a lot of regular people who aren't like paying that much attention to the news. and they're just seeing these horrible photos of kids in cages. I'm worried that if they hear that Trump has done something to end the kids in cages by themselves, they won't care that the kids are just going to be put in cages with their parents. Okay, so we just had to pause the podcast for a second because while we were talking, Trump did end up signing this executive order.

Right. Yeah. And so from what we understand so far, it's that the state of play. now is that he's ended the family separation policy, but that now creates a situation in which families can be detained together at the border indefinitely. So you still have children in detention. Yes. They're just going to be with their parents, which is slightly better than being by themselves, but still very bad. Well, yeah, better than being by themselves, including after the parent is deported. Yes.

but it's still children in cages. Like the fundamental thing here that is the fundamental, certainly visual cue of children in cages is still, that seems to be still true. Yeah. Well, and also, so there, people are already sort of speculating that there's this executive order is going to cause legal problems for the Trump administration because there's a 1997 law called the Flores law, I believe. and it prohibits children from being detained for extended periods of time, generally anything more than 20 days. Yeah, and so the problem is that the children, the executive order is saying that the children can be held indefinitely,

and that is incongruent with the existing law. Oh, when is a legal challenge ever stopped? But, yeah. I'm just wondering if this is, to use, think that this is the apex of the crisis for the Trump administration? Like, do you think this is going to solve anything? I don't know the political answer to that question. Part of the reason I wanted to talk about this with you is because, so there's the political, there's the immigration question, right, which is a political question for, you know, a lot of

political argument. But to me, the uniquely Trumpian thing about this is the fact that, thank you. I Imagine a dark thing. Imagine Jeff Sessions is president, right? If Jeff Sessions is president, it's easy for me to imagine a world in which you have this policy in place. And President Sessions and his press secretary and his director of Homeland Security, they all come out and just say, well, this is the policy. Right?

Like, this is the policy. We campaigned on this. We won. You can dislike it all. want. You can go to your congressman if you want, but this is the policy and this is, we did this for this reason. Goodbye. The uniquely Trumpian thing is that instead of that, you have this, you have this dystopian, bewildering. This is the policy, but also the policy doesn't exist, but also it's the Democrats' fault, but also I campaigned on this, but also a reminder, this policy

doesn't actually exist. That's the weird thing here. That's the, that's the thing that's, that's the thing that seems to characterize so much of how the Trump administration interacts with people. Sessions would be lawful evil and Trump is chaotic. Right. Right. Right. It's chaos governance. Yeah. I think if you get to a point where you look at Trump and you're like, he's so chaotic,

like he's an opportunist. He might have become anything and he just happened to become this. It's like, no, the thing he became is a very specific articulation of American reactionary ideology. Yeah. So where do we go from here? Do you think I'm of two minds, I guess, about what could happen next? I do think that this whole controversy, I hope at least, that it's changed people's opinions of immigration or at least made them reconsider their stance.

and maybe this will sort of give immigration reform activists an end to get more people on their side. Do you mean it in the sense of like maybe this, the argument over children in cages basically leaves a permanent dent in the arch conservative case? Yes, and just the case for the necessity of ice and the case for criminalization of. of undocumented immigrants and stuff. Like, I just think that maybe this will inspire people who haven't really given it much thought to think about the other problems besides the child separation policy, the other problems around U.S. immigration policy, which, you know, the Obama administration was very strict on penalizing immigrants without documentation. like Obama's nickname amongst immigration activists was the deporter in chief. Trump took preexisting attitudes about immigration to an unprecedentedly horrible place. But I think that this maybe will get like, you know, middle of the road conservatives,

middle of the road liberals who were fine with other really inhumane policies. it will inspire them to take a closer look at what the United States has been doing apart from the child separation. That's my hopeful side. But then I worry that the signing of the executive order will sort of dissipate anger. Like, do you think I should be optimistic or pessimistic? I mean, I think you should be pessimistic. Because, I mean, even apart from or on top of the immigration debate,

I just the way, even if you look at this as like Trump ultimately losing and he signs this executive order and he clearly looks bad and no one agrees with him, I just look at the way in which his administration persecuted this argument. The Trump administration doesn't talk to the American people. Like forget talking to its critics or whatever. It doesn't talk to the country as a governing body that's trying to say, and even in the most flattering terms to itself, trying to say, hey, this. is what's happening. We're doing this. This is our agenda. The Trump administration just sort of says whatever, says whatever to whoever and however many different forums. And yeah, the fact that this debate was so defined by and it is so defined by in the same way that DACA was, the president just sort of saying, it's like gaslighting,

right? It's like the photos are right there and you still had the DHS secretary saying, like, it's not accurate to say that the kids are in cages. You know? Also, this policy doesn't exist. Yeah. Also, this policy doesn't exist. Also, the policy that doesn't exist was created by Bill Clinton, but also Barack Obama. You know, it's that manner of communication that makes me, that is the unique thing.

And that's why people look at this debate as a uniquely Trumpian thing, even though you can trace it to Obama. And even though you can trace it to Bill Clinton. right or you can trace different elements of what led us to this point to past presidents. Trump really is the person who, like him and his administration have so little faith in so much cynicism about what it takes to win people over to their side and how much they can get away with despite the popular will. And so, yeah, I don't know that you should be optimistic. Like, we watched how DACA played out.

Even the travel ban. Like, the travel ban was the ultimate sort of Trump looking kind of stupid in his first hundred days. But then he just sort of goes on and we're on to the next issue. And, you know, we're still, even when he loses, we're all a little bit worse for the wear. Definitely. But I'm still going to be a tiny bit optimistic. If only because the next topic that we're talking about has left me like,

just profoundly pessimistic about everything. So I'm going to take this tiny, like, psychological win for myself here. That's fair. We deserve it. It's a pretty dark week. It's a pretty dark episode of damage control, but we must continue. Yeah. Okay.

So Triple X Tintoshione was a 20-year-old rapper who was gunned down and killed in his car in Miami on Monday. Triple extantation was a polarizing figure. He's a controversial figure. We're not going to hide behind those vague terms. We're going to talk about the contrary. Yeah, exactly what he did. He notoriously abused and beat his pregnant ex-girlfriend. He was a dark and unsavory figure who made a lot of dark, appealing music.

for a new generation of rap fans who I would say, um, um, sort of exist on the outskirts of mainstream discourse. He, he sort of got his first hit on SoundCloud, right? Yeah. Look at me.

Look at me. Not only did he get his first hit on SoundCloud, because like a lot of rappers do, he got his first hit on SoundCloud with a song that just sounded like it was contraband. Hey, Hey. It's, you was your mess, hey, can't keep my dick in my pants.

Hey, my bitch don't love me no more. Hey, she came me out like, bro. Hey, that bitch don't want to be friends. Hey, I give her dishie I'm mad. Hey, she put her 10 on my dick, hey, look at my wrist about 10. Hey, just got a pound of the booth. Hey, by that she's straight to the booth. Hey, tell me my health of the fools.

It's like very aggressively unfinished, unpolished, Yally song called Look at Me. Everything about Triple X Tintoshion, his manner of dress, his, his, wild, weirdly colored, you know, hair, his dreads, his actual criminal record and history of abuse, all of it codes very loudly as this guy was an outlaw. And the problem with that, and even as I'm saying out loud, right, like I'm struggling with it, the fact that when you talk about somebody like that as an outlaw, on some level, that's what they want. Well, and I think for him, all of the bad shit he did wasn't wasn't separate from his musical persona.

It was like baked into it. Yeah. And sort of like pouring a celerant on his popularity. Right. And listen, uh, Triple X Tentatioan's music is interesting. So there's certainly a level on which like,

if, if, if his music existed in a vacuum, it would have appeal, but it is distressing to think how much the darkness surrounding him and his history of abuse and his violent nature is in fact a part of his appeal

or was a part of his appeal as a rapper. Yeah, it's really depressing. And it's also like a... Is an interesting case study in the whole, like, art? Can you separate the art and the artist debate?

Because with a lot of the, I mean, first of all, he's not the first terrible man to make really good music. Right. Like, not even close. And a lot of, like, a lot of the musical idols of America were bad people who did various bad things. Like, John Lennon was a wife beater. The thing that made, like, I didn't listen to his music because by the way, that I was introduced to him was by hearing about this rapper who had started becoming super popular and also he nearly killed his pregnant ex-girlfriend. So I sort of made the decision

not to listen to it because I figured, why am I going to listen to music by this fucking evil demon? Um, with other stuff, like there's a lot of music that I like by really bad people. and I don't want to, like, police his fans. A lot of them are super young. I wish that they would have not been his fans, but they were, you know, whatever. But. We should clarify. Yeah.

They were not only... He was really popular. It's not just that his fans are young and super into him. It's like, on some level, you really get the sense that a lot of his fans just didn't really engage with the truth of his abuse. Like, I mean, he, you know, he talked about, like, beating a gay man in jail at one point.

A lot of his fans just didn't really engage with any of these facts about him on a serious level. Yeah, because you think there's a lot of like casual music fans who aren't even like bothering to look up the biographies of the musicians that they're streaming. But I just, I just mean to distinguish triple X from somebody who is maybe a popular musician and you maybe know things about them. but those things are obscured by their persona. Triple X's persona did not obscure the facts about him. It amplified the facts about him. But the facts themselves, I get the sense that they were lost on a lot of hardcore,

maybe like 17-year-old Triple X Natasha on the fans. When he was a lot, he released music, he put out an album. one fairly recently, and a lot of critics struggled with, man, this guy is a lot. And around the time that his debut, like, Popper album came out, you couldn't deny that he just had a huge fan base, especially young fan base and especially impressionable fan base. And so you watched critics, I would say tepidly and cautiously try to engage with the idea of, okay, what is it about this guy's persona, which contains traces of his dark nature,

and what is it about this guy's music, which also contains traces and in some cases, I think, explicitly articulates the logic of, like, abuse and emotional abuse and physical abuse. How can you write this? How can you write about this stuff in a responsible way that isn't promoting it? And the problem that music criticism while Triple X Tintoshino was alive, the problem music criticism never really got around is that I think a lot of fans in this particular moment in popular culture read those reviews. And they were just like, no, this is inappropriate. Like, I don't care how much ethical posturing you think you're doing.

Like, if you're writing about Triple X Tintoshion, you're promoting him, you're increasing his profile, you're making. his you're making his like crossover popularity inevitable. So these weren't fans. They were just like people reading their. They're anti-fans. Anti-fans. Haters. The haters. But you know what I mean? Like people who are trying to say, come on, we need to have like, you know, there is an appetite right now. I would say there is a post-me-to appetite for like, no, seriously. Like, yeah, you can, you can point to James Brown all day and be like, you know, people who beat their wives have.

always been in music, but the difference is that that was then and now it's 2018 and we're sick of this shit and we're going to, like the thing I admire about the people who really clamp down on discourse about triple X is that they really are trying to envision a world in which we just have total, we are going to have totally different standards of personal conduct. You're not going to beat women. You're not going to rape and assault women or intimidate women and get signed by a music label and get a $3 million advance and have critics write about you and how your album is in stores this Friday.

You know, like there's something very radical and ambitious about that ideal, but it creates this awkward space where it's like, the guy is objectively popular and we're trying to metabolize and process what is even going on here. So do you think that we shouldn't have been reviewing him? Like, do you think there should have been an ethical embargo on? And I'm talking about reviews, not about essays examining his popularity. Because I remember reading, like, there was a stereo gum one, there was an outline one. Micah wrote a really great one for The Ringer, just sort of talking about the, and pitchfork, I think, was like the, they did the first one, sort of discussing, like, the problem of X as a public figure and, like, how to grapple with his popularity and shit.

that. We both agree those pieces are good or no? I think, yeah, I think they have to exist. I think they had to exist and have to exist now because I think even if you, even the album review, which I think is the piece of criticism that people took the most objection to, right? Because they looked at that and they said, this is pegged to something that triple ex and Tachian is selling.

And if you're going to write about it and just raise awareness of this thing that he's selling and trying to get people to stream, then it doesn't matter how critical or it doesn't matter how ambivalent you are about him. You're just contributing to the myth. You're contributing to the grand myth of triple X Tintacian. And I just think that like, you know what? That's actually true to an extent. But your alternative is you have an entire generation of people who are apparently very deeply emotionally invested in this wrap. and you basically seated the critical space to them and you've turned it into this uncritical space instead.

It's not like by refusing to review. I think I wrote about this actually recently for The Ringer with regard to R. Kelly. This idea that, look, the radical thing that needs to happen is people need to stop, like people need to look at empire, like the distribution company for triple X. They need to look at the people who actually have money wrapped up in him because critics are the least, I think a lot of people advocating against triple extantation picked fights with music critics. And music critics have the least power of the people in the ecosystem of the music

industry, the people with the power of people who gave the guy $3 million or whatever. And I think that critics are mostly just sort of working with what we got. culture produces really ugly things. You know what I mean? Like it's American culture. Like a lot of our culture is ugly. And like the job of the critic, ideally,

is to wade through a lot of ugliness as well as a lot of great things, you know? Yeah, it's also, it's weird. I think it's sort of, instead of just saying hard line, you can't write a review about this, you could be like, obviously you can write a review about this,

but if it doesn't take into account the artist, then it's a moral failure. Right. Oh, so, okay, we'll elaborate on that a little bit. Like, I don't think it would have been very responsible for music critics to evaluate, like, question mark or other X, like, output. Just in, like, you know,

there's different, like, schools of critical, like, approaches to criticism, whatever. I think it would have been fucked up if they, like, looked at his music in a vacuum. And we're like, because it, this is really good, like A plus. I think that one of the projects, like the critical projects that were undertaking right now is trying to figure out a way to situate art in the broader cultural and, like, ethical context of the country. and it's not time to for like the triumph of aesthetics of over morals and that like if you're going to review this person's art

you have to take into account who they are at this point. I think the consequence of a lot of the angst about Triple X which I think ultimately did scare a lot of critics off from wanting to engage with his music in a consistent way is now triple X Natasha is dead. And I think his death cauterizes his legacy in a way. And his

legacy while he was alive was sort of music critics had to treat it with kid gloves or else we treated it antagonistically. But now what you have is basically this guy who represents just a lot of terrible things, who represents a lot of trivialization of the lives of the people around him. Yeah. Now he died basically a martyr, you know, like, as much as people wanted to blame critics for

contributing to the myth of him, like, the sort of, the fact that he was too hot for critics to hold just means that he, his legacy now is like he's this martyr. And now you have, like, at the scene of the shooting, his murder is unresolved, by the way. There's no sense of why he was going. Wasn't it a robbery gone wrong? Oh, was it? I don't know if they've, I don't think it's like determined. I think that was what was being floated.

Okay. But I mean, even in the wake of his death, like you have his fans antagonizing. The woman. Yeah. The woman he abused. They were like harassing her. Right. She couldn't even go to the vigil.

I think she attempted to go to the vigil and people scared her off. God. But you just sort of left. with that now. And like obviously critics can write about him in this sort of post-mortem sense. But it just his, I mean, apart from the basic thing here, which is like a loss of life

of a 20 year old and all the people he's left in his wake, it just feels like he represents this lost opportunity. Like I struggle to think about triple X and Tashione without thinking, man, everyone, literally everyone failed. Like everyone failed. Music criticism failed. The music industry failed. He failed.

I don't know what music criticism could have done though. Like do you think what because it seemed like his popularity was not significantly tied. Like it wasn't like oh my God I heard about this new rapper on like I know he was

on the XXXL cover or whatever but like he was sort of an organic slash streaming phenomenon. And I feel like there were a lot of music critics who were deeply conflicted and writing about how they were deeply conflicted about him and how he was a bad person. And that did not stop him from being popular. Like, I just don't know what they could have done. I'm not even saying that my assessment of music criticism having failed is reasonable.

I'm just saying that I feel gross. Like I leave this thinking, yeah, I don't know. Maybe there was just, maybe it's the no-win scenario. But I definitely don't come away from this thinking, well, music criticism did the best it could do and everyone else failed. I feel like, no, everybody failed. This is a conclusive ethical failure when everyone's part. I think the industry failed more.

Yeah, yeah. And again, that's sort of what I'm trying to, I think in these debates going forward about bad artists and the industries that pop them up and create them, I do think that we would all be better off and these ethical debates would actually be a lot easier to solve if we focused on the people signing these artists a lot of the time. But, you know, I think the thing I regret about music criticism is that maybe I just wish music criticism had a better, stronger, more direct relationship with, like, rap fandom in the first place.

Like, the fact that that disconnect even exists is weird. Yeah, and it's probably a sign that, like, music criticism is aging. or not matching up with the demographics of... I think it's always true in some context, but it's the sharpest... It's the sharpest I've ever felt that kind of divide, where it's just like... You know, again, I think a lot of triple X...

And's made a lot of bad ethical judgments in this situation. But I just wish that they... You know, in an alternative universe, they would... I'm not saying care more about criticism in a self-interested way, but I just mean that they would, you know,

they would feel like the critical conversations around triple X Tintacian had more to offer them and were more relevant to their experience of music culture and, you know, hip-hop culture. Maybe that's just like a quaint way of thinking. Maybe I just, I love writing or something, but it just feels weird. No, I get that, although I do think that you shouldn't, you should not personally feel gross. There's many other people who should feel gross. And so one thing I wanted to talk to you about that has sort of been jarring to me is that so yesterday or two days, yeah, yesterday went for a run open Spotify. There is all of these playlists in honoring X.

And that was weird because I think it was just last month that Spotify rolled out this initiative. against hateful conduct. And so they said that they were not going to promote him on their playlists. Him and R. Kelly, right? It was the policy was basically, it was very loosely worded. It was super vague. But the idea was Spotify had a new policy, beginning with R. Kelly. The second artist was X, where they were like, look, we're not going to ban artists

who have unsavory, violent conduct, misogynistic conduct. We're not going to ban them from the platform, but we're not going to put them in our playlist. Yeah, we're not going to actively surface them. Right. And Spotify playlists are a big part of the value proposition. Spotify right now.

And so they're saying, you know, we're going to take them off the playlist. Yeah. R. Kelly's not going to appear on a playlist. Triple X isn't going to appear on a playlist. And it was quite a remarkable ethical stance for a company to take, but it received a lot of backlash because people were like, well, what are the exact standards for this?

Like, where do you draw the line? It was Kendrick Lamar and the president of TV. Well, Kendrick Lamar was one of the people. Yeah, Kendrick Lamar. No, and people, ordinary people and a lot of really popular musicians. Industry people were like, if you do this, we're pulling our music. Like, how dare you be the morality police, you freaking Scandinavian streaming. Go in.

Go off. But, and so anyways, they were. reverse the policy. And now... So they flip flop once. They flip flopped, and now they're like flip flopped belly flopping into this... Memorial playlist. Or triple Xentatio.

They were about to ban. Yeah. Or, you know, hide. Right. That was really weird to me, and that has just got me thinking. Because I think I was sort of in the minority. When I was talking to people about the initial, like, Spotify stance, I was, I usually didn't find many people agreeing with me because I was like, good, like, go Spotify,

like ban those fucks. Like, I was happy about it and I was annoyed that they flip-flopped. I know it was vague and whatever, but I just thought that I found it kind of refreshing and I was glad that they were going to do it. And I'm wondering, I'm wondering how you feel about that now and like what you think the role of streaming services is. in making stars like X? I was briefly encouraged by the Spotify thing because I thought it was a cluster fuck and it didn't really...

It definitely... It immediately seemed like a bad idea to me. Not bad in the way that Kendrick Lamar, whoever thought it was bad. I just thought it was bad because I was like, yeah, Spotify is gonna... I just knew from the beginning. It's like they're gonna...

There's no way they thought this through. It was definitely an important. thought out and kind of stupid gesture, but I appreciated it. To me, and I, this is my optimistic note in all this, is the fact that Spotify invited all of the scrutiny to itself in a way that kind of backfired on them because they ended up reversing course and now they have memorial playlist for Triple Xentatioen that people are also scrutinizing, it represented a brief moment in all of this in all of Triple X and Tashion's career where instead of, instead of

of the sort of more righteous rap fandom turning their ire on critics and being like critics why haven't you like why don't why haven't you solved triple xintoshion everybody focused on spotify and spotify is a company with actual money and spotify is a company with actual leverage in the way of artist promotion because that's literally what spotify playlist are yeah like music criticism again, it's tied up with the idea of publicity and promotion inherently, but that's not really what a music critic does. A music critic is, in a lot of cases, reacting and processing. Spotify playlists are literal promotion, you know.

Like Spotify is way closer to what it means to talk about the music industry. And the people that generate revenue and generate publicity and create musical careers. and I think if Spotify tripping over its own shoes drew people's attention to the fact that like, oh, right, like there's a whole industry dedicated to not just like, Triple X is a bad person and there's a whole industry dedicated to throwing money at him regardless. I think if more and more people think about the streaming music companies,

the record labels, the publishing companies, the tour management companies, and they think about their role in the promotion and the creation of someone like triple extantation as a musical artist, I think that gets us into a much healthier place going forward of thinking about, like, who do we let into the music industry? Who do we throw money at? Like, what kind of behavior is too much?

Like, what is crossing the line? I think that those questions are way better directed at the people with actual power and money. And, yeah, I'm hoping, I mean, at this point, I don't even. care what Spotify's policy is. They've sort of reset the debate and they've reset people's mindset for thinking about what it means to hold these artists accountable. I still care about what their policy is and I hope that they continue to ban extremely bad people actively making music. I think that they're, I guess I am also a little optimistic about this because I do think

that that at least opened the conversation to maybe making some changes in that way. We'll see. We'll see. All right, I'm Just a Charity. I'm Kate Nebs. That's it from us this week. It has been a dark and chaotic week here at Damage Control. Yes, it has. Hopefully two weeks from now, when you hear from us again, things will be a little brighter, a little bit better, but still hopefully just a tad bit controversial.

We'll see you then.