Regarding the controversy over Don Imus’s recent comments about the Rutgers Womens basketball team being “nappy-headed hos”, I’d personally be much more offended at the fact that he called them hos than the fact that he called them nappy-headed. They are nappy headed after all; his comment wasn’t so much racist as just plain rude.

But, I guess it’s harder to stick someone with being rude than being racist.

The more I look at pop music, the more ridiculous it seems to me. Perhaps that seems like a judgmental statement, especially from one whose stylistic tastes aren’t exactly mainstream, but right now I’m not even referring to anything stylistic. It really seems that almost every top pop song of late has been unabashedly self-aggrandising and conceited to the point that it would be funny if it wasn’t serious.

Take, for example, the song “Hips Don’t Lie”, by Shakira, the record-holding song for most radio plays in a week (9637). Shakira and Wyclef Jean sing back and forth to each other for 3:40 about the sexiness of the other on the dance floor. Now they aren’t singing about themselves, but the sections were certainly not written exclusively by their respective singer.

Yet, this isn’t even as bad as it gets. Even the title of MIMS’ “This Is Why I’m Hot” seems so over-the-top that it would be a mocking the feeling that it’s actually displaying. Or how about Paris Hilton’s (perhaps the epitome of conceitedness) entire new album, with such gems as “Fightin Over Me” and “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy”. Or Justin Timberlake’s iconic lyric “I’m bringing sexy back”? The level of self-absorbtion displayed in these songs is as stunning as it is disgusting.

But what’s even more surprising than the fact that tripe like this succeeds is that it succeeds to the detriment of everything else. These are the songs that enter our collective consciousness as a society - the songs that make it onto the radio, into movies, and onto CD and MP3 players. Pop culture is a disease - a gruesome yet all too sweet inevitable product and continual propagator of the consumerist mindset of entitlement and luxury that will eventually rot our already frighteningly gluttonous society from the inside out if it continues on its current course.

I can only hope that with the increasing irrelevance of the record labels that encourage this sort of behavior, we will look back on this time as a dark era for pop music.

The Capitalist economy is structured so that each person tries to exploit the system for his own gain. By allowing for and even encouraging this sort of individualistic behavior, Capitalism ensures its own survival: exploitive and selfish behavior are inevitable in society, and part of the reason Communism fell is because of behavior in the interests of the individual over the group.

Because Capitalism is built on this system of encouraging self-interested behavior to the detriment of the group, the participants work against each other, effectively balancing out the system in the long run - Adam Smith’s “Invisible Hand” that guides the market to long term equilibrium. This system of motivation is perhaps the strongest of any, because obligation or compulsion hardly ever compel everyone to work their hardest. But working for one’s self on the other hand, multiplied by the entire population of any particular Capitalist economy, produces a group product - GDP - far more consistently greater than any other economic system to date.

But a culture of adamant individualism has its downsides as well. Certainly this was the complaint of Marx and other anti-Capitalists: riches only bring more greed - by any account unhealthy for the psyche. Self interest at the expense of others creates a culture harmful to the individual psychologically, and if taken to its logical extreme, even physically as well (self-interest is, after all, what drives the vast majority of crime).

This then is the irony of Capitalism: by working in our own self-interests and against those of the whole on a massive scale, we actually harm ourselves psychologically and emotionally for the benefit of and in order to uphold that same whole.