From an interview with Hunger:
HOW DOES IT FEEL TO BE BASICALLY THE MOST FAMOUS WOMAN IN THE WORLD RIGHT NOW?
It feels pretty sick. Only because like I said I have been gone for a few years, where I wasn’t doing anything and I wasn’t working. So now it feels like all that work in the studio did pay off. And I had so many times where I had to tell people like, “Yo, just trust me, I’m telling you with this ‘Can’t Stop’ video this is going make people watch” or with ‘Wrecking Ball’ saying, “this is going to make people go crazy.” And once I did ‘Can’t Stop’ that’s when people really started trusting me. At first on paper that video sounded insane, no one understood it and I’m just like, “let me film it and then if it doesn’t work out you never have to trust me again but if it works out you have to let me drive this ship, you know I’m on to something.” And then they call me and they’re like “yo, you’re onto something!”
You know me and Rankin were talking about it. With magazines, with movies, it’s always weird when things are targeted for young people yet they’re driven by people that are like 40 years too old. It can’t be like this 70 year old Jewish man that doesn’t leave his desk all day, telling me what the clubs want to hear. I’m going out, I know what they want to hear. I know when you’re in a club, what makes everyone go crazy and when the time is where everyone’s like “alright I’m going go get a drink”. I know when people walk off the dance floor and I know what’s driving it so I’ve got to be the one doing it because they’re just not in on what 20 year olds are doing.
Tablet (who once reported this) seems to think so.
Alongside hip hop’s poses and its patois, then, Cyrus seemed to have also inherited a tad of its inadvertent anti-Semitism, the same awkward but not necessarily pernicious sentiment that the acclaimed rapper Scarface expressed earlier this year when he claimed that Jews were controlling—and destroying—hip hop. When I called Scarface out for his comments, the rapper agreed to an interview, in which he denied feeling any particular animosity toward Jews while also expressing his frustration that record industry executives, many of whom were Jewish, packaged and popularized a diluted version of hip hop to the genre’s detriment.
I don’t.
Sure, she did not have to mention the ethnicity of the 70 year old man telling her what the clubs want to hear, but I am sure from her experience, he is invariably Jewish. She’s just not the sharpest tool in the shed.
Her comment reminds me of this one from “Luke Skywalker” Mark Hamill a decade ago:
I don’t mind the Hollywood caste system. I know the tenuous position I’m in on the entertainment food chain. I don’t get invited to A-list affairs. Me? I’m listless,” he says. “If anything, it hardens my resolve to say, ‘Ah, you’re wrong. I’m going to show you by doing this or that or the other.”
“But when you do it to my children, that makes me go berserk. And she started being excluded from this one’s birthday party or that one’s bat mitzvah because I’m not A-list. It really burns my hide when it comes through because they’re not in show business – I am.”
Again, I feel Hamill was just speaking from experience, and not trying to impugn the Jewish people.
I suggest we don’t cheapen the very real problem of antisemitism by crying wolf with it.
Especially when many critics of Israel use our willingness to invoke the word against them as a smokescreen for their very real antisemitism.
