Where the Culture Went

In 2001, BET sold to Viacom for three billion dollars. That number deserves to sit for a moment. Three billion. For a network built entirely on Black cultural production, Black viewership, Black creative labor. The sale didn't happen in secret. It was celebrated. And what followed, gradually, was the quiet erosion of everything that had made the network worth three billion in the first place. Not all at once. Just steadily, in the direction that every acquisition moves: toward what the new owners needed it to be.

That's when culture stopped being the product and became the asset.

And assets get managed differently. They don't have to be good. They just have to hold value long enough to be leveraged.

The institutions that held cultural memory were never actually built to last. The channels, the award shows, the magazines, the radio programs that functioned as shared infrastructure: all of it built to generate, and once the generation became less profitable than the catalog, the institution became secondary to what it had already produced.

Streaming finished the job. The numbers are not ambiguous: most songs uploaded to DSP's have less than 1,000 streams. Over forty-five million tracks have zero. The back catalog, the mid-tier, the regional act, the artist who defined a genre without ever dominating a chart: all of it invisible unless you already knew to look for it, and an algorithm with no memory and no obligation to tell you why it mattered.

The infrastructure of cultural memory didn't collapse overnight. It was sold, piece by piece, to people for whom memory was never the point.

There's a video that circulates periodically of a creator going to HBCUs and asking students to identify artists. Not obscure artists. Not deep cuts. Whitney Houston. T.I. Names that, not long ago, you simply knew.

T.I. is 44 years old. At the height of his career, mid-2000s, when every artist had a distinct sound, when album rollouts were treated like events, when the culture moved through rooms that held it, he was only in his mid-twenties. The students watching that video were being born then. The gap between his peak and their awareness isn't a generation. That's barely a decade, and a collapsed infrastructure, and those are not the same thing.

Whitney Houston was 29 when she released I Will Always Love You in 1992. She didn't need to be introduced to the next generation. She needed the channels that used to do it automatically to still exist.

By the time those students were old enough to find her on their own, the rooms that would have carried her there were already gone.

This isn't nostalgia. It's a structural problem. Every generation needs a way to inherit what came before it, not passively, not through osmosis, but through the kind of deliberate, repeated, institutionalized transmission that used to happen through BET, through radio, through the rooms where the culture explained itself to itself. When those rooms are optimized out of existence, the transmission breaks. And a generation grows up without knowing what it's standing on.

A clip resurfaced recently of Method Man at Summer Jam 2024. He said he's not going back. Too much of a generational gap. He's not wrong about what he felt. But I think he's wrong about the conclusion.

The gap isn't generational. It's infrastructural. The medium at which older artists get introduced to younger audiences is broken, not the audience itself. Streaming was supposed to fix this. Before it got shaped by the same logic that took everything else, the idea was genuinely radical: every record ever made, available to anyone, at any time, with no gatekeeper deciding what was worth hearing. That was going to be the bridge.

Then the algorithm decided that what you hadn't already searched for wasn't worth showing you, and the bridge became a mirror.

I don't think young people have stopped being capable of crossing the gap. I think they've stopped being given the chance. I've watched it up close. Working with kids, I've seen 19-year-olds build real friendships with people twice their age, not for content, not for a platform moment, but because the music connected them and they followed that connection wherever it went. Yonna and BenDaDon stream together. One is 19, one is 34. The room they build online every time they go live doesn't feel like a generational negotiation. It feels like people who found each other through something real.

The world cares less about age gaps than we've been told to assume. What it can't do is care about something it was never introduced to. Method Man doesn't have a generational problem. He has an infrastructure problem.

The part that hurts most isn't the loss itself. It's watching what the loss does to the people who built everything.

I see producers. Legends. People whose fingerprints are on records that defined decades, posting their accolades, restating their résumés, trying to remind an internet that wasn't there. I understand the impulse and I feel the tragedy underneath it: when greatness has no institution to hold it, it has to hold itself. It becomes its own archivist, its own publicist, its own advocate. It turns into something that looks, from the outside, like seeking validation. When really it's just refusing to be erased.

When BET stripped the Hip Hop Awards and the Soul Train Awards quietly lost their footing, it hit me in a place I didn't expect. Not because either show was perfect in its recent years. They weren't, and we all knew it. But because of what they represented even in their diminished form. Those stages were a record. A living document. The BET Awards gave us Monique doing Beyoncé's Crazy in Love dance in 2004. Michael Jackson and James Brown sharing a stage in 2003. Jesse Williams in 2016: just because we're magic doesn't mean we're not real. Chris Brown's MJ tribute in 2010. Dipset at their absolute peak. 50 and Kanye's album face-off in 2007. These weren't just moments. They were the culture annotating itself. Saying: this happened, and we were here, and it mattered.

Now those moments are clips. Orphaned from their context. Watched by people who have no way of knowing what surrounded them.

I'm 33. That's apparently old enough to be an unc now. I know how that sounds. But I want to be precise about what I'm mourning, because it's not the past. It's the function the past served. I'm not mourning BET 2003. I'm mourning the thing BET 2003 did, which was make it impossible for a young person not to know who mattered and why.

At a Grammy red carpet not long ago, Babyface was mid-sentence in an interview when the interviewer cut him off to wave Chappell Roan over. Maybe she didn't mean anything by it. But the moment told the whole story: we have become so conditioned to chase the current that we'll interrupt a legend mid-breath to get to whoever is newest. Relevance has become a conveyor belt, and we treat it like it's neutral. Like the belt isn't pointed in a direction someone chose.

For a moment, it looked like something new was being built inside the feed itself. Live streaming felt like it might be the bridge. Unscripted rooms. Real conversations between people who hadn't shared a space in years. You could feel the difference between those early moments and everything that came before them. Something was being figured out in real time.

And then, gradually, you could feel it shift. The spectacle started optimizing itself. The moments that traveled weren't the quiet ones, the ones where something real was exchanged. They were the ones engineered to travel. The guests started arriving with their own agendas. The stream became a platform inside a platform, with all the same pressures, the same metrics, the same gravitational pull toward performance over presence. The authenticity didn't disappear all at once. It just got quieter until the noise was all that was left.

The format was never the problem. The rooms we had weren't sacred because they were on television. They were sacred because something real was happening inside them and the structure protected it long enough to matter. When the structure optimizes for reach over realness, the room becomes a set. And you can feel the difference, even when you can't name it.

Here is the question that keeps me up: how is Kanye performing two sold-out nights at SoFi Stadium, packed with kids who weren't alive for The College Dropout, while T.I., who peaked at nearly the same moment, isn't recognized in a video at an HBCU?

The answer isn't talent. It isn't even age. T.I. is four years younger than Kanye. The difference is that Kanye never left the cultural conversation. Not always for good reasons. Not always for reasons that reflect well on any of us. But he remained someone every generation had an opinion about, which meant every generation had to know who he was. The controversy became its own infrastructure. A broken one. But functional enough to keep his name in every generation's mouth.

T.I. made some of the most precise, undeniable Southern rap of that entire era. But without a shared infrastructure to hold him, without the magazines, the award shows, the channels that used to make an artist's legacy something passed forward rather than left behind, he became someone a 20-year-old had no mechanism to encounter. That's not a failure of the music. That's a failure of the room.

Relevance today isn't built over time. It's assigned in real time. And the assignment happens by algorithm, by controversy, by the velocity of your presence in a feed, not by what you made, not by what it meant, not by who you shaped.

That's a crisis. Not just for the artists, but for the culture itself.

Because a culture that can't remember itself can't teach itself. And a culture that can't teach itself becomes something that can only repeat: remix, reference, sample, without ever understanding what it's reaching back to or why.

There was vinyl before cassettes. Cassettes before CDs. CDs before streaming. The format always changes, and the format was never the point.

But somewhere in this particular transition, we didn't just change formats. We dissolved the shared room. We replaced the communal space with infinite private ones and told ourselves that was progress. That more access meant more connection.

It didn't. More access meant more content. And content, unlike culture, doesn't hold you. It doesn't teach you who you are or where you come from or what came before you and why it matters.

The rooms aren't gone. They're just being run by the wrong incentives. Every time something real starts to grow inside the feed, the feed notices, and the numbers follow, and the numbers bring the pressure, and the pressure reshapes the room until what made it real is the one thing that can't survive the growth.

That's not an accident. That's the arrangement working exactly as designed.

Held up. Passed down. Made visible enough that the next generation can't help but inherit it.