‘Everybody want a motherfucking Benz or Bimmer
And designer sneakers, ain’t no motherfucking dreamers
Shit is deeper than Neiman Marcus or your Hollywood starlets
Underneath this nigga starving, impoverished
People don’t give no fucks, nigga
Trump don’t give a fuck, your niggas don’t give a fuck
Your favorite artists don’t give a motherfucking fuck
Do you give a fuck, nigga?’
One of the realest outros I’ve ever heard. So real that I printed the lyrics out and pinned it onto the wall of my uni room it makes up 1/7 photos of the “M”on my wall as part of my name xx
These lyrics hold immense weight. They’re brazenly poetic yet simultaneously, brazenly raw. Within this piece, Brent taps into a realm of a deep collective sense of frustration, contempt and disillusionment with society; a world where people are taught the reward,of chasing appearance before purpose, luxury before humanity..
This constant recurring theme of instant gratification is distorting the process of life for many.
Again, it reminds me:
“All that glitters ain’t gold,
And all that shines bright ain’t a diamond.”
Everybody wants the Benz, the Bimmer, the designer sneakers not even because these things truly fulfil us, yet but because society has conditioned people, especially young people, to view material success as the highest form of validation.
It reminds me of when Dave said:
“Materialistic aims make me feel a way when I want it, when I got it, it don’t ever feel the same.”
{Dave, My 19th Birthday}
Within this day and age everyone is so intricately selfish and obsessed with claiming an exclusive identity, that they are “different from the rest” , so much that they would ironically reject the claim that we have all fallen victim to the disease of materialism - yet many are slaves to it in differing ways.
And that Dave lyric alone provokes another conversation for me:
Is this honour of material despair only reserved for wealthy artists and celebrities?
Clearly not.
There is a glass wall many of us repeatedly walk into — this invisible pressure to perform success, to appear fulfilled, to aesthetically construct a life that looks meaningful even when internally we feel detached from it. Whether it’s a young Black teenage boy in an all-boys school feeling pressured to conform to the mandem’s materialistic “uniform,” - despite school uniforms supposedly existing to dissolve and dissipate those harrowing social differences, or young girls killing their sense of creative expression in order to be mimetic of their favourite, the most favourably reviewed celebrities, in order to feel visible — there you go! We are all characters victim to the spell of the agentic state; we are all operating beneath similar social pressures.
