Kem Joining MoTown & Other Crimes Against Humanity
- Feb 18
- 9 min read
Crimes against humanity in my eyes are conscious actions by individuals that negatively impact the human race as a collective.
In a world with a recorded history as corrupted as ours, this list could go on ad infinitum. These are the crimes that fit on my kitchen whiteboard.
1. Slums in India juxtaposed with multi-million dollar Indian weddings.
A few months ago, I began watching this animated film on YouTube. I couldn’t complete it on the first watch once I’d realized what I was viewing.
The protagonist’s main conflict is that he needs to use the bathroom.
The plot is as simple as that—he needs to use the bathroom and because he lives in a slum, he must go through great lengths to do so.
In my efforts to replace social media and Big Media (Hollywood, TV, etc) with other forms of entertainment, I’ve taken to browsing the Libby app with a bowl of popcorn on the couch. Libby works with libraries and allows patrons to check out ebooks, audiobooks, and magazines with their library cards.
About a week ago, I browsed through an Indian magazine called Brides Today, which is devoted to glamorizing the wedding industry.
One of its headlining articles was a report on the “Wedding of the Year,” a multi-day mega show celebrating the union of a billionaire heiress and a rising tech giant. They had a slew celebrity performers, including Jennifer Lopez, perform at their reception.
It was a spectacle; it was the “wedding of the year.”
This event took place at the Jagmandir Island Palace. In the very same city, Udaipur, there are several slums housing hoards of people. Perhaps these are where some of the “palace” workers live.
Wealth inequalities reign supreme all over our planet; one need only visit the shantytowns of Berkeley and Oakland or ride the bus from Wall Street to Washington Heights to see this stateside.
But the juxtaposition of the animated film with the magazine just gut-punched me in a different way.
I don’t know what it’s like to be a billionaire living in Mumbai’s newly erected “Billionaire’s Row,” overlooking the slums and doing nothing to uplift the people who live there.
Thankfully, I never will.
I can tell you one thing: if I ever get my hands on a silver spoon, it will be used to feed the world.
2. Carcinogens & reproductive damage rampant in poor people products
The best things in life truly are free—this I thought as I gallivanted around my Rust Belt town wearing bug-eye sunglasses my mom gave to me that she’d bought and found she didn’t need.
I was devastated when I lost them.
I’ve recently chosen to take an income cut in order to focus on my artistic and spiritual offerings—and to leave a job that I knew was a bad fit for me from the first assignment they sent in the hiring process.
As such, I like to keep my coins close to my chest and I feel peaceful and abundant because all my basics are covered. I want for nothing in this time because I’ve deglamorized shopping in my former-shopaholic mind; a huge impetus for this was realizing most of the sweatshops and oppressive factories in the world are sustained to entertain the frivolities of the West.
But it’s winter in upstate New York and the glare off the snow is mighty. I had scoured resell app Vinted for the cheapest pair I could find, but most of these were from Amazon or—worse—Shein. Quality was a concern, for even if a pair of sunglasses was only $5, I’d still be mad if I paid that and they broke after a wear or two.
So I ventured into Walmart where I could at least try on the pair, which would ideally be from the clearance section.
I found two pairs and went to the mirror to try them on. The first pair—three dollars—was basic but flattering. The second, at the same price, was going to be my dog walking pair. I’d keep the better looking ones in the car.
After checking the tag, however, I wanted to fling those glasses across the room and into the cosmic void. For at the bottom was the Prop 65 warning: this product may expose you to chemicals known in the state of California to cause cancer and reproductive harm.
Cancer and reproductive harm—from sunglasses?!
Pulling other (full priced) pairs off the rack, I was aghast to see every single pair had the Prop 65 warning.
I left without a pair and ended up getting stainless steel sunnies from the brand Quince sustainably sourced from Ebay.
And then I found pair I’d thought I lost.
They’re still my favorite.
3. Kem Joining MoTown
There’s a saying in the black community: not all skinfolk is kinfolk. This means that just because someone belongs to the same community as you, it does not mean they inherently have your best interests at heart.
When it comes to MoTown, a pillar in the black cultural canon, I don’t claim it as my kin.
Look at what they did to Kem:
Kem is an RnB artist whose first album, Kemistry, is one of those albums I can listen to the whole way through. There are two or three songs I’ll skip if I’m close to my Victrola or the remote is in my hand, but I can still listen to them and enjoy what I’m hearing; they’re just not my favorite.
This album “eats” as a Gen-Zer would say (or as this millennial writer would posit a Gen-Zer would).
According to Wikipedia, “Kem wrote, produced, and financed his self-released debut album, Kemistry, with his American Express card and by singing top 40 cover tunes in a wedding band and waiting tables.”
This album was self-made, which is why it is so full of selfhood—of humanness—of true, soul and vibrant personality.
Kem’s studio-produced work have never lived up to his first album’s greatness.
I believe the future is indie and artists like Kem (and Janelle Monae, as we will see) help reinforce this belief in me.
Checkout this clip from a vlog I recorded today for my Chapter Members. We listen to a few songs from Kemistry versus two of his more recent singles (barf)
His second album, Album II, is pretty good, I won’t lie, but one of my least favorite songs in the collection was his number one hit, “I Can’t Stop Loving You.” It’s a depressing ballad the urban stations played relentlessly, bringing down the vibration of all their listeners.
Oftentimes, an artist’s feel-worse song is their biggest hit.
It makes me think of Rihanna’s crossover hit “Unfaithful,” which tortured my adolescent ears on the middle school bus ride home. Then there was her voice crooning “Love The Way You Lie” with Eminem.
I shudder at both aural violations.
4. Janelle Monae joining Bad Boy
Okay so it turns out she’s been with Bad Boy since her first EP, releasing her first studio album (which is a masterpiece in my mind), The Archandroid with them.
Sean “P. Diddy” Combs is listed as an executive producer—drats!
I wanted to argue that Janelle joining Bad Boy made her music really bad, but I guess we’ll just have to attribute “Yoga” to the de-evolution of artistry most studio artists experience.
Baby bend ova…baby bend ova…baby bend ova—let me see you do that yoga.
Baby bend ova…baby bend ova…baby bend ova—let your boody do that yoga.
Real lyrics people—really, really, really bad lyrics.
I still blame it on Bad Boy.
5. American grown rice containing several times the arsenic as its foreign counterparts
I’m doing my best to be a responsible consumer and I must confess, it’s quite hard. I read an article today about how avocados grown in Mexico contribute to socioeconomic instability across the country just so Chipotle can charge you $5 for a plastic cap-full of guacamole.
I’ve been trying to source American grown food and was researching rice, which I’d recently returned to after years of being grain free.
Well, it turns out we don’t want to buy rice grown in America—at least not in the South—even organic fields have been contaminated by the cotton industry’s longtime use of pesticides. Rice absorbs a great amount of chemicals as it grows, and arsenic is the most dangerous to our sensitive human vessels.
Rice grown in California has significantly lower arsenic levels than rice grown in the South, but domestic rice across all regions still tests higher for arsenic than rice grown in Asia.
But of course one must think of the ethics in importing rice from around the world—the jet fuel it pollutes our skies with and the bellies around Asia—and its closer sister in Africa—that could benefit from this rice made for US consumers.
I’ve had this problem with coconut oil as well. While Dr. Bronnersoffers a regenerative, organic option, it still comes from the other side of the world.
My solution is to save up for a gallon of organic, California-grown olive oil.
Why must I save up, you ask?
Well, I pretty much only use oil for popcorn, so it’s not a big necessity. I’ve got a pretty full jar in my kitchen (organic but from Tunisia—not the best but not the worst). And the aforementioned gallon is $90—shipping not included.
As for rice—I’ll just nix it entirely, thank you King Cotton.
6. TikTokers making more money than teachers
At least when we used to shake our heads that athletes and actors did, many of these people trained for years to be highly specialized in their fields.
A teenager doing dance trends while she should be in school, making more bank than her professors combined?
Don’t even get me started on OnlyFans.
7. The black community being brainwashed into wasting precious money on sneakers
I know a man who has a whole closet full of sneakers. It’s a small room in his basement that overflows into his gaming area. As far as I know, every single pair belongs to the category of Nike Air Force Ones.
There was a Nelly song that came out when I was a kid called “Air Force Ones” which was an ode to—you guessed it—those sneakers.
That man I mentioned, growing up in Boston and entrenched in urban culture, would have grown up listening to it.
As a fatherless child (his dad was white, by the way—Irish American and incarcerated), this man’s model of masculinity was through rappers like Nelly telling him to reach for the stars—no sorry, the sneakers hanging from the power lines.
This man, an investment banker, has spent thousands of dollars on his sneaker collection. And he at least has the disposable income.
Many people in the projects will spend a bulk of their paychecks on sneakers because they are being brainwashed into thinking sneakers make the man—and even the woman.
Every community has been targeted with weaponized consumerism, siphoning their money and funneling it back to the very corporations that are enslaving the world through sweatshops, debt, and the Hungry Ghost syndrome that tells us we never have enough stuff.
The piles of waste littering the earth would disagree—as do I. We have more than enough stuff. Nike doesn’t need to make one more pair of sneakers for the next five generations to be able to wear brand new pairs. And Nike especially doesn’t need to market their stuff to black people. We’ve paid them more than enough.
8. The birth business in America
I first watched “The Business of Being Born” when I was in high school, and it completely changed my life.
Up until that point, I thought that I’d have a hospital birth as that was simply what one did. I was always weary of epidurals and sought to have a natural birth when my time came, but still—I thought I’d be in the hospital.
After learning about how modern day birth practices, like inducing labor and giving epidurals, disempowers mothers and endangers both them and their children, I’ve promised myself that I’ll do everything I can to have a home birth.
When I listened to the audiobook of Beverly Donofrio’s memoir, “Riding in Cars with Boys,” I was horrified to hear of how birth went in the 60s: the mother was strapped to stirrups, given a gas-mask cocktail that caused her to hallucinate, and—for the unlucky ones—cut without consent.
In Europe, births were no better:
“On your first antenatal visit, you were sent to the dental clinic which was next to the antenatal ward. If any of your teeth looked like they needed a filling or any sort of treatment, the dentist insisted on pulling them out – so I lost two teeth on that first birth. Eventually, after many hours the matron appeared and my legs were hoisted up over my head and strapped either side of the bed onto two metal bars.Then the Doctor entered with a scissors and cut my vaginal opening. Throughout all that time I was never offered any pain treatment but soon after my legs were unstrapped I was given a gas mask. Fifty years later I can still remember the horrible taste and the feeling of hovering somewhere above the bed. My baby was born healthy and I was given four catgut stitches. After five days the catgut stitches were removed, again without any painkiller. These stitches were so strong that often more damage was done taking them out than inserting them.But salt baths, we were told, cured everything.” (Source)
After my sister’s hospital birth, the doctor forcibly pulled her placenta out of her while she screamed.
A hospital may be a safe place to die, but it’s no place to bring life into this world.
At least, that’s my personal view.
So there you have it, my non-exhaustive list of crimes against humanity.
What’s on yours?
Xo,
Spirit
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