Episode Details

What can a $15,000 mechanical bird, a Brooklyn curiosity shop, and America’s sweetheart Kelly Clarkson teach us about the true nature of class in America? Quite a lot, actually. In this episode of HERE COMES THE BACKKLASH, DJ Poolhouse takes the delightfully absurd controversy known as Mollygate and turns it inside out, challenging the fashionable assumption that wealth is class, celebrity is power, and the proprietor of a small business is necessarily a member of the proletariat.

Giving both Clarkson and the shopkeepers the benefit of the doubt, Poolhouse proposes a more provocative interpretation: that beneath the familiar spectacle of rich celebrity versus humble merchant lies an older, subtler, and far more enduring architecture of social distinction, one built not merely upon money, but upon inheritance, institutional authority, cultural recognition, and proximity to the machinery of commerce itself.

Drawing upon his own Poolhousian theory of class, he interrogates the curious contradictions of contemporary class solidarity, the bourgeois sympathies of self-appointed champions of the working class, and the rise of POPULISSIP, a new populist strain of celebrity journalism that mistakes the famous for the powerful and public humiliation for social justice. Perhaps Kelly Clarkson behaved badly. Perhaps the shopkeepers did too. Perhaps everybody is telling the truth as they experienced it.

But what if the real story isn’t about who could afford the bird, or even who was entitled to buy it, but who was understood to belong in the room? Money can purchase luxury, influence, even fame, but it cannot purchase the history of having been born into power. And once you begin to recognize the invisible codes through which class perpetuates itself, you start seeing them everywhere. Sometimes it takes a fifteen-thousand-dollar mechanical bird to reveal the bars of a cage nobody knew they were living in.

Poolhouse is online.

Poolhouse on the rise of reactionary populist celebrity media:

Stream Platinum Hunc - the latest single from DJ POOLHOUSE:

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