After spending three hours counting the pores on Elizabeth Holmes' and Nathan Fielder's faces, I couldn't help but think how perfect Yung Miami's "Spend Dat" would've played over the closing credits. Whatever you feel about the veracity of the protagonist in the blockbuster doc You Can See Everything, there is no doubt about her innate ability to cop and blow money fast. She's probably about as familiar with Diddy's favorite City Girl as she is with Abbott & Costello. But a scammer of such ill repute deserves an apropos theme song. Hell, maybe we all do.
When people complain about hip-hop no longer being political, what they're really talking about is commercial rap's long-fizzled countercultural agenda. The politics of consumption and corruption however have never enjoyed a louder ringing endorsement. Like a billionaire hogging the bully pulpit. To that end, no song in 2026 comes closer to mimicking the feeling of being the violated and the violator. On its face, "Spend Dat" is a get-money flex dedicated to all the "scammers" and "booster b*****s." But behind that seductive veneer is the sadomasochistic loop of late-stage capitalism's long, punishing con. An inflation indicator like no other, it's easily our most American anthem of the year. And we're all transfixed, nodding along in unblinking commitment to the charade.
The video for "Spend Dat" feels like a throwback to the early 2000s, when making it rain in strip clubs was still obligatory signposting for selling the dream. It almost feels trite now that prediction markets allow us to place digital bets on democracy and buy-now, pay-later loans keep expanding on our freedom to fall deeper in debt. At least a good lap dance came with a tangible return on investment. Now we're all just being teased to death.
When India.Arie echoed the public denouncement of "Spend Dat" — which included a call for Black folk to boycott the Billboard-charting song of the summer — another film, I Love Boosters, had just hit streaming. Unlike the aforementioned documentary on the blonde-haired, blue-eyed, white-collar scammer Holmes, rapper-turned-director Boots Riley's fictional narrative centered on the supposed scourge of the hood. In it, Keke Palmer plays an illegit booster, selling high-end fenced clothing out of the abandoned fast-food chicken joint she's squatting in while harboring her own fashionable aspirations. It takes an international worker-led intervention — and a sci-fi bopgun full of Marxist intentions — for her to realize the minor disruption she and her shoplifting girlfriends are causing is but a necessary cog in the ever-churning, exploitative wheel of global capitalism.
What Riley wants us all to understand, as an avowed communist who switched his weapon of choice from fronting Bay Area rap group The Coup to writing screenplays, is that we the people are hardly the problem. Even when sufferers turn into self-styled hustlers out of desperation instead of pooling their collective power. Like WEB DuBois before him, Riley calls his art propaganda. And he's equally adamant about calling art on the other end of the spectrum of propaganda, too. "When The Coup first came out they would call us a political rap group. And we'd be like, 'No,' " he said on a recent episode of Novara Media's podcast Downstream. "Don't call us that unless you're calling everybody that. Because what it then made it seem like was as if everything else was just what it is." Rather, art magnifying the status quo is not some benign representation of a fixed reality but an uncritical regurgitation of everything indoctrinated by the moneyed elite.
When the controversy surrounding "Spend Dat" reached a fever pitch earlier this summer, it came with the usual diatribe. The song was criticized for being culturally degrading. Even India.Arie caught a bunch of flak for stating the obvious when she said, "Everything you listen to see or eat is going to influence you." I don't blame anybody Black for getting in their feelings over the seemingly negative portrayals or stereotypical depiction centered in rap. But the buck doesn't stop there. It never has. "We are bound by all sorts of customs that have come down as second-hand soul clothes of white patrons," as DuBois so eloquently stated 100 years ago this month in his essay Criteria of Negro Art. "We are ashamed of sex and we lower our eyes when people will talk of it," he says, concluding with this thought: "Our worst side has been so shamelessly emphasized that we are denying we have or ever had a worst side."
The same week "Spend Dat" went platinum, Yung Miami appeared on "The Breakfast Club" to promote the release of her solo debut, Watch Dis. When asked about the criticism the song received, she defended it as inspirational music "that builds you up to want to be somebody." Rap may have started at the bottom. But at some point the script flipped. The systems hip-hop was oriented to rebel against became the metric for its success. The victors, in this case, were found striving for the same spoils. Having finally achieved the market share and visibility we'd been denied for decades, we became centrists: a marginalized culture subsumed by the mainstream. Commercial rap made itself a useful tool of the establishment, and the perfect racially coded scapegoat.
If the American Dream really is a pyramid scheme, as commonly critiqued, all hail the original scammers who bricked up the foundation. Even with their fuzzy slave-owner math (discounting Blacks as three-fifths human) and gender restrictions on equal rights (ratified while rocking powdered wigs), the nation's so-called founders created a system even the lowest caste could be constrained and cajoled into aspiring to.
It reminds me of the funniest meme I encountered online last week: a comic strip calling cap on the promise of Black capitalism. It pictures two brothers chopping it up, with one plainly stating, "You can't buy your way out of a system that was built on selling you." Totally undeterred, the other replies back, "Well, I'm gonna try!" before invoking the Black power era's "by any means necessary" rhetoric. In the next panel, Malcolm X expresses frustration over his words being misused to validate participation in the futile American experiment.
We've been hoodwinked, indeed. Bamboozled. Led astray. Run amok and flat-out deceived like a mug.
The grift is so complete that it's almost impossible to distinguish the mark from the actual con artist. Whether it's a convicted felon hiding fraudulence behind white tears, or a ride-or-die who bossed up with the boosters and got it off the muscle. In a year when prediction markets and predatory installment loans sucked us all dry, inflation skyrocketed and tech billionaires quickened the apocalypse, an ode to America's undying hustle and flow might be the closing credits theme we all deserve.
Copyright 2026 NPR
