No Rock And Roll Fun

DON'T CROSS THE SOUL TRAIN'S TRACKS: Of course, by now you'll be sick of the whole tale of the boy who took on Soul Train's admittedly ill-considered plan to give its Aretha Franklin award to the somewhat duff Ashanti, but just in case you've missed the story, here's a nutshell:
A 15 year old kid didn't like the idea (and actually thought India Arie would be more deserving of the accolade - yeah, but they're fifteen, they can be forgiven). They set up a petition online, which somehow wound up with 20,000 signatures. For their pains, the kid got sent a vituperative email, apparently from soultrain.com, calling him a "moron" and a "fucking loser." Nice.
But then, it just gets plain ole weird beacuse then... well, then came this...
soultrain.com rails:
we were astonished to learn of the existence of such a large group of individuals, who are under the belief that they, as mere, although, extremely valued, music fans and record buyers, could even, imagine having an honest justification for, aggressively, challenging a, fairly, routine creative decision, made by people who have been, enormously, successful at making sound creative decisions, for more than three decades.
I've read and re-read this, and looked at the webaddresses, and can't quite decide if this paragraph is a spoof - surely no organisation would be quite so far up its own arse to say "We have been doing this for thirty years - you're mere record buyers - what would you know?"
Indeed, we at Soultrain.com, are very saddened to learn that, during an age when suicide terrorists have been able to level skyscrapers, in America, more than eighteen-thousand (18,000) mud-slinging, petition signers and a handful of, hateful and negative, e-mail writers, have nothing better to do with the precious time they all have left on Earth.
Signing a petition that suggests that maybe the choice of a artist for an utterly meaningless award is wrong might be a frivilous waste of time, but - in an age when suicide terrorists are levelling skyscrapers, of course - you could say that a pop music television show is equally a squandering of time. And, hey, maybe talking about music might be a way that people try and cope with the attempts of the American, British, Indian and Pakistani governments to wipe us off the planet...
May we take this opportunity to make it very clear, that during an era when a number of Internet Web sites are visited or clicked onto by tens of millions of persons, worldwide, every single month and many, many TV outlets are viewed by tens of millions of viewers each day and each week, eighteen-thousand (18,000) responses to anything, on the worldwide Internet, cannot and must not be construed, in a relative sense, as a large number.
Large enough for you to put lots of angry posts on your website and make you look rather ridiculous, though...
While not, in any way, intending to promote racism, we must concede that we are also, quite, amazed that such a large group of individuals, undoubtedly, mostly African-American, can be provoked toward such vivid expressions of disrespect and hateful speech (against a young, Black recording artist, as well as Soul Train), under the leadership of an individual whose foreign-sounding name (Rommel Zamora), may be an indication that he is not African-American.
Hang about... what the hell has race got to do with this? First up, why should "foreign sounding names" mean you can't express an opinion on who gets the Aretha Franklin award? Can you imagine the hoo-hah if a country music award panel of judges, say, said "well, the complaints of people about our choices seem to come from people with names that don't sound like they're white, so..." - and as for Black people who disagree with your choice - what, they're not meant to say so because it looks like black people disagreeing with each other? Sorry, that's just shameful.
So, in short, then, soultrain's argument is: we know better than people who buy music; white people have no right to question our judgement anyway; black people are tantamount to Uncle Toms for doing so. Not that we care, anyway, because there are only 18,000 of you and in the context of there being millions of people watching TV, you're not worth even thinking about.
Right. And people watch their show? Living in the UK, of course, I only ever saw Soul Train when they attempted to import it here, and so I'm unfamiliar with the presentation style of the programme - do they get the audience to sit and bray for fish like seals? Or do they try and hide the contempt they clearly feel for the elements of their audience who have their own opinions?
It was 12 months ago: Last year, it was a big load of fuss over bookings policies
We actually do have nothing better to do with our time [YahooNews] - don't piss off soul train, they'll dance at you