Katt Williams And The Culture of Nostalgia

Pierce Otlhogile-Gordon, Ph.D.
Think Rubix
Published in
7 min readJun 11, 2021

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Is your relationship to the past cursing your view of the present?

My father and I have a little debate we can’t seem to defuse.

Every time I see my father in person, we have a huge hearty hug, exchange pleasantries and talk about our little worlds, and then somehow fall into a debate about music. It’s his fault, of course; he’s the reason why I built such a strong relationship with the craft. He was there at every single stage of my music career, from my piano recitals playing hot cross buns, to my final marching band performance, finishing as the section leader of the Morehouse College Drumline. Music has always been his religion: he literally cried in front of Jimi Hendrix’s grave and played nothing but the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and The Who during every single road trip.

It’s probably why the debates about today’s music get so hectic.

To him, today’s music isn’t really music. They’re not playing real instruments, he says. It’s too easy, too repeatable, too simple for any Tom, Dick, or Harold to get famous without the hard work.

I try to bring up the technological developments that both Jimi Hendrix and the Beatles exploited, but it’s to no avail. I try to discuss how we can find shitty musicians, but geniuses are present in the past and today. Here’s what I realized: what really matters to us consumers, isn’t what’s better, but whether we decide to fixate on today — or yesterday.

This is why I realized Katt Williams is one of my heroes.

Let me remind you what happened a few days ago. When he was on Joe Budden’s Podcast, the hosts pushed him on cancel culture, and he pushed back:

“If all that’s gonna happen is that we have to be more sensitive in the way that we talk, isn’t that what we want anyway?” asked Williams. At the same time, he assured the curmudgeons who want to say whatever they want, that they still have that right. “If you

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