By Ebonyicons
There is a difference between craft and commodity, and my grandmother knew it before I had the sense to.
She knew it about food, about furniture, about films. She would not be moved on any of it. As a child I mistook this for pretension — I thought she was a bougie Black woman with airs, too particular, too hard to please, turning her nose up at things that seemed perfectly fine to me. I could write a whole book on the ways I misjudged my grandmother and my mother, on everything I failed to understand about what it meant to be a Black woman moving through the twentieth century, about the pressures that shaped their exacting standards into something I was too young to read as anything but snobbery. It took me years to understand that what I was watching was not snobbery at all. It was discernment. It was a woman who knew the difference between the made thing and the sold thing, and refused to accept the second when she had known the first.
Let me be careful here, because the distinction is easy to weaponize and I don’t mean it as a weapon. Commodity is not a slur. Commodity can be fun. It can be entertaining, even artful in its way, and it asks nothing of you but your enjoyment, and enjoyment is a perfectly good thing to give it. Not everything has to be profound. Not every pleasure needs to be defended. I am not here to tell you that the things you love for a good time are beneath you.
I am here to say you have to know which one you’re holding. Because if you lose the ability to tell craft from commodity, you don’t stop consuming — you just consume blindly, and a whole life can fill up with commodity without your ever noticing. Commodified fashion, commodified beauty, commodified hair, commodified food, commodified music, commodified language, commodified art, until the made thing becomes unrecognizable to you and you genuinely cannot tell why the sold thing leaves you a little empty. I worry I live in an era that has lost its reverence for craftsmanship. And I worry that the losing was not an accident.
Here is where my grandmother comes back in, because she engaged with my own taste — sometimes with real irritation.
Picture me as a kid, obsessed, playing her the pop music of the moment. K-pop. Britney Spears. The Backstreet Boys. The Spice Girls. Playing it for her the way you play something for someone when you need them to love it as much as you do. And she was not having it. At the time I thought she was just a hater, an old woman who didn’t get it. I laughed her off.
I was wrong about what I was watching. My grandmother was not hating. She was recognizing. She had lived through enough to watch a craft get lifted, relabeled, repackaged, and sold back at a lesser quality behind faces and names more acceptable to white supremacy — and she could see it happening again in real time, in my hands, coming out of my speakers. She had lived through the death of disco. She had seen, in 1979, a stadium full of mostly white men in Chicago pile up records made by Black artists and blow them up in center field to chants and cheers — not just disco records but soul and R&B and funk, anything Black swept into the pile — a genre that had been sanctuary for Black and brown and queer people, detonated as public spectacle. And then she watched, a handful of years later, the Spice Girls make music thick with disco’s DNA, its rhythm and its style, and get called something fresh and new and safe. She watched Britney Spears work with Black producers, Black songwriters, Black choreographers, Black dancers, performing what was in essence a Janet Jackson cosplay — and be sold to the world as an original.
This is the part I need to be precise about, because it would be easy to hear this as an attack on those artists and that is not what it is. The Spice Girls were talented. Britney is a genuine performer. The point was never that these specific people were frauds. The point is that they were engineered — built and positioned to be the commodity version of a craft that already existed, separated from its origin, its Blackness, its creative force, and handed to a mass audience with the uncomfortable parts filed off. My grandmother’s refusal was not a refusal of the artists. It was a refusal of the artifice. To love that music without knowing where it came from was, to her, to participate in the theft. She would not do it. She would enjoy plenty of things — but she would not be lied to about what she was enjoying.
And the record proved her right in the most literal way. That night in Chicago meant to kill Black dance music? A young Black man was working as an usher in that very stadium, watching the crowd destroy his people’s records, and he went on to help build house music out of the wreckage. They demolished the thing and the thing changed its clothes and kept walking. That is what craft does. Commodity can be manufactured, but craft cannot be killed — only stolen from, temporarily, by people who could never make it themselves.
Once you can see the pattern, you see it everywhere, and you see it right now.
I am surrounded by cultural critics who spectate on the present — the new girls aren’t hungry enough, the new talent can’t hold a candle, the art isn’t what it was. And I don’t entirely disagree with them. But I think they are missing the essential part of the analysis, the part my grandmother had and they don’t: the cultural understanding of origins. When people say Tate McRae is emulating Britney Spears, they have already lost the thread. Tate McRae is doing a poor imitation of an already poor imitation of Janet Jackson. To place those women in a lineage together, as though they are three points on one artistic tradition, is not just wrong — it is a little offensive, because it erases the Black woman at the headwater and credits the dilution as though it were the source.
This is not a hit piece on new artists. I actually believe there is no shortage of talent alive right now — there has never been a shortage of talent. There is only a system that hands us commodity and calls it craft, that elevates the manufactured over the made and trains us to mistake the one for the other. Black music flourished for decades precisely because it was underground, excluded, shoved to the margins, labeled “race music” and kept off the respectable airwaves — and out of that exclusion came nearly every sound this country now sells to the world. That inheritance does not belong to Tyga’s AI-assembled album. It does not belong to the diluted efforts of white artists with a Black sound propping them up from behind — there is not enough time spent hanging around Usher, not enough albums titled Swag, to transfuse into someone a culture they did not come from. Justin Timberlake cannot inherit it. AI certainly cannot. And you can hear the absence. That is why so much of it is so boring — the boredom is the sound of context that has been stripped out. Craft carries its origins inside it. Commodity is the origin removed, and removal has a flavor, and the flavor is thin.
I want to say again, because it matters: I have loved plenty of the artists I just named. This is not about hating what you enjoy. It is about knowing what you’re consuming and when, because you will always be shaped by what you take in, and you cannot afford to lose sight of it.
It reaches past music, too. It reaches into hair.
Let me say clearly what I am not arguing, because this one gets twisted fast. I am not saying natural hair is superior to wigs. That framing is anti-Black and patriarchal at its root, a way of ranking Black women’s bodies against a standard that was never ours. Wigs are hair care. Wigs are craft. Anyone who tells you a woman in a wig is somehow less is a problem, full stop. The artistry of Black hair — the wig, the weave, the braid, the press, the loc — is one of the oldest crafts our people have, as old as our storytelling, a craft of self-care and self-expression and transformation that predates this country.
The commodity is not the wig. The commodity is what happens when that ancient craft gets flattened into product and sold back to us — textures marketed as trends, techniques severed from their lineage, the deep knowledge of how to tend and shape and honor your own hair replaced by a shelf of things to buy. The craft is knowing. The commodity is being sold the thing that used to be knowledge. Both can involve a wig. Only one of them remembers where it came from.
And it reaches into film. My mother was not being elitist when she understood that Spike Lee and Mara Brock Akil are storytellers steeped in the whole history of Black art — that what they make is dense with reference, intention, craft. That is simply a different thing from Friday or the Madea franchise, and naming the difference is not the same as hating the second. No one has to hate what entertains them. But we do need to understand commodity as commodity. If you believe the summit of Black cinematic achievement is measured against the Madea films, then friend, the plot has been lost and the oppressor has won — not because those films are worthless, but because you’ve let the sold thing stand in for the made thing and forgotten there was ever a difference.
So here I am, an adult, greeting whiteness at the door every single day — not only in the rooms of school and work, but in culture itself. And the particular vertigo of my life is that I was raised, before I knew there was any other way to see, on an understanding of music and art and beauty and food as craft. That was the water I swam in. Everything since has been the shock of watching the world hand people commodity and tell them it’s the real thing, and watching them believe it, and knowing my grandmother would have clocked it in a second.
Because here is what I finally understand about that woman from rural Mississippi. Where the world saw a difficult, bougie Black woman putting on airs, and told me to see the same, I now see clear as day: she had taste. And like everything else in her life, she refused to compromise it. She would not eat the lesser thing, sit on the lesser thing, watch the lesser thing, or love the lesser thing without at minimum naming it for what it was. That refusal was not vanity. It was a form of respect — for the craft, for the makers, for herself. It was a Black woman insisting, in a world engineered to sell her cheap copies of her own culture, on knowing the difference.
So this is the charge, and I’ll give it to you the way she gave it to me, without softening it: know what you are consuming. Enjoy your commodities — genuinely, I mean it — but do not let anyone tell you they are craft, and do not let the sold thing erase your memory of the made thing. Learn the origins. Name the headwater. Keep the difference alive in yourself, because the whole machine is built to make you forget it, and forgetting is how the theft completes.
I am still learning to see the way she saw. I am not there yet. But I have finally understood what I was looking at all those years, and I will spend the rest of my life trying to exalt the craftsmanship of Black people, and Black women in particular — the makers whose work keeps getting lifted and thinned and sold back to us behind more acceptable faces, and who keep making anyway, uncredited and unkillable.
I can only hope to have half the taste of that Black woman from rural Mississippi, whose appreciation for craft would scald at my admiration for anything less than what I came from.
She was right. About all of it. I just wasn’t ready to hear it yet.
ebonyicons 
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