Sometimes one article so perfectly sums up contemporary pop culture reality that you can only sit in awe of the wealth of verisimilitudes you’ve just borne witness to. Such is the case with the recent article in The New Yorker by Nick Paumgarten titled “Fresh Prince: Hip-hop’s Machiavelli.” The article playfully romps through the world of Robert Greene, author of The 48 Laws of Power, the ridiculous book of ham-fisted would-be aphorisms that essentially encourages everyone to hate, distrust and trick everyone else. Not surprisingly, the book has gained special currency in the wanna-be-gangster-studio-thug-often-turned-real-world-gunshot-victim world of hip-hop. And, according to Paumgarten, Greene is eating it up; a book is supposedly in the works with everyone’s favorite scholar, 50 Cent, and Quincy Jones’ son has apparently started work on a documentary on the book. (Jones’ last well-known documentary, titled Beef, explored the world of rappers who enjoy pretending they are gangsters so much, they actually start killing each other. Whee!) 

What Paumgarten deftly accomplishes with this article is pretty sublime in that he exposes the Scarface idolatry of rappers-who-can-read-books while simultaneously calling Greene’s credibility into question by suggesting he might not have written the book himself (Who is Joost Elffers?); invoking the name of ambulance chaser/vampire book agent Marc Gerald; revealing that Greene’s name isn’t really Greene and his work at Esquire was not as an editor (as his bio claims) but as an office assistant, telling us that the author calls objects of seduction “victims,” and citing American Apparel’s Dov “hustle man” Charney as such a big fan of Greene’s that he actually has him on some sort of retainer. If the reader pays close attention, one comes away with a deep yearning to learn who the hell Joost Elffers is and how he became a “producer” of books from his Greenwich Village lair. Perhaps the funniest part of the exposé is when Karrine “Superhead” (as in blowjob) Steffans is cited as a huge fan of Greene’s chapter “Law 21: Play a sucker to catch a sucker.” 

Towards the end of season three of the hit HBO series “The Wire” (America’s latest Understanding The Ghetto For Dummies cheat sheet now that even rap music has become too cartoonish to decipher), thugged out sex symbol/Brit-actor-convincingly-parroting-a-Baltimore-scumbag, Stringer Bell (Idris Elba) is unceremoniously shot to death in one of his own condos by a gay, scarfaced street thug with a mean streak that would freeze Tony Montana’s blood and a New York drug dealer assassin who uses Malcolm X accoutrements to disguise his lethal tendencies. Afterward, Stringer’s chief pursuer, Officer McNulty (Dominic West) peruses the slain drug dealer’s plush apartment and finds a copy of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations on a bookshelf. Eyes wide and shoulders suddenly slumped, McNulty sighs, “Who was I chasing …?” The answer is that McNulty was simply chasing a street thug who happened to read a famous book about power. No more, no less. In matters of intellectual discourse, possession does not necessarily equal retention. Similarly, Greene’s entertainment world acolytes are little more than fascinated rubes drawn in by a flashy book club hustle with an even flashier name. Near the end of the piece, Greene tells Paumgarten, “I’d like to be the Karl Rove of the Democratic Party …” That one is just packed with zingers, so we’ll leave it to you to put on your thinking caps and dish the one-liners amongst yourselves.