I’ve just come back from banking my paycheck and visiting Zion’s Gate (an excellent record store around the corner) with the express goal of spending some of the money I earned on a new/used Jeff Mills CD. Zion’s Gate only had one CD, Wave Transmissions 3, which I already own. Steve, the dread-ed owner of the business, explained to me that Mills was hard to find. How regrettable. Mills is not from Africa, from Jamaica, from Asia; he is from Detroit, and he’s a genius, a black American genius. Why is his art so hard to purchase in the very country he is from? Because his music is adult music, and the only records that Americans in general will stock and buy from black Americans are childish records, records made by blacks who are, like 50 Cent, essentially boys, kids, dribbling infants. But it’s not all that simple. Black adult music is also ignored by black Americans, which is why techno, a black form of music, is 95 percent supported by whites (80 percent of which are European whites). The blacks of our age have been trained to remain childish, to worry about childish things, and never see the world from an adult’s (John Coltrane-like) perspective, from the position of one whose view of the world is politically and critically developed. Indeed, techno, which like hiphop, achieved adulthood in the late ’80s (but by the mid 90s, adult hiphop was entirely banished to the underground), lost its black audience almost immediately, and outside of black intellectuals and artists, is taken seriously primarily by white Europeans. It’s such a shame.