Miles Raymer: User-content-driven sites have also accel­erated the speed at which the mainstream absorbs elements of black youth culture, with things like “Chicken Noodle Soup” going from a Harlem neighborhood thing to a worldwide pop phenomenon more or less in a matter of days. What do you think the effects of this have been so far, and what do you see happening in the future?

Wayne Marshall: In a sense it’s just an intensification of what has been a long-standing pattern of influence. African-American culture finds itself amplified in the mainstream for all sorts of reasons—some specious (primitivist fascination), some not (genuine celebration, empathy)—and, in turn, projected around the world by American imperial/corporate networks (with which African-American culture has an ambivalent relation). The radical difference is that some of the traditional middlemen (record/media companies, government, privileged appropriators/champions) have been cut out with the rise of P2P technologies. So now anyone can make a video of themselves dancing in their kitchen or driveway and put it up and it can catch on, across the street or across the globe.