I mean thoughts:

• Yeah tru, what “gangsta” meant wasn’t really settled in then
• And really maybe between NKOTB and N'Sync/BSB that industry energy WAS minority-focused. I remember elementary kids following along the New Jack Swing thing, and Boys II Men’s “motownphilly” was knowingly putting them in a lineage of packaged harmonized pop boy/girl groups
• Plus Michael “it don’t matter if you’re black or white” Jackson really WAS the avatar of kid pop culture in the 80s
• Honestly a lot of when I see Black Twitter go off on like, what your sappy aunt was listening to back then, it had a lot of overlap with my mom’s “adult contemporary”
• And when you look them up the differences tend to be the same romantic schlock for middle-aged secretaries, just in different ballad/Broadway or soul/gospel/R&B idioms
• When you think of it really Madonna’s shtick was she was a white ethnic girl who stayed in touch with the urban streets even as they got browner and queerer
• But then rap got coded hard black and white suburban kids went “alternative”
• Really in a lot of ways pop culture in 1991 prepared us for this moment which then got delayed 30 years, not just “racial minorities are now part of the cultural mainstream”
• Like remember Married With Children about how liberation had given nothing to the American man it just freed womenfolk to further undermine his hopes for a dignified domain
• Or all the “Slacker”, temp stuff – no one has real careers anymore!
• Or the SF bike courier cyberpunk “so we’ll all be poor disposable gig workers underfoot”