I hear you and I often share your sentiments. However, I understand that there is a much larger issues at hand. I'm not condemning Jay, Bey, or any of our celebrities for their success. I just feel that success for us often comes with a huge level of responsibility that I don't think we always consider.
To quote Ice-T from New Jack City, "You owe Pookie! You owe."
It is ignored wholesale and the "hive-mind Lemming I want what they tell me to want" is promoted and forced feed us and out children relentlessly. Like I said, our poisons are legion to the point where we don't consider them poisons at all.
Beyonce is not idolized for her voice and she can clearly sing, the BLOND lace weaves are salivated probably more than her voice is by black women and, naaaw, I'll say without QUESTION it is.
Jay Z is just a living commercial reel basically in his rhymes, the naming of products that are imprinted in our minds to want to have so that we too can look down on the next person of color as they do us and feel superior to.
The poisons are endless, the absence of any fucking stance on anything affecting the world is another, as you said, ducking responsibility to stand for SOMETHING. AS someone else pointed out these "interest groups/corporations and government" all have an agenda they are carrying out. We have no such agenda, it is whatever is whatever or what we are bombarded with to think we must have.
Don't get me wrong, I ain't mad at either of them, they doing what they doing to get theirs and MAINTAIN that "position" if that means turning a blind eye to anything that will make them not "marketable". They have essentially become "Product".
This is the poison that affects most of us, doing us and fuck everyone else and it is the biggest myth in America to me that black folks have swallowed. Cause no other people are doing that in this country, they are always either openly or covertly trying to make sure their people have advantage whenever possible.
How about this, folks look at Mexicans and say probably "We have it better than they do."
I say bullshit, they are wholesale grabbing up every type of labor there is that is manual, chefs, landscaping, construction, home repair, building homes, selling ices, selling corn on street, you name it. And they are KEEPING it amongst themselves and feeding their families and not remotely concerned about NOTHING the media trying to bombard them with in terms of "Marketing".
My two cents