Showbusiness Ethnopolitics: Ludacris

No Rock 'n' Roll Fun reports that US rapper Ludacris - whom without extensive Googling I can only describe as occasional actor and one of Usher's collaborators on last year's minimally titled Yeah - has provoked a minor showbusiness-ethnopolitical scandal by incorporating a Confederate flag into his outfit at the recent Vibe awards, where he performed his new song Georgia.

In fact, Ludacris (or Chris Bridges to his mum) wasn't just waving the flag, as XRRF suggest, but wearing what the Confederate team tracksuit would be on some awful parallel Earth where Lincoln had lost the Civil War and the Confederate South competed on its own in the Olympic Games.

The inevitable explanatory press release states that the outfit symbolised 'the oppression that we as African Americans have endured for years', and was intended 'to represent where we came from, to remind people that Ray Charles' original "Georgia" was written because of that racism'. The performance in fact concluded with Ludacris taking off and stomping on the Confederate outfit and revealing the African colours of black, red, and green underneath, or, in other words: 'In order to move forward, we must never forget where we were'.

With any luck, nobody responsible for the annual Croatian Eurovision striptease will have been keeping up with this...