When he burst onto the scene alongside Jay-Z in the mid-1990s, clutching a bottle of Cristal in both hands, Dash represented a weird new archetype: the businessman as superstar. When Damon “Dame” Dash dies, his obituary will inevitably describe him as Jay-Z’s one-time business partner (unless their recent low-key reconciliation blossoms into more), but that doesn’t do justice to the strange role Dash has played in pop culture. Dash produced Shadowboxer, the first of Daniels’ unintentionally hilarious melodramas, and co-directed and produced Paper Soldiers, in addition to contributing a self-deprecating cameo as himself. The connection, I suspect, boiled down to a fascinating figure named Damon “Dame” Dash, who bridges the worlds of uptown and downtown, the arthouse and the streets. It doesn’t share any major cast or crew members with The Butler, nor are they thematically similar. But the recommendation engine suggested I might also like the 2002 comedy Paper Soldiers, and that connection was much less clear. When I started with Lee Daniels’ The Butler, Netflix’s suggestion that I might also like Magic Mike looked simple enough: Matthew McConaughey starred in Daniels’ hilarious melodrama The Paperboy the same year he starred in Magic Mike. Perhaps the Netflix recommendation robot wasn’t providing easy answers, so much as challenging me to find connections myself. Perhaps it’s not just a simple piece of technology, but rather a complicated form of artificial intelligence capable of doing deep research and making sophisticated associations that might elude lesser intellects. Now, however, I fear I’ve underestimated it. During the previous installments of this column, I viewed Netflix’s recommendation engine merely as a computer algorithm that draws clear-cut connections between projects.
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