In an article on the dollar’s depreciation in today’s NYT, Katie Hammer and Julia Wedigier write:

The dollar’s fall has been so drastic, it has seeped into the popular consciousness. In his last video, rapper Jay-Z cruised the streets of New York flashing not a stack of Benjamins, but a fistful of euros.

The implication seems pretty clear*; as James Cramer put it last month: “When things have gotten to the point that even people like Gisele [Bundchen] and Jay-Z realize the dollar is too weak, things have gotten out of control” (my emphasis).

Yes, we get it: the point of the anecdote is to add color (no comment) to the story, to break up more mundane sentences like the one that follows. (”The dollar had been at relatively low levels against the pound and euro for most of this year, but in April it broke the $2 for £1 barrier…”)

But stop for a moment and ask yourself: by what standards does Jay-Z count as a representative of the popular consciousness? Consider what it means to be a person “like” Jay-Z:

+ According to Rolling Stone, Jay-Z earned $17.5 million in income during 2005, including $3 million for serving as president and CEO of Def Jam Recordings.

+Were all of his business activities concentrated in a single company, Jay-Z would be 73rd on Forbes’s executive compensation list for that year, just behind the CEO of Colgate-Palmolive and a few steps up from the CEO of Halliburton.

+ This March, Iconix purchased Rocawear, Jay-Z’s clothing line, for $204 million in cash.

+ In October 2006, Anheuser Busch named Jay-Z the co-brand director of Budweiser Select.

+ This report (PDF) suggests that Jay-Z’s net worth is around half a billion dollars.

These facts give us every reason to assume that Jay-Z’s consciousness, especially in when it comes to dollars and euros, is something quite other than “popular.” In fact, I’d guess he counts himself among the people for whom the relative value of the dollar is a datum of signal importance. And so it seems odd that the authors would use him as a kind of canary in the world economic coal mine—as if he were one of the legendary shoe shiners who asked Joseph Kennedy for a stock tip and thereby let him know that the stock market was oversubscribed.

Make no mistake: Jay-Z is our Kennedy and we are shining his shoes.

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*Note: To be fair, it could be that Hammer and Werdigier are proposing the video, and not the man, as the indicator of “popular consciousness.” But even if that’s true, it’s a neat demonstration of just how much the definition of “popular” has skewed: where once it could mean “of or by the people,” now it almost exclusively means “for the people.” To see what a difference a single shift in preposition can make, try it out on some of your favorite phrases—popular culture, popular government—and see what happens.