Last week, in his latest bid to be the most visible retired individual this side of Michael Jordan, Jay-Z declared that he will be boycotting Cristal, the expensive champagne brand he has previously championed in his music and lifestyle, because of comments made by Cristal director Frederic Rouzard in a recent interview in The Economist.

In the interview, Rouzard was asked whether he viewed his brand’s recent association with the hip-hop world and the “bling” lifestyle as “unwanted attention” and whether it would hurt the champagne’s image. Rouzard responded by saying, “We can’t forbid people from buying it. I’m sure Don Perignon or Krug would love to have their business.”

As a result of these comments, which Jay-Z called “racist,” the rapper has decided to boycott the champagne brand and cozy up with its competitors instead. Of course, while this is an amusing story and all, it didn’t really make me think much about hip-hop, Cristal or Jay-Z himself. Instead, it got me thinking about boycotts.

Cristal has become one of the biggest status symbols in the “bling” lifestyle, to use the parlance of our times. You see the stuff all over rap videos. When the NBA All-Star Game came to Los Angeles in 2004, you couldn’t find a bottle of Cristal in any liquor store in the greater Los Angeles area. And now here we are, potentially seeing the demise of a subcultural symbol.

So this got me wondering: What would happen if other musical genres and subcultures were to boycott things integral to their lifestyle?

For instance, what would happen if DJs decided to boycott vinyl records because they saw “Shaun of the Dead” and realized that these seemingly harmless discs of aural pleasure could be lodged in someone’s forehead if tossed hard enough? What would that do to house and dance music? Suddenly you’d have guys like Jay, a 38-year-old man I used to work with, working as top-flight DJs. Jay used to spin CDs at parties, trying to use his CD mixing skills to get “bangin’ honeys” to come back to his house with him as a “lil’ something on the side” in addition to his wife of nine months. Ugh. Thank God for vinyl requiring the skill that the Jays of the world lack.

Or what would happen if lo-fi artists decided to boycott four-track recorders and record their songs with high-end equipment in an effort to sound more polished and professional? Basically all the music that I like would suddenly be refined to such a degree that it would lose any personality that attracted me to it in the first place. The entire “Westing (by Musket and Sextant)” album that Pavement released 14 years ago is essentially one huge mess of poorly recorded songs that is awesome simply because it sounds so tossed off and careless. Take this quality away and basically everything that Lou Barlow and Stephen Malkmus ever recorded loses its soul.

Worst of all, and something that would have changed the course of my life irrevocably: What if in the early 1980s, Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo of Sonic Youth decided, “Hey man, you know what? We’re sick of buying these crappy $50 Japanese Fender knock-offs. We’re saving up and buying uber-expensive guitars and taking good care of them!”

If this had happened, Moore and Ranaldo would not have been as inclined to experiment on their disposable, poor-quality instruments. Then Sonic Youth would have just been some overly pretentious art-punk band. I mean, yeah, they are an overly pretentious art-punk band, but they’d be far less interesting without their adventurous, experimental aesthetic. Probably something like a poor man’s Liars. Actually, make that a homeless man’s Liars. Indie rock (and by extension, mainstream rock) would have looked far different had Sonic Youth stopped messing around with flimsy instruments.

With all that said, I really don’t expect Jay-Z’s boycott of Cristal to continue. After all, we all remember the time that Snoop Dogg decided that he could no longer get high because he was a “businessman.” That lasted for oh, I don’t know, two months. I remember watching “MTV Cribs” and seeing an episode with Snoop while this was going on. At one point, he showed off his massive refrigerator and started talking about all the food he kept in it, like chicken wings, french fries, popsicles, Kool-Aid, etc. As he named all these foods, he started to trail off, and the look in his eyes said one thing: “Man, as soon as these MTV cats leave, I’ma light up and rip apart that fridge.” For the record, it was not clear if Snoop was off the grass wagon at this point, but it wasn’t hard to make an educated guess.

Eventually, Jay-Z and Cristal will make up, probably when Jay-Z realizes Krug and Don Perignon aren’t nearly as cool or when Cristal notices that now no one is willing to pay an exorbitant price for a champagne that isn’t championed by the rap world anymore.

But Hova, take my advice: Think long and hard before you discard something so vital to your lifestyle and image.

If only to keep the Jays of the world at bay.

Humphrey will never boycott Expressmart for as long as he lives. E-mail him at mhumphrey@media.ucla.edu.