It's Bigger Than Hip Hop: The Rise of the Post-Hip-Hop Generation (15 page)

At this same conference, something strange, something emblematic of the problem occurred. David Mays, a white Jewish Harvard graduate and founder of
The Source
magazine, stood up and added:

Our hoods? Back to the streets? Our culture? Listening to Mays was like listening to George W. Bush tell us that “we cannot allow terrorists to rule the world.” This was way beyond chutzpah. Mays, who allowed
The Source
to be overrun with ads by the same “exploitative” corporations he’s denouncing, reveals the incredible amount of control white corporations have over hip hop—not just the music, but the publications, fashion, et cetera.

As the release date for
The New Danger
approached, I told everyone I knew to cop it, especially Black folks in “the industry,” hoping that it would spark a dialogue that was long overdue.

“Yo, you gotta cop Mos’s new album… if only to hear one track: ‘The Rape Over,’” I told one childhood friend and emcee from Philly.

I was sure, too, that because of the “tall Israeli” line, the song would probably generate a mountain of controversy. A year earlier, the state of New Jersey abolished the position of poet laureate after its first appointee, Amiri Baraka, asked, “Who told 4,000 Israeli workers to stay home that day? / Why did Sharon stay away?” This despite the fact that in the same poem, Baraka asks, “Who killed the most Jews… who put the Jews in the oven? And who helped them do it? Who backed Hitler?…” Sadly, many people perceive criticism of the governmental policies of the Israeli state as criticism of Jews, and hence, anti-Semitic. We see this same tactic used against Americans who are critical of the government when they are tagged “unpatriotic.” Mos’s comment that “some tall Israeli is runnin’ this rap shit” certainly had the same potential
to push some of those same buttons, despite the fact that he was not making a broad statement about Jewish domination, but rather a specific shot at Lyor Cohen, president of Warner Music Group, who is, indeed a tall Israeli whose tremendous influence in hip hop has often been criticized. In any event, I was hopeful that any controversy would be good because it would push other issues—mainly, who runs rap, who controls our music, et cetera—to the surface.

October 19, 2004:
The New Danger
is released. I got a call from the emcee who I specifically told to get the album.

“What’s the track on the Mos jawn called?” he asked.

“ ‘The Rape Over.’”

“All right, hold up,” he said, as he checked the album cover.

“I don’t see it,” he broke to me. “Are you sure that’s the name?”

“Positive.”

Hmm
.

Silence occupied our line.

“All right, I’ll call you back,” I said.

I went to the store, bought the album, and—

Hmm
transformed into
damn
.

“The Rape Over” was indeed missing. Gone. Vamoosed.

And “missing” because, interestingly enough, according to Mos Def’s label Geffen Records, the LP was initially shipped with “The Rape Over” on it. However, the album hit stores with that particular song missing and with no public explanation from Geffen. Without “The Rape Over,”
The New Danger
debuted at number 5 on the
Billboard
charts. When word began to spread about the missing track and corporate censorship, Jim Merlis, head of publicity at Geffen, released a statement claiming that although the album was initially shipped with “The Rape Over” on it, the company realized shortly before the album’s release date that a musical sample on the song by The Doors had not been properly cleared. So, rather than push the album’s release
date back (a common practice among record labels) Geffen decided to remove the controversial song and release the album as scheduled. “‘The Rape Over’ was never removed from the album for any reason other than the clearance of the sample,” Merlis said.

Are we to believe that the removal of one of the only songs, and certainly the first song by a mainstream artist, to challenge the corporate sharecropping in hip hop was purely coincidental? A song that didn’t challenge “hatin’-ass niggas,” “bitch-ass niggas,” or “lame-ass niggas,” but rather “old white men,” “corporate forces,” and “some tall Israeli”? The overt omission of this song was a testament to Mos’s track, a validation of his words, a real-life example of the white corporate domination he rhymed about. A music executive at a major label, who chose to remain anonymous, summed it up to me as “nothing more than a routine instance of censorship—corporate censorship by the labels. It’s unfortunate but it happens. It’s effective because it sends a message to all artists on the label about what the label will tolerate.”

The First Amendment—which states: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances”—gives people the right to free speech, a right that historically has been called upon to protect otherwise marginalized voices. However, the rise in corporate censorship—censorship through intimidation, budget-cutting, refusing to advertise or allow airtime, and via other legal channels—has been used to restrict the sociopolitical voices of commercially viable artists.

Radical rap group Dead Prez knows all too much about corporate censorship. Rawkus Records deleted their verse on the
Hip Hop for Respect
LP and Loud Records placed a huge sticker on the case of their first album,
Let’s Get Free
, censoring a photo of South African youths with guns celebrating victory over the police.

“Censorship by omission is worse, because, in effect, it’s a way of leaving the door open, letting you think freedom of expression is possible in certain instances, when really the [corporate executives who control radio, TV, and the record industry] have made up their minds to make that impossible,” explains the rapper Paris, who has also battled against corporate censorship. Ultimately, corporate censorship works because, as the industry adage goes, distribution is king. Since they control the distribution of a product, they ultimately have the power to gag artists by fumbling the paperwork needed for the “clearance of the sample.”

Just a few weeks later, it was all revealed to me. The whole
thing
.

The next
segment I was producing for the digizine took me back—
way back
—to the Motherland. Accra, the capital city of Ghana in West Africa, is a colorful compilation of African greatness. Warm charcoal
faces, with even warmer smiles, welcomed me back. As I stood in the Doorway of No Return, the door through which my ancestors passed before being forced to board slave ships headed for the Americas, I contemplated beauty and tragedy. Beautiful because it was the Motherland; and tragic because of the brutal history of slavery and colonialism. I was there to produce a segment about an emerging music genre called “hiplife.”

Highlife is a West African musical genre that emerged in the 1920s and has an up-tempo, synth-driven sound. As hip hop spread across the globe, it infused itself into much of the continental African music, including highlife.

“Hiplife is just highlife plus hip hop,” one Ghanaian teenager told me. Hiplife takes imported hip-hop beats and rhymes over them using local Ghanaian languages and dialects.

Under the shade of a wooden storefront, weed smoke sashays through the air as Lil’ Kwesi, a local hiplife emcee, takes control of a cipher. After he finished his rhyme, which he spit in the Ghanaian language Twi, I asked if he could explain to me what his rhyme was about.

“Our country and our people were colonized by the British.”

“Yeah, I know. Y’all gained independence in the sixties right, under Nkrumah?” I said, to which Lil’ Kwesi slid out a chuckle.

“We are still not independent. That’s what my song is about. The British still control our country in many ways,” he explained to me. “They come here, take our goods, pay us nothing, than sell our stuff in Britain, the so-called mother country, so we don’t even benefit, as a country, from the fruits of our own labor. We have not won independence!”

“Neocolonialism” describes the economic arrangements by which former colonial powers maintain control over their former colonies and create new dependencies. This is twenty-first-century colonialism
where the same countries continue to economically exploit their former colonies while maintaining that this exploitation is beneficial for the former colony. I realized that Mos Def’s “The Rape Over” was ultimately about neocolonialism, a topic seldom discussed but that sucks the life out of Black music.

“Colonialism,” as Immortal Technique points out, “is sponsored by corporations.” Similarly, just as there were four dominant colonial powers (England, Portugal, France, and Spain) that raped and maimed Africa, Latin America, and Asia, there are four corporations who are not only “runnin’ this rap shit,” but as Mos says, “run Black music.” Appropriately dubbed the “big four,” Universal Music Group, Sony BMG, EMI Group, and Warner Music Group, according to Nielsen SoundScan, account for 81.87 percent of the U.S. music market and supply “retailers with 90 percent of the music” that the public purchases, according to New York’s
Daily News
.

Consider that the colonial powers were/are called “mother” countries. Although formerly colonized countries like Ghana, Jamaica, and Senegal may appear to be independent, their economies are still controlled by the old colonial powers—mother countries. Ironically, the “big four” of the music industry are called “parent” companies. Despite the perception that Black entrepreneurs like P. Diddy, Russell Simmons, Jay-Z, Cash Money are moguls, they are, in actuality, the children of their respective parent companies. P. Diddy’s Bad Boy Records is owned by Warner Music Group; Suge Knight’s Death Row by Interscope is owned by Universal Music Group; Def Jam is also owned by Universal. They are, as Norman Kelley writes in his article on Black music, “Black gnats.” What’s worse is that, despite popular perception, there are no Blacks
—none
—in top executive positions of the parent companies. What the parent companies, as well as the Black moguls, would like us to believe is that “the R.O.C. is runnin’
this rap shit.” This is why Jay-Z is touted as the “CEO of Hip-Hop.” Russell Simmons once said that Blacks are too valuable to be “glorified employees of American Culture, Inc.,” yet this is precisely what has occurred. Where is the outrage?

Simmons, discussing perception management, explains that “It is how you develop an image for companies. So in other words, you give out false statements to mislead the public so they will then increase in their mind the value of your company.” In the same way, we have been given a false impression of Black control in hip hop.

Simmons’s statements are reminiscent of the brilliance displayed in August Wilson’s 1984
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom
, a play that, like this essay and Mos’s “The Rape Over,” explores white corporate exploitation. Set in Chicago in 1927,
Ma Rainey
focuses on the exploitation of blues musicians. Wilson’s character notes reveal that the white execs—Sturdyvant and Irwin—are completely “preoccupied with money,” are “insensitive to black performers,” and thus “deal with them at arm’s length.” The brilliance of Wilson’s piece illustrates Simmons’s comments, because although Sturdyvant and Irvin are not on stage much, they circumscribe and dictate the lives of the Black performers who are constantly
seen
on stage. They are both nowhere and everywhere at once.

Under the classic colonial model, raw materials like rubber, cocoa, and gold were extracted from the colonies and sent to the mother country to be finished and commodified for the marketplaces of the mother country. Additionally, these products were often sold back to
the same colonies from which the raw materials were extracted in the first place. In other words, the colonies—because of regulations that prevented them from manufacturing their own products—were forced to buy back their own goods. Under this system, which Kwesi correctly insisted “is still in place under neocolonialism,” raw materials are taken from places like Ghana and sold to the citizens of the mother country. Similarly, in hip hop’s case, the citizens of the parent companies are, according to Forbes, “45 million Hip-Hop consumers between the ages of 13 and 34, 80% of whom are white and has $1 trillion in spending power.”