It's Bigger Than Hip Hop: The Rise of the Post-Hip-Hop Generation

by M. K. Asante Jr

  Dr. Molefi K. Asante introduces the first Ph.D. in African-American studies at Temple University. Public Enemy and other Afrocentric rappers frequent the department. The department also encourages young scholars to write dissertations on hip-hop culture, advancing the discipline.

  Bill Cosby, during the height of the popularity of his sitcom The Cosby Show, donates $20 million to Spelman College, the largest donation ever made.

  1989

  Spike Lee’s film Do the Right Thing, a story about racial tension in a diverse Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, community, is released by Universal Pictures and features a soundtrack from Public Enemy. The film stars Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, and Samuel L. Jackson and is the debut for Martin Lawrence and Rosie Perez.

  Under international pressure, South African president F. W. de Klerk releases eight African National Congress (ANC) leaders from jail, including Walter Sisulu, founder of the ANC Youth League and prominent figure in the formation of the militant MK or Umkhonto we Sizwe (“Spear of the Nation”).

  1990

  The leader of 2 Live Crew, Luther Campbell, gets arrested ’cause of the lyrics on As Nasty as They Wanna Be.

  On February 11, Nelson Mandela, leader of the ANC, is freed from Victor Verster Prison in Paarl, South Africa, after twenty-seven years in prison. On the day of his release, Mandela spoke to the nation and to the world:

  Our resort to the armed struggle in 1960 with the formation of the military wing of the ANC (Umkhonto we Sizwe) was a purely defensive action against the violence of apartheid. The factors which necessitated the armed struggle still exist today. We have no option but to continue. We express the hope that a climate conducive to a negotiated settlement would be created soon, so that there may no longer be the need for the armed struggle.

  1991

  Now I see her in commercials, she’s universal

  She used to only swing it with the inner—city circle.

  — COMMON, “I USED TO LOVE H.E.R.,” RESURRECTION

  Ice Cube writes and performs an original song for a St. Ides Malt Liquor commercial. In the thirty-second commercial, Cube rhymes: “Get your girl in the mood quicker / Get your jimmy thicker / With St. Ides Malt Liquor.”

  On January 16, the United States begins an unprecedented bombing campaign on Iraq, primarily targeting civilian life. The bombs, cumulatively, were the equivalent of seven Hiroshimas and resulted in the death of over 100,000 Iraqi citizens.

  On March 3, Los Angeles police officers brutally attack and arrest Rodney King after a San Fernando Valley traffic stop. The beating of King is captured on videotape and quickly broadcast. All of the officers, during a trial that would take place the following year, would be acquitted—an event that sparks the second L.A. rebellions.

  It’s nothin’ black about the head niggas that’s running the

  industry, they not even niggas.

  — JADAKISS

  Foreigners, who have not studied economics but have

  studied Negroes, take up business and grow rich.

  — DR. HAROLD CRUISE

  Black culture is too significant in American culture

  for blacks to be glorified employees.

  — RUSSELL SIMMONS

  It has been said that while a wise person learns from his mistakes, an even wiser person learns from the mistakes of others. Survival for the post-hip-hop generation means being deeply engaged in the latter and confronting, challenging, and correcting the issues that have plagued previous generations and paying special attention to those issues that have maintained a consistent presence throughout our history in America. One such issue is the relationship African-Americans have had and still have with incredibly lucrative industries that, without us, would not exist as such.

  “Old white men is runnin’ this rap shit,” Mos Def, in his Brooklyn drawl, rhymed through the trembling speakers in the New York studio I sat in.

  Corporate forces runnin’ this rap shit

  Some tall Israeli is runnin’ this rap shit

  We poke out our asses for a chance to cash in.

  My lips parted, not because I was surprised by what he was saying, but rather, that he was saying it. For so long, critical issues of power, race, and music have been neglected to the point where one wondered if the economic domination of Black music by non-Blacks was normalized beyond question.

  The one-and-a-half-minute song continues as a lyrical indictment of an industry that tells Black performers to get in the line of fire, we get the big-ass checks. The song ends with a laundry list of culprits: MTV, Viacom, AOL, Time Warner, cocaine, and Hennessey.

  A few weeks prior to hearing this song, I was a producer on Blokhedz, a short animated film for a digizine that Mos Def did a voice for. Blokhedz, a comic book created by Mike and Mark Davis of Imajimation Studios, tells the story of young Blak, an aspiring teenage rapper who is blessed with the mystical gift of turning his rhymes into reality. Living in the Monarch Projects of Empire City, Blak—who sports a red, black, and green wristband—must struggle to survive the violence and temptation of the streets, while also remaining true to himself and his gift. It was while working on this project, as I sat behind an engineer in a recording studio watching legendary movie director Michael Schultz (Krush Groove, The Last Dragon, Cooley High), along with his son Brandon (a writer for Blokhedz) direct the voice-over artists, that I heard this song playing in another section of the studio. I followed the beat.

  Aptly titled “The Rape Over,” I learned that this song, which I was hearing a few weeks early, was slated to appear on Mos’s album, The New Danger. The song, like so many truths that surface in our lives, came to me at an important time. I was a student in college and had, over the course of my senior year, created Focused Digizine, an urban digital media enterprise with an estimated worth of $1 million. Part of our ability to raise funds and grow was due to the enormous amount of resources Lafayette College, a small, private liberal arts college with an endowment of more than $780 million, bestowed upon me: offices, interns, equipment, et cetera. In addition, this 94 percent white college located in rural Pennsylvania had resources that would bring me to point-blank range with the crisis.

  “I want you to meet some of our board members and alumni in New York who are super successful and can help you. I don’t know much about what they do, but I know they are into the whole rap thing,” a fifty-something white administrator at the college told me.

  Weeks later, I found myself, along with my producing partner, in robust Manhattan high-rises with fancy elevators and views that were surreal, meeting with executives from record labels, cable channels, and radio stations who were “into the whole rap thing.” Old white man after old white man, blazer after blazer, gray head after gray head, and striped tie after stripped tie, I was shocked to discover that hip hop’s decision makers weren’t hip hop at all. I quickly came to the realization that hip hop, this urban Black creation, was something that urban Blacks (or even just Blacks) didn’t control at all. The brutal fact is, as Afrika Bambaataa says: “Today a lot of the people who created hip hop, meaning the Blacks and Latinos, do not control it anymore.” These meetings symbolized how perhaps African-America’s richest cultural capital is outside of African-American hands.

  It became clear that the hip-hop community and hip-hop industry were two totally different entities. As Yvonne Bynoe points out in her essay “Money, Power, Respect: A Critique of the Business of Rap Music,” the hip-hop industry “is comprised of entities that seek to profit from the marketing and sales of rap music and its ancillary products” and includes “record companies, music publishers, radio stations, record stores, music-video shows, recording studios, talent bookers, performance venues, promoters, managers, disc jockeys, lawyers, accountants, music publications, and music/entertainment websites,” most of which are not owned or even operated by the progenitors of the music—Black folks. Peep:

  HIP-HOP COMMUNITY = THE STREETS

  HIP-HOP INDUSTRY = WALL STREET

 
; HIP-HOP COMMUNITY ≠ HIP-HOP INDUSTRY

  Mos Def’s “The Rape Over” had validated what I was seeing, verbalized what I was feeling, and aired out what needed to be made public. What’s shocking is that he is among a select few to voice this gross disparity; it has been the proverbial elephant in the room. It’s easy to see why most rap artists would be deterred from challenging the institution that feeds them, but what about the critics, fans, and scholars? Most writers and critics who have written about hip hop have not approached the topic from a perspective rooted in history, making it difficult for them to fully assess the function of Black music in American life or to put forth a serious analysis of how hip hop and R & B undergird the entire music business. The most in-depth analysis usually arrives in the form of a moral objection to the content of the rappers’ lyrics rather than an analysis or scrutiny of the corporations that profit most from such “immoralities.” By focusing on the content, they unskillfully avoid the tough questions: Who sponsors rap? Who buys the most rap? Who promotes death and violence? Who backs ignorance? Who exploits rappers? Who profits from Black-on-Black violence? Who owns the radio stations? Who owns TV? Who owns who, you and your crew? Who runs the media? Who runs radio? Who, who, who? Norman Kelley, one of the few writers to seriously address these disparities, reminds us in his essay “The Political Economy of Black Music,” “Never has one people created so much music and been so woefully kept in the dark about the economic consequences of their labor and talent by their intellectuals and politicos.”

  However, all of that was about to change. Mos’s song, I just knew, would ignite all of our minds, pens, voices, and feet. It would spark new strategies about community control as well as expand upon discussions that needed to be had—discussions like Passage to Peace held at the 2004 Congressional Black Caucus in D.C., where Congresswoman Maxine Waters told the crowd:

  Something is going on in hip hop today…. We have been the creators of a tremendous art and it gets imitated, it gets redefined, it gets repackaged…. It is time to take the economic riches and divert some of the benefits and resources of hip hop to our struggling communities…. It’s time to open up this discussion about who owns hip hop.

  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:

  This union with Congresswoman Waters and CSDI [Community Self-Determination Institute] is a way to educate our people on the real issues affecting our ‘hoods and help bring hip hop back to the streets. Hip hop culture was born and became a voice for this country’s most powerless and endangered demographic group. It is the responsibility of hip hop artists, executives, and true fans to reclaim control of this multi-billion-dollar industry from racist corporations and reap the rewards of hip hop’s success for our disenfranchised communities. We must not silently participate in the overall exploitation of our culture.

  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 grou
p 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.”