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

by M. K. Asante Jr

  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?

  We so confuse you

  We front rap music.

  — MOS DEF, “THE RAPE OVER,” THE NEW DANGER

  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.”

  Blacks in the inner cities share many of the characteristics of the colonized. As Norman Kelley, who has also elaborated on this colonial connection, describes in his essay “The Political Economy of Black Music”:

  Blacks in the inner cities, if not as an aggregate, share some of the classic characteristics of a colony: lower per capita income; high birth rate; high infant mortality rate; a small or weak middle class; low rate of capital formation and domestic savings; economic dependence on external markets; labor as a major export; a tremendous demand for commodities produced by the colony but consumed by wealthier nations; most of the land and business are owned by foreigners.

  So essentially, the ghetto—with poverty, poor schools, drugs, police terrorism, et cetera—provides the raw materials needed to produce rap. Then, just as the gold and diamonds that are taken from Africa are primarily sold in the mother countries (Europe and the United States), rap is mainly purchased by a white audience, the parent companies’ citizens, if you will. “Economically, colonialism programmed African countries to consume what they do not produce and to produce what they do not consume,” writes Nigerian Bade Onimode in A Future for Africa. This fact has deadly ramifications.

  The middle-aged, wealthy white executives that I met with in Manhattan—the decision makers of hip hop—I’d initially perceived to be very ignorant with regards to hip-hop culture, history, and ideology. I realized, however, that they were very knowledgeable, we just had different knowledge(s). They may have not understood the ghetto, or the Black experience, or the current struggle, or even Black music, but they had a rich—rich!—understanding of the tastes and values of white consumers. That is to say, by default, they understood white racism on an intrinsic level, which meant that they understood how to sell products to young white males. As Chuck D noted in his essay “Death of a Nation”: “It’s hard for me to support an 85% white teenage audience screamin’ ‘smoke that nigger’ and call it the shit.”

  The idea of selling Black violence, misogyny, and sexuality to a white teenage audience conjures up the image of blues musician Tommy Johnson, who in the film O Brother, Where Art Thou? sells his soul to the devil. He has a photograph, titled “Tommy and fans,” where Tommy, a chocolate-colored brother, stands surrounded by a group of whites in KKK outfits. It is this reality that prompts M-1 of Dead Prez to explain:

  Hip hop today is programmed by the ruling class. It is not the voice of African or Latino or oppressed youth. It is a puppet voice for the ruling class that tells us to act like those people who are
oppressing us. The schools, the media, capitalism, and colonialism are totally responsible for what hip hop is and what it has become. But we didn’t intend on that—hip hop was a voice just like the drum, the oral tradition of our people.

  Allowing white executives, not from the hip-hop culture, to control and dictate the culture is tragic because the music, and ultimately the culture, as we can see today, has not only lost its edge, but its sense of rebellion and Black improvement—the very principles upon which it was founded. In Byron Hurt’s groundbreaking documentary, Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats & Rhymes, former Def Jam president Carmen Ashhurst-Watson recalls:

  At the time where we switched to gangster music was the same time the majors brought up all the [hip-hop] labels and I don’t think that’s a coincidence. At the time we were able to get a place in the record store and a bigger presence because of this major marketing capacity, the music became less and less conscious. We went to Columbia, and the next thing I know we went from Public Enemy to pushing a group called Bitches with Problems.

  As rap music began to show serious economic promise in the 1980s, major record labels, alien to the culture and unsure what would sell, began signing up a wide variety of artists—from Public Enemy to LL Cool J. However, soon after the acquisition of these artists, it became evident—through lyrics like “Better you than me / I’m a cop killer, fuck police brutality! / Cop killer, I know your family’s grievin’ (fuck ’em) / Cop killer, but tonight we get even”—that many of the recently signed artists had a political agenda that was in direct conflict not only with the label’s politics but with their bottom line as well. The result, as Ashhurst-Watson remembers firsthand, was a mass dismissal of artists who insisted upon challenging the status quo. Put another way, the labels were saying, “We want to make money off your art and culture, but we don’t want you to truly express yourselves if that means rage or challenging the politics of the status quo.”

  Tragically, the history of African-American music has been one of white corporate exploitation and outright theft of Black artists and music. Even in the midst of the most virulent and vehement racism, whites still figured out “how to grow rich off of Black fun,” as one minstrel performer notes. And the main way to “grow rich” was from blatant theft. This stealing is a part of a system of theft that dates back to the immensely popular minstrel shows of the nineteenth century where whites would blacken their faces and imitate and pervert Black dance and music forms before white audiences. The evolution of this theft can be observed in the subtle historic categorizations of Black music and to more outright and blatant forms of larceny.

  Blues artists responsible for countless gold and platinum records were constantly cheated. Many were paid as little as fifty dollars for an album and were denied royalties, even while their songs stayed on the hit charts for months at a time. To make matters worse, the lawyers who represented the artists were assigned by the labels—a clear conflict of interests. In the end, Black artists, like the sharecroppers who worked plantations after enslavement, always ended up owing the labels. Artists like Bo Diddley, who was cheated by Chess Records and stayed broke despite recording hits, has recently come out to speak up. When asked about why he chose to challenge his former label, he says, “I decided to tell it like it is. They’re the ones who should be ashamed, not me.” Diddley’s label, Chess Records, thought of its artists as childlike men who were interested only in Cadillacs and beautiful women, and who needed “plantation owners” to look after their affairs, as Marshall Chess, son and nephew of the founders of Chess Records, recalled. Through exploitation and a plantation-owner mentality, white businessmen were able to spin the blues into gold.

  The jazz era was no different. Trumpeter Rex Stewart, who joined Duke Ellington’s band in 1934, echoed Mos Def when he asked, “Where the control is, the money is. Do you see any of us [Black musicians] running any record companies, booking agencies, radio stations, music magazines?”

  Black saxophonist and composer Ornette Coleman, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2007, has been a consistent voice against this exploitation:

  The problem in this business is that you don’t own your own product. If you record, it’s the record company that owns it; if you play at a club, it’s the nightclub owners who charge people to listen to you, and then they tell you your music is not catching on…. This has been my greatest problem—being short-changed because I’m a Negro, not because I can’t produce. Here I am being used as a Negro who can play jazz, and all the people I recorded for and worked for act as if they own me and my product. They have been guilty of making me believe I shouldn’t have the profits from my product simply because they own the channels of productions. They act like I owe them something for letting me express myself with my music, like the artist is supposed to suffer and not live in clean, comfortable situations. The insanity of living in America is that ownership is really strength. It’s who owns who’s strongest in America … that’s why it’s so hard to lend your music to that kind of existence.

  The “existence” Coleman reflects upon is, in part, a classical component of capitalistic relationships. The term for this relationship, where the fruits of an artist’s labor are controlled by the employer, is “alienation.” Then and now, this alienation is the result of the employer owning and controlling both the means of production and the manufactured products that are the end result of the workers’ labor.

  To complicate matters and to add insult to rape, many of the jazz executives despised the musicians and the music. Consider John Hammond, a descendant of the Vanderbilt family and a top executive at Columbia Records, who signed Billie Holiday and Bessie Smith to a series of contracts where they were given a small flat fee for each recording and no royalties. Holiday, for example, was paid thirty dollars for six recordings—recordings that went on to sell hundreds of thousands of copies. What’s worse, Columbia designated Hammond as the “sole recipient of all royalties” from sales of a 1970s reissue of Smith’s albums. Hammond, if we adjust for inflation, made roughly $360,000 off that album alone.

  The exploitation of artists continues even after their deaths. Recordings withheld from the market are often released with much publicity after the artist has died. Smith, for example, came out with an album after she had passed that was much talked about and acclaimed. Columbia made a fortune off of this, all while Smith lay dead in an unmarked grave. After a campaign by rock singer Janis Joplin and Juanita Green, a Black nurse, a few hundred dollars was raised for a headstone and a scholarship in Smith’s name. Columbia Records finally saw fit to put a measly thousand dollars toward the fund. Hammond, who had exploited Smith for so long, reluctantly contributed fifty dollars for a headstone.

  The theft of Black music has been so rampant and pungent that a group of major record labels, overcome by guilt, founded the Rhythm and Blues Foundation in 1994 in an effort to help “victims of poor business practices, bad management and unscrupulous record companies,” wrote The New York Times. Kick-started with a $1.5 million endowment from Atlantic and $450,000 from Time Warner, the Washington, D.C.-based foundation promotes the importance of past musicians and gives annual awards; however, nothing is being done about the redistribution of the enormous wealth gained off the original exploitation. The R & B Foundation may be a step in the right direction, but it fails miserably at seriously addressing the gross theft that occurred.

  The attempt by Atlantic Records is, at best, thoughtful, but it isn’t nearly enough. Consider, for example, Ruth Brown, who received as little as sixty-nine dollars per song, with no royalties for a series that enabled the then-fledgling Atlantic Records to become an industry giant. Brown was one of the highest-selling recording artists of the fifties and was so instrumental in the success of Atlantic Records, it was often referred to as “the house that Ruth built.”

  Similarly, today, with the billions of dollars that hip hop generates annually, the modern music industry is a house, a mansion, built by Black youths. And within that mansion
, the same exploitation continues to take place. Norman Kelley writes:

  Contracts are structured in such a way that the odds are against musical neophytes remaining in the business for very long. They see the likes of Michael Jackson, Prince, Tupac, Snoop Doggy Dogg or Quincy Jones, dazzled by the big money makers but don’t understand how the music industry depends on a fresh crop of naive, young and talented artists—black, white, and Latino—to grease the industry’s wheels. Most of those who sign contracts will not enjoy long careers and the industry has ways to recoup the money that it spends on producing and promoting what they call “talent,” but viewed as either disposable or exploitable.

  What makes this even more troubling is the lion’s share of music industry profits that hip hop generates. With all other genres losing music, the music industry, for years now, has relied almost exclusively upon hip hop to stay afloat. “What is keeping some labels solvent, many executives agree, is hip hop and contemporary rhythm-and-blues,” writes Neil Strauss of The New York Times. According to Forbes, hip hop generates over $15 billion per year and “has moved beyond its musical roots, transforming into a dominant and increasingly lucrative lifestyle.”

  There’s an image in John Gabriel Stedman’s 1790 book, Narrative of a Five Years’ Expedition Against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam, that is called “Europe supported by Africa and America.” The image depicts three nude women: an African, a European, and a Native American. The African and Native American women, both wearing shackles, are holding up a shackle-less European woman draped in pearls. This is the best way to think about colonialism and indeed the rap industry. More than that, though, Stedman also leads us to some of the answers.