“Who Stole the Soul?”
Corporate Involvement and White Consumption’s Effect on Hip-Hop
There are two Americas; one that enjoys expansive civil liberties and economic boons and another which has been systematically denied these things for centuries. What’s worse, if you are born black you are just about doomed to belong to the latter. African American males make up 6% of the general population but over half the prison population( www.aclu.org). According to the Harvard Civil Rights project, schools have been gradually resegregating since the 1990’s (www.civilrightsproject.harvard.edu). While the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960’s dismantled much of the legal infrastructure that permitted this dual world to exist, the fact remains that there are still two Americas. The tools of oppression have transformed from naked legal sanction to the clandestine cultural programming, as whites have slowly hijacked black music through corporatization and resold it to white audiences. Yet just as the laws that permitted segregation could only be dismantled by other laws, socially conscious culture may be the only way to fight today’s oppression. This is best seen when one analyzes rap music.
According to Greg Dimitriadis, rap music began in the government sponsored housing projects of the Bronx as the musical element of a multidimensional culture also involving dance and graffiti. Within three decades rap left its inner city roots, becoming the best selling musical genre in 2006 (Myer and Kleck). Along the way it has left the other two elements behind, and exchanged the basements that spawned it for high level corporate board rooms. Parents, scholars and Congressman have pondered why the music that dominates our airwaves today has become so violent, materialist, and misogynist. Lagrone discusses how these artists portray themselves similar to characters from minstrel shows which were 19th century plays using white actors to portray blacks as uncivilized barbarians (Lagrone 122). Whites used these crude stereotypes in minstrel shows to justify their continued oppression of African Americans. The audience has shifted along with the content, becoming much more white, and Yousman shows how the white audience today uses mainstream rap the same way that audiences used minstrel shows, as a justification for their continued oppression of blacks in the inner city (Yousman 375). Corporations are more than willing to modify their supply of rap music to meet this demand, telling the record labels that manage their contracts with artists to seek more of the violent “gangster” rap white youth crave to assuage any guilt they might feel living in the just America’s. (Lena 480). Yet not all rap exhibits these negative aspects. Independent music labels abound with artists releasing songs dealing with subjects from true intimacy to police brutality and economic discrimination, part of an undercurrent of “conscious hip-hop” largely unheard on mainstream radio. While white consumption fuels corporations’ desire to provide violent music, Zillmannn shows that conscious rap music can alter white peoples’ opinions on racial issues, making them aware of the inner city’s problems that suburban life tries so hard to insulate them from (Zillmann et al 1). Dowdy shows that live conscious rap shows also become agents of political action, so the music that awakened an open minded white listener can also provide him a tool to use his racial advantage to take action. Therefore, while corporations have transformed rap to exploit the white America’s inner racist, rap that is outside of corporate control and the mainstream can activate these same white people to use their power to correct the injustices that created this situation.
Hip hop began in neighborhoods that were almost completely non-white as the epicenter of whole neighborhood parties (Dimitriadis 361). Upski describes it as a culture of “competition as opposed to bloodshed” (Upski 158). Dancers would compete to see who had the best maneuvers, rappers would compete to see who had the cleverest rhymes, and graffiti artists would compete to see who had the most visually appealing images. While there was some white contact with it, it was fundamentally unable to leave the projects and enter the mainstream because “like many African musics and popular dance musics, early hip hop cannot be understood as aural text alone but must be approached and appreciated as multi-tiered event…”(Dimitriadis 361). Songs were rarely recorded and Dimitriadis describes them as “long and sprawling,” as producing an autonomous song was “less important than the rapper’s or DJ’s ability to ‘move a crowd’” (Dimitriadis 361). These songs were too long for radio play and dealt with subjects that made very little sense outside the context of an inner city party. Rap group Run DMC changed all of this by recording self contained, 3-5 minute songs that resembled the rock singles that mainstream radio played ( Dimitriadis 363). Rap could not only move to other cities across the nation then, but out to the suburbs where white audiences could encounter it much more easily.
As rap music transformed from the marathon party music that drove hip hop culture into a form that could be more easily packaged and sold, the nature of rap music changed as well. Dimitriadis writes, “Hip-hop moved, in short, from a place dependent art to a more mobile one” (Dimitriadis 364). The songs were now designed for the world at large instead of small segmented communities at a party. This didn’t destroy rap however. In fact, it allowed for the creation of songs like “Its Like That,” by Run DMC which Dimitriadis describes as a “tight…thematic track…one which explores the trials and tribulations of poverty” (Dimitriadis 364). A track addressing social ills would have made no sense in the early days of hip-hop, as rap was the soundtrack to parties full of people who had daily contact with those ills. They were dancing and having a good time to forget these, not be reminded of them once again. This transition left the art form vulnerable, however. Dimitriadis writes, “Rap was now a separable discourse that did not demand strict integration in live multi-media production”(Dimitriadis 161). It could leave the projects much more easily now and was available to an audience that had nothing to do with the communities that originally produced it. Worse yet, it was in a form that could generate massive profits for whoever held the rights to sell it. Now that it could be recorded easily, these records could be sold to whomever wanted them, and if they were popular enough they could be played on the radio. Rather than being independently produced by people trying to craft quality songs, it could be produced by people only concerned with making profit; a concern that can often override the concern for quality.
Rap stayed widely outside of the major record corporations radar until 1996, when major labels owned 73% of the rap songs that made it to the 100 most played songs on radio that year (Myer 145). The damage done by rap music’s transformation from a cultural expression to a profit driven product can be seen when one compares songs produced by major and independent labels, such as independent artist MURS’ “Walk Like A Man” and mainstream rapper Snoop Dogg’s “Pop It Like Its Hot”. Both songs deal with violent subject matter. MURS tells the story of the violent death of his friend, his feelings on losing him, and his revenge and subsequent guilt. After he shoots his friend’s murderer, MURS delivers this line, “I thought [revenge was] what I wanted until the problem was confronted and now I am haunted by remorse and I wish I hadn’t done it. Shit.”(MURS) The song clearly shows the many folded consequences of thoughtless violence, as MURS’ persona in the song spends much of the song grieving his friend, than feeling guilty about his own actions that he took to avenge his friend. The song certainly does not glorify violence as it only creates negative consequences, and the narrator is conflicted by his own act of violence. Snoop’s song deals with a much less focused subject matter, splitting his song between glorifying his own wealth and sexual prowess while als threatening his enemies. In the third verse, he says
“You got a gun so you wanna pop back?/AK47 now nigga, stop that!/C mid shoes, now I'm on the move/Your family's crying, now you on the news/They can't find you, and now they miss you/Must I remind you I'm only here to twist you/Pistol whip you, dip you then flip you.” (Snoop).
Snoop feels no remorse for his deed, in fact lampoons his victim’s family’s grief then continues on with his life. He makes murder look like it has no consequence, that it is just one part of living the life of a successful black man. MURS on the other hand devotes an entire song to the ripple effects of just one murder.
Capitalist ownership of rap music didn’t necessarily guarantee rap’s destruction, however. After all MURS is trying to make a living off of his song just like Snoop is. Myer writes that “the problem occurs not when culture becomes a vital functioning part of the capitalist economy, but when the culture is produced as a commodity in order to gain profits…when this happens the culture industry follows the logic of capital” (Myer 138). The logic of capital is to sell as much as you can to as many people as you can, and for music in the United States to be truly profitable it must appeal to white audiences, an audience completely distinct from that of most rappers. Indeed, Bill Yousman writes that as many as 70% of rap music listeners are white (Yousman 367). Corporations want to attract that audience simply because there are more people in it than are in the black audience, and they push for music they feel will attract more whites to accomplish that goal. The music is no longer about sharing an experience, its about sharing or even fictionalizing one the rapper feels will attract suburban white kids.
These attempts to modify rap music to make it palatable to a white audience create the negative music we hear today. Whites, as the largest single segment of the population, are the audience that corporations want to reach. Corporations target songs like “Pop Like It’s Hot” to Whites. The audience receives what the audience is willing to buy, and when rap hit the mainstream the audience was no longer African Americans. It was white suburban teen-agers, and the negative images present in rap reflect this white audience’s images of African Americans, not reality (Yousman). The images that whites want to see, the images that corporations want to promote, are those of age old stereotypes (LaGrone). In minstrel shows of one hundred years ago, whites watch blacks cut each other over dice games, where as today LaGrone writes, “the ‘Nigger’ wields uzi’s and AK’s. Crap games metamorphosed in to drug deals but the conventions were still recognizable” (Lagrone). Conscious rappers, who don’t receive the radio airplay that mainstream rappers do, are very conscious of this. Marxist rappers Dead Prez talk about this in their song, “Turn Off The Radio,” saying “I refuse to be a stereotype in ya box…/What's on the radio, propoganda, mind control/And turnin it on is like puttin on a blindfold” (Dead Prez). They encourage their listeners to leave the mainstream, because the mainstream propagates the stereotypes and myths that have justified black oppression for centuries. Whites have always feared blacks and have turned their fear into negative stereotypes, as evidenced by the minstrel shows and the gangster rap of today. White consumption of hip-hop and the black aesthetic did not lead to a culture melding or a mutual understanding between African Americans and European Americans, but rather European dominant culture once again using its hegemony to transform African culture into something it was comfortable with. It had the brute economic power to demand and receive images that it was comfortable with, images that justified their continued oppression through “maintaining a high level of support for the practices and structures of institutional racism, such as unequal education systems, discrimination, housing and employment, repressive policing and criminal sentencing, and so on” (Yousman 387).
Whites use this economic power to modify culture in order to justify other exercises of power. Images like the ones Snoop portray in his song
“allow Whites to retain a sense of natural superiority while embracing the notion that we are a land without hierarchical, race based structures…All men are equal, but of course Blacks are not men” (Yousman 378).
As the images of black men presented in mainstream rap and hip-hop have become more and more barbaric, white youth become more and more inculcated into allowing inequality to continue to exist. The results of Yousman’s survey of young white gangster rap consumers’ political views, show that only 4% felt that living in a segregated neighborhood was “not acceptable” (Yousman 373). Yousman discusses this when he writes,
“…the embrace of the substance of much of these images and messages can be seen to logically and powerfully lead White youth right back to a generalized ideology that is consistent with an acceptance of White economic, political and social supremacy.” (Yousman 386)
Whites can rationalize that blacks deserve to be poor because obviously they could succeed if they would just take away their focus from cars, women, and murdering one another and put it to getting good jobs and going to college,
The power structure presents white audiences with images of black men that they are comfortable with, images of barbarians who need to be controlled for their own good, just as they did a hundred years ago with minstrel shows. They don’t have to have an agenda of continuing oppression to justify this, they just have to want to make money. White domination of hip-hop however adds a more destructive element. Minstrel shows were primarily a white produced and ran phenomenon (LaGrone). Blacks were left alone to develop their own music, developing blues and jazz that laid the groundwork for much of modern music. Today, however, the power structure (in the form of multi-media music corporations) have hijacked the black aesthetic to turn out these destructive images, thus re-enforcing stereotypes among whites and destroying the mechanism of black culture at the same time, as illustrated by the fact that five corporations control 90% of all music revenue (Myer 140 ).
Yet hip-hop and conscious rap have a cross-cultural appeal that extends even to whites as well. MURS, for example, has a primarily white audience which he discusses when he says, “Man I do the same music and they stop coming to shows/It’s like they’re scared of the white boys in the front row/numbers kept falling as my fan-base would grow…” (MURS). As blacks left his fan-base due to what MURS feels is its growing white presence, white fans still formed the basis of his continued success. In fact, when white kids are exposed to conscious rap it can have substantial effects on their attitudes and world view. Zillmann writes in his article “Radical Rap: Does it Further Ethnic Division?” that
“After exposure to radical political rap, White students gave more support to an African American, ethnically liberal candidate and less support to a White, ethnically radical candidate than after exposure to nonpolitical rap or popular rock”(Zillmann et al. 1).
While the study goes on to say that whites on the whole enjoyed political rap less than nonpolitical rap, the study does confirm that the exposure to political rap has positive effects on the white people who enjoy it (Zillmann et al 1). In fact, their consumption of rap music directly motivates their political beliefs and action, as seen by their shift in support for a Black ethnically radical candidate. Author and hip-hopper William Wimsatt underwent just such a transformation through his contact with hip-hop, saying “Rather than posturing over the pro’s and con’s of affirmative action, now I make it my personal priority” (Wimsatt 40). Wimsatt’s association with the music activated him, and he changed not only his personal policies but the path of his life, eventually writing and publishing the book about hip hop culture that quote came from. While it was shown earlier that white consumption of rap has turned it into the instrument of oppression we see today, it can also create agents within the power structure for the case of the oppressed.
White interaction also represents a new opportunity for grassroots political involvement in the struggle for racial justice in this society. Michael Dowdy discusses this in his article “Live Hip Hop, Collective Agency, and ‘Acting In Concert’”
“Live hip hop shows that take place in small, independent clubs are powerful instances of both community outreach and community….hip hop artists…with a responsive audience, create a collective agency wherein the audience members are a t least momentarily empowered to enact change to practice subversive action and to speak out about injustice and current political issues.” (Dowdy)
While the shows’ action is limited because the artists usually must move along their tour and cannot stop to create the infrastructure needed to wage a sustained political movement, it does have an effect. The energy of the shows and the suspension of individual identity makes people more conscious of their role as a collective (Dowdy). Dowdy relates an instance when rapper Slug from the rap group Atmosphere performed a song critical of the president then “implored all audience members to take but one message from the show-to go to the polls and vote”(Dowdy 81). One can listen to the music in their homes and sympathize with the ideology expressed there, but live performance gives performers the ability to augment their message for individual audiences. Corrupt leadership will always be an issue so those songs will always be relevant, but a live performance gives the performer the ability to change his message to match the context of the place and time he is performing. George Bush and the Iraq War was the issue three years ago, but songs critical of the government can still be used to orchestrate responses against whatever the issue will be in the future. The direct contact with a figure head in the performer enables the audience to feel called to act. From a purely practical perspective, it brings people together who have similar beliefs regarding these issues, enabling them to meet one another and form the necessary infrastructure to carry out action after the performer leaves. Zillmann et al discussed how exposure to political rap music for whites who enjoyed it affected their world views, but Dowdy shows the potential that live hip-hop shows have to turn those views into action.
Hip hop is at a cross roads; the mainstream is funded by suburban white kids who demand music that degrades and oppresses their people. Some artists forgo the mainstream in order to make music that focuses on the plight of their people in an effort to alleviate it. There is something about hip-hop however that transcends the condition of one people in one time. Just as no great idea can exist in isolation for too long, hip hop was too big to be contained in one apartment complex in one neighborhood of one city and it is too big to only be relevant to just one race or one nation or one people. The rhythm and the rhyme moves us, despite the fact that some people use that quality to hurt it. Super Raven LP, a graffiti writer from Chicago seems to understand this, saying
“Hip Hop is a process which is supposed to eliminate itself. For hip-hop to achieve its goals it would have to disappear. Wack public schools breed hip-hop. If hip-hop is going to do something about wack public schools, and it works, then hip-hop will become obsolete, a thing of the past.”( Upski 152).
While mainstream rap perpetuates negative stereotypes and fuels white oppression, so did the prevailing legal atmosphere before the Civil Rights Movement. Just because oppression uses certain tools, like hip-hop or laws, does not mean that those tools must be kept off limits to those who are trying to fight oppression. Indeed, the only way to change unjust laws is to work through the legal system and get them changed. In the same way, the only way to change oppressive music is to work within the system and make liberation music. Just as Dead Prez says, “if you be playin the real, you won’t get rotation/Unless you take over the station” (Dead Prez)

Works Cited
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