And I say that with the best of intentions.
I recently read an article on Medium written by one of the dopest emcees of all time, Talib Kweli! He spoke on why he left major labels alone and struck out on his own independently. Great long form blog post, very insightful to say the least and very disappointing and uplifting all in one, and that’s what led to this article.
You see, I’m what you would call old school when it comes down to hip hop, I was here when it started and fell in love completely with no turning back the day I heard Follow The Leader! For those that don’t know, Follow The Leader was on Eric B and Rakim’s second album and it was released in 1988. Don’t get me wrong I was already a hip hop head, but that song, from that album spoke to me like it was God telling me something, and ironically Rakim goes by the name Rakim Allah, The God MC. So at the end of the day it was God telling me something!
Their previous album Paid In Full was arguably one of the greatest albums of all time, but the debut song, on the second album is what hooked me, it was the very first time that I had to know every single word that an MC was spitting. We didn’t have the internet, so we couldn’t look up the lyrics to the songs, we had to either have damn good memory or do like I did, pause and rewind the tape until I could literally write down every single word that was spit. A painstaking process, but necessary to me at that time because I just had to know that song, from front to back.
That was my moment, the moment I felt it was critical for me to spend a few hours pausing, rewinding, and transcribing a song to make sure I knew exactly what he was saying, I was officially a junkie and my love for hip hop with meaning or conscious hip hop was born out of that experience. From that point on, I was what people call a real/conscious hip hop head and I supported and still do support those who fall into that category.
From Eric B and Rakim, KRS ONE, Public Enemy, X Clan, Poor Righteous Teachers, EPMD, Redman, and Rass Kass to Common, Mos Def, Talib Kweli, The Roots, Lupe Fiasco, Immortal Technique, Pharaoh Monche, and WuTang, etc, the list can on and on but you get the picture right! I support these dudes every time they drop an album. I don’t buy them from the bootleg man, but from legitimate online establishments so they can make money off of their crafts, and continue to make new music. So with that said, I am a real/conscious hip hop fan to the core!
Now back to why I wrote this! It seems that the vast majority of real/conscious hip hop fans are a bunch of liars, they lay claim to the title but their actions don’t back up their claims. The article that I sited earlier that Talib wrote brings you all into question. He stated that he dropped an album via his webpage kweliclub.com and made about $30k off it, based off his statement saying that its sells covered his production cost. I figure he’s made more by now but what pissed me off is that he has over a million “fans” on Facebook, a few hundred thousand on IG and Twitter and more on Tumblr.
So with about 1.5 million fans across 4 social media platforms, why in the hell was he only able to sale $30k in product! That comes out to under 4000 purchases based off the price per unit! So less than 4000 real fans purchased his album and the other 1.496 million “fans” didn’t, WTF! How can you claim to be a fan but not put your money where your mouth is. With that many “fans” he should have at least sold 100 thousand units, which still isn’t even 10% of his so called fan base.
This isn’t just what has happened to Talib, but it has happened and still is happening to every real/conscious hip hop artist the exact same way. Common, Mos Def, The Roots, etc have only seen modest success throughout their careers when it comes down to album sales. And Common has never gone platinum, gold 3 times, but never platinum, and all of their sales have tanked over the past 3-5 years across the boards, even WuTang Clans!
And before we move into the all album sales are down territory, I know that, but the sale of singles is through the roof for most artist, except those who are classified as real or conscious, yet most of those artist have a million plus so called “fans”, go figure!
So what am I supposed to think about this phenomenon?
Well I think that, as indicated by the album and singles sales of these artist, based off the amount of so called “fans”, that the vast majority of “real hip hop fans” can go phuck themselves. And when you all are finally willing to put your money where your mouth is, then you can discontinue the self fornication, until then, read the title!
3 Levels of Blackness
Average Black people don’t care about the past, are afraid of the future and live expressly for Right NOW!
It’s evident in how they think the past holds no solutions for whats happening NOW and that things will only stay the same or get worse in the future.
So whats needed Right NOW is whatever material thing thats considered hot, not what they actually need, so the people are stagnated once again but this time because they see no good in the future, therefore why try to plan and save for it.
Afrocentric Black people are in love with the past, infatuated with future possibilities, but hate Right NOW!
Its evident in how all their solutions either harkens to a time of Black Majesty, or are set to unfold a generation or two down the road.
So whats needed Right NOW is always debatable, to the point of stagnation, therefore kicking the problems down the road for the next generation.
Enlightened Black people understand the past, make plans for the future and loves Right NOW!
It is evident in how all their solutions borrow from the past, and seek to build a better future by utilizing what we have Right NOW!
So whats needed Right NOW takes precedence over how things used to be in an effort to focus on what the future can be shaped into.
The Average Black person and Afrocentric Black person have interchangeable characteristics within their understandings, because there are a lot of brainwashed Afrocentric Black people who actually help to spread a Self Oppressed mind state to the the majority group, the Average Black person.
This creates a problem because the Average Black person thinks that the Afrocentric Black person is the same as the Enlightened Black person, but in almost every case they are not. The Average Black person does not want to put in the time to gather the amount of knowledge needed to elevate to the level of an Enlightened Black person, therefore anyone that appears to have more knowledge becomes the Enlightened Black person in the eyes of the Average Black person!
But the thing is, in order to make it to the Enlightened Black persons level, one must first become the Afrocentric Black person, there is no way around this. The only problem lies with staying their!
Once the Afrocentric level is reached by the Average Black person he/she believes that they have peaked, thus plateaued on the plain of Enlightenment. This is where the Afrocentric understanding becomes the paramount understanding! And because knowledge leads to the feeling of Power, the Afrocentric initiate feels the new level of respect that is given and seeks to multiply that feeling. In doing so most become lost to the fact that knowledge is ever evolving. At this point is when they fail to seek knowledge and understanding outside of the Afrocentric equation, believing that this is it, therefore they stay on the Afrocentric level but elevate within it!
The Enlightened Black person has traveled the road of the Afrocentric but understood that something was still missing in the grand scheme of themes. They are the ones who decided to seek knowledge outside of the understanding of Afrocentricity and by doing so recognizes the inherent Synergy produced by combining the knowledge from each level of understanding, with knowledge from outside of the Black equation to create a new, ever evolving dynamic, that only seeks to create, grow and evolve further. This is the closest that man can get to the level of God Most High the Supreme Being, The Creator! This is the true plateau of understanding!
By using this understanding to create; more expressions of The Most High’s Oneness with ALL things seen and unseen become manifest! A thought can become a material thing! A thought can become the road map for the future! A thought can manifest greatness or destruction! This is what the Enlightened Black person knows; it’s what the Afrocentric Black person thinks needs to be centered in Afrocentrism only, and that the Average Black person doesn’t care to know exist.
Yet this very understanding actually seeks out the Average Black person, and plants itself as a quest for knowledge of self, which turns their mind towards Afrocentricty, which then blossoms into Enlightenment!
And there we find God!
The Self Oppressed Syndrome
Self Oppression, We’re Headed for Self Oppression! Sing that to the tune from the 91 hit classic Self Destruction, by BDP and various top tier artist of the era, and then read this!
One day I was in a debate with a couple brothers about the plight of the Black man in America, and it seemed like no matter what I said, they’d harken back to a statement about us being oppressed in this country.
Sure, we’ve been oppressed for many centuries here under slavery; The Black Codes, Jim Crow, Redlining, bad loans or no loans at all, unemployment, and now Mass Incarceration, but even when I mentioned all the good things that we’ve accomplished during these same times, they basically threw them out the window and dug right back in with the woe is me, woe is us, oppression talk! So I thought to myself, I don’t feel oppressed, what are they talking about?
Don’t get me wrong here, I understand that being Black in America comes with extra rules and can be burdensome at times, but are we really oppressed in the manner that they continue to propagate?
Can we as Black people honestly say that all the things that I’ve listed above as burdensome and unjust has effected us at a 100% level over the past 40 years? In this time period there has always been a small percentage of Blacks that suffer from each problem, and some from a few of them at a time, but as a people, not even 30% can say that these things have them oppressed!
We’ve had ample opportunity to open our own banks and give loans to each other, but nope, hasn’t happened. You can walk through any black neighborhood in the US and see 100’s of businesses that aren’t owned by Black people; from beauty supply stores, corner restaurants, gas stations, grocery stores, nail salons, and a host of other businesses that siphon money out of our communities and never bring it back!
But we surely do own churches, lots of them! And guess what, the churches follow the same pattern, they siphon money out of the community to the tune of $252 million a week, that never goes back into the community! Then they take valuable tax dollars away from the community also, and hardly none of them open businesses to help their unemployed congregation!
Then you have Black people that lay claim to the fact that the man is deliberately keeping us from owning businesses, by making us jump through hoops to get loans. As if a bank or the SBA wants to just lend money to someone without a business plan and a bad credit score, c’mon, it’s just not going to happen!
Now there are instances when all the criteria is met, and we are denied loans, but let’s be serious, does that happen to the majority of Blacks on a regular, no it doesn’t! Or sometimes they might give us higher interest rates than white people, but when these things happen, thanks to hard fought rights, those lenders can be sued for doing so if it ever comes to light. Which it did recently, and the lenders got fined and will have to pay back millions of dollars in restitution to the Black homeowners that were defrauded!
I can go on but you get the picture right, yeah things are not fair, we still have work to do but to harp on the fact that we’re still oppressed is Self defeating! Black Re-Activist want you to believe that your position in this country is out of your hands, it’s what the Man wants or bust, yet every single day we see Black people succeeding in various endeavors and creating a better life for themselves and their families! But for some reason this isn’t good enough for a small but loud group of Black men who lay claim to being the keepers of the Black consciousness, the Afrocentric understandings, and the warrior mindset that will liberate us from this oppression that we all suffer under.
I’ve gone as far as to ask them, do you think, Oprah Winfrey, Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, Jay Z and a host of other Black billionaires and multi millionaires wake up in the morning feeling oppressed? Why don’t they? Even those of us that have small businesses and aren’t even close to being millionaires don’t seem to share in this same thought pattern! Why is that? It’s because we realized that if they strive to be the best that we can be and have something to offer worth value, we can rise above the things that these Black men feel are oppressing Black people.
Oppression
1. the exercise of authority or power in a burdensome, cruel, or unjust manner.
2. an act or instance of oppressing.
3. the state of being oppressed.
4. the feeling of being heavily burdened, mentally or physically, by troubles, adverse conditions, anxiety, etc.
Now think about why these men feel oppressed! It’s because of unjust laws, lack of gainful employment and feeling like racist cops and others can do anything to them at anytime and get away with it. Although unjust laws do create an oppressed like state for Black people in America, the reality of the situation is that, it’s mostly in our heads.
And this is what made me think about the phrase Self-Oppression, I looked it up and I found a few spiritual and holistic usages of the phrase but no one has ever broke it down into a psychological or sociological thinking for a group of people based off the 4th definition for the word Oppression and the adding of self to the other three!
So when you add self to the word oppression what do you get;
1. the exercise of authority or power in a burdensome me, cruel, or unjust manner on your SELF
2. an act or instance of oppressing your SELF
3. the state of being oppressed by your SELF
The 4th definition already lets us know that this could be a feeling that we have, which by definition means it’s coming from your SELF.
So what you get is that a Self Oppressed person believes that he/she is being oppressed by outside forces and reacts accordingly. Every time something bad happens, it’s because they’re Black, and a racist white man hates them! Whenever a black white interaction occurs that is negative, wether it be warranted or not, the race card is pulled by the Self Oppressed, thus adding to the fact that he is being oppressed.
On the flip side a Black man with money doesn’t worry about being targeted by corrupt cops because if he is detained unjustly, he can hire a good lawyer to get him exonerated, a poor man can’t, therefore he feels oppressed by the penal system! A rich Black person or one that owns his own business (rich or not) doesn’t worry about employment, or that he might get fired by a racist boss, the poor Black man feels he’s being oppressed because he has to work for a white man that may be racist and fire him at anytime, therefore boosting the feeling of being oppressed. In fact rich Black people could care less about racist white people, because the things that racist can affect are within their range of getting fixed because they can afford to fix them!
And in reality though, the vast majority of white people are not racist, maybe biased towards Black people but not flat out racist! And to take it a step further, the percentage of Black people that work for small white business owners is minuscule by comparison of how many of us work for major corporations or governmental bodies like the post office and other stuff, so for the most part the fear of being fired by a racist is mostly in our heads, especially because more than likely you would have never been hired by the racist in the first place. But guess what, when unfair hiring practices come to light, thanks to some hard fought rights again, these employers can be sued.
The Self Oppressed attitude keeps you in a position of thinking that the Man controls your life behind the scenes, and the Black Re-Activist who suffers from the same syndrome believes that he’s enlightening the world to the evils of the Man, therefore his points are valid. But have you ever wondered why you can read post after post on social media outlets from these Re-Activist about what ails the Black Community, but none of them have a plan or even concept on how to rectify this situation except for becoming more African centered.
None of them have plans on how to sustain a Black population if we ever became a sovereign people, none of them own businesses, besides the ubiquitous African book Store that sales boatloads of Afrocentric stuff, that a lot of is made in China, go figure!
I love my Black people but at the end of the day, we need to step away from self oppressing ourselves and continue to reach for the stars in order to rise above this oppressed state that the poorest amongst us find themselves in. If each person committed himself/herself to becoming the best person that they could be, this mind state will not exist in two decades. The Self Oppressed will become the successful self and as long as we understand that the things that we feel are oppressing us have to do with money and social status, then we’ll feel like the successful people of today feel. They know that black people still have work to do, but they also know that the future is ours to create and that white supremacy and racism can not hold us back if we continue to strive for greatness and stop Self Oppressing ourselves, we don’t have to worry about being New Slaves!
Black Women Ought to be Ashamed of Themselves/You Are Not The Father!
I was recently tagged in a photo uploaded on Facebook to Witches Brew page, of a Mahogany card, by Hallmark, for Father’s Day. I know some of you are saying “ok”, “and”! Well the card was for Fathers Day but as you can see in the picture it was addressed to Mothers on Father’s Day! SMH!
Last year right before Mother’s Day I made a post to the women in my feed about how, on Mother’s Day, no matter how trifling and fucked up some peoples mothers were when they were growing up, or if they were absentee, you never, ever, ever see men spewing hate about their mother on or before that day. You never ever see men trying to lay claim to being their child/children’s mother too! Never Ever!
So my appeal was to have women think twice before they claim that they had to play father too to their kids, just because the father was a deadbeat and wasn’t around. It makes no sense at all! It doesn’t matter if someone else post it and you like it, stop it, You Are Not The Father! And feeling any kind of way that gives you the notion that you played the role of the father too is borderline psychotic. And if your child post it, correct them right away, it’s obvious that they’ve been raised to believe a lie!
You’re confusing taking them to play sports or going outside and playing sports with your child as being a “father figure” or as something that’s strictly thought of a s father’s duty. My wife takes my kids to activities all the time, and has occasionally shot a couple hoops with my son’s, but was she doing my duties, she wasn’t doing some holy fatherly thing that only fathers are allowed to do, she was bonding with her children as any mother should.
Get mad if you want to, call me whatever but stop laying claim to something that you have no capacity to be. I feel you, you had a tough time trying to raise them and keep things together, I commend you for that. My mother did the same, and I love here to death for trying to keep me level headed enough to not venture out and be part of the problem! She did a hell of a job raising 6 kids virtually on her own with no help at all from my father, and a little help from my siblings father.
But at no time ever did she lay claim to being my father too. She had enough wisdom to know that she wasn’t a father and enough dignity to not think she deserved that accolade, she was and still is all woman! A woman that was strong enough to hold shit down without a man, but never felt like she was a man.
A lot of y’all have it twisted, you’re letting these feminist movements and propaganda create an alternate understanding of feminism that seems to want to see women shown in a more masculine light, and Sisters, you are ground zero for the re-education.
Just take a look at how Black women are being portrayed in the media now; you’re wild, uncouth loud mouthed women who will beat each other into the dirt, just like men, a bunch of Sharkeisha’s. Reality shows have fucked up what a real woman (Black) is supposed to be by elevating the worst of the pack to the top of the pecking order, i.e. Nene Leaks! And no I’m not one of those every Black woman is a Queen kinda dudes, because that’s false propaganda too! Some of you are exactly who you’re supposed to be, just regular people, everyone can’t be Queens, and for damn sure, not one of y’all can be Kings, period! These chicks on the internet calling themselves King this to King that, or calling Beyonce, King Bey are a part of the problem. Stop that shit now and be a part of the solution!
At the end of the day, there is no way a woman can take the place of a man and be a father to their children, the only thing you can do is find a way to get them in front of a man that’s a good father who can teach them what a father is, and that’s it! And the real sad part about this, is that it’s only prevalent in our culture, amongst Black women, go figure!
The “Great Radio Debate”
Chuck D of Public Enemy fame slammed one of the nations biggest urban radio stations, New York’s Hot 97, for its horrible representation of the hip hop culture (read it here). He goes in on the program director for this and goes into the usual diatribe about how corporations are the new plantations, etc. Hot 97’s program director Ebro and one of their top on air personalities, Rosenberg responded (read it here) by spewing the same old, we play what the streets want dogma. “I assume what he was trying to get at is what a lot of people say as far as blaming Hot 97 and radio in general for the demise of hip-hop culture,” is part of what Rosenberg had to say when talking to billboard a few days ago.
Just the other day I was listening to WGCI 107.5 here in Chicago when they were having a stop the violence conversation, and every time a caller mentioned that radio stations and their DJ’s need to be more involved in cleaning up the airwaves, all of the people who make a living from said station went into the same spiel, “we just play what the streets want to hear”! So the question should be, why does the streets want to here this type of music?
Most of you are probably unfamiliar with this debate, but it’s been raging on for decades now, and shows no sign of abating. The debate I’m speaking of is the “radio just plays whats hot in the streets” debate! You know, the go to phrase articulated by just about every radio DJ on the planet when the public conscious raises questions about what gets played day in and day out! It’s akin to the “what came first, the chicken or the egg” philosophical pondering, but with much less gravitas, therefore no one actually writes about it, until now!
To start lets take a brief look into early radio. To keep it short, I’ll just highlight a phenomenon that used to be called “Payola”, or “Pay to Play”. For those of you who don’t know what that means, it’s an industry term for that lets you know which radio stations had DJ’s who would accept payment under the tables to break new music. In short, if you pay us, we’ll play your music! It’s illegal and record industry execs claim that they don’t do it anymore, keyword, claim! As all they did was create a 3rd party system, called independent record promotion, to independently “promote” label artist.
In this Wikipedia article it goes into more detail about it, but it’s been around since the inception of the music business itself. As late as 2005 – 2006, Sony BMG, Warner Music Group and Universal Music Group were still going back and forth to court about the issue. They eventually had to pay fines to the tune of $10 million, $5 million and $12 million respectively! Then in 2007 four of the largest radio conglomerates were fined also for receiving payola. In 2014 they all claim that they don’t do it anymore, but seriously, the one thing that I’ve learned is that corporations will find a loophole when they need a loophole, period! But lets just say they don’t anymore, and leave it at that.
I contend that they don’t “have to” anymore, they’ve been able to sway the public opinion when it comes down to music for so long that they have literally programmed, pun intended, what the masses want to listen to anyway, so they don’t need to pay to get plays, listeners are asking for it!
I contend that what the people want was systematically programmed into their thinking via Payola. Let us remember, they just “stopped” doing it in 2007, but by that time the “bad hip hop” that Chuck D and other hip hop activist complain about had already been on repeat 10 times a day for 20 plus years. So radio effectively have two generations that have grown up on that type of music, what would you expect the streets to want to listen to?
They made sure that in the early days of hip hop, the artist that rhymed about street life and culture got major airtime. They kept groups like NWA and artist that rapped like them in the spotlight and pretty shortly thereafter the streets all across America started to change. Most will say that it was by coincidence, that the streets were ripe for the violent explosion that came along with what was dubbed as “Gangsta Rap”!
But living through those times and being a person that was more conscious thinking, I know that there were various other artist with great music that weren’t getting any airplay at all. All the conscious brothers like Common, The Roots, Slum Village, Dialted Peoples, Pharoahe Monch, Talib, Mos Def, etc, had dope ass songs that never got radio play. Why not? The streets knew about these cats, but the radio stations weren’t playing them. While Little Kim, Foxy Brown and Trina was getting all the airplay for women; Bahamadia, Rah Digga, Jean Grae, Lady of Rage and other non-sexualized female rappers were struggling to get on a late night mix.
There has always been a disconnect between whats played on the radio and what hip hop heads think is the real cultural expression, but when looked at closely, and knowing the fact that record execs were, and still probably are paying to get records broke using some “loophole”, it’s not a farfetched accusation to say that the industry engineered the “whats hot in the streets” mantra by paying to get songs that would have otherwise died a horrible death in a crate played continuously throughout the day. Thus creating a whats hot on the streets mind state in the youth.
If you think I’m reaching, ask yourself this, how many times have you found yourself nodding your head and singing the lyrics to a song that you know you don’t like? Then tell me whats hot on the radio is always whats hot in the streets, or does hearing a catchy tune repeatedly make it stick in your brain even when you don’t like it. Now imagine what a 5 year old in the back seat thinks about that catchy little hook and beat!
Lupe Fiasco wrote a song about it, (listen here) and guess what, it didn’t get any radio play, at all, and please don’t say it’s because of the hook and name, they could of made a radio version if they wanted to push that message!