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!
Sterling Reputation
Donald Sterling has been in the news over the past few weeks because of racist remarks recorded by his girlfriend/“archivist”. She lead him into a conversation that saw the 80 year old owner of the Los Angeles Clippers spew hateful rhetoric and then try to justify it by saying it’s just how it is.
This tape was eventually leaked, as they all are, and now we have a media storm surrounding him and what the players, coaches and NBA owners think about what should or should not have been done about what he said!
NBA brass stood up and fined him $2.5 million, banned him from having any affiliation with the NBA for life and stated that they would recommend that he be forced to sale the team! Yeah, victory!
Whelp, not so fast, he says he’s not giving up without a fight, but it’s proving hard to find council because his name is so toxic now! Law firms are afraid of being labeled as sympathetic to a racist so most of the big boys are declining what would be millions of dollars in revenues to steer clear of a sensationalized trial that would probably still lead to the inevitable, him being forced to sale the team.
In steps his wife, she claims that she should not be punished because of what Donald said, and that she should be able to purchase the team instead of someone else. What!
So in her mind, her owning the team, in California, a Community Property state, where all assets acquired while married are considered to be 50/50 for spouses, no matter who owns it, means that he doesn’t own the team! Who are you kidding, if you own it, he still owns it, thats simple.
I know that in a capitalistic society, you shouldn’t be forced to sale your company because you’re a racist, lets face it, half of the Fortune 500 owners would be selling but the NBA isn’t the same as a regular ole capitalist offering. They have rules and bylaws that govern the owners behavior as well as the players, and all levels of management.
The truth is, if the GM, CEO or President of any major corporation or any sports franchise, NFL, NHL, or MLB included made blatantly racist statements, they’d be fired also, and never would be able to associate with that sport again! (see Marge Schott)
So the fact that Sterling and his wife think that they shouldn’t be punished speaks volumes to their mentalities!
There is no way that he could think that what he said didn’t come from the mouth of a racist, as he claims that he likes helping Blacks, and Magic Johnson doesn’t, so how could he be racist!
White privilege has afforded him the life of, if I give to Black charities, but I think they stink and don’t want to rent to them, I’m not a racist!
If I objectify them and then brag about their beautiful Black bodies, like slave masters used to do, I’m not a racist!
If they work for me and they help me make $100’s of millions of dollars, and I articulate that as, “I clothe them, feed them, and buy them cars”, as opposed to, I pay them for performing a task, I’m not a racist!
Only a racist can see the comments that he has made since the incident as not racist!
He has a slave masters mentality and the business that he owns “just happens” to be a business that utilizes the athletic prowess and strength of the Black male to make money. As a Black male, knowing that my “owner” thinks of me in a similar fashion that slave owners thought about their slaves, would make me do exactly what they planned on doing. Refuse to play for the team unless something is done, and sorry Mrs Sterling, your reputation is intertwined with his, so that goes for you too! As if you didn’t know that he was a racist even though you were married to him for all those years. There’s no way on this planet that a man that would say the types of things he’s said to a half Black and Mexican to her face hasn’t spewed his vile racist opinions at the dinner table, in bed, or while watching TV, on numerous occasions. And no, the interview with Anderson Cooper didn’t help, unless he’s trying to play the senile old man card, and it still doesn’t absolve him from being a racist, he’s just a racist with dementia!
Flirt, Flirt On, Flirt On Flirt On!
So I’m watching Lust and Hip Hop Atlanta the other day with my wife and a certain scene stuck out to me because I’ve heard so many women use the words that were used via conversations, in real time, or online in social media post, that I decided to share my billion cents on the subject!
It was the scene when Karlie Redd was in the studio with Jeremih.
The scene was staged to be a sexually tense scene, which was supposed to happen exactly when Yung whatever his name is, Joc I think, (it’s so many young this and that’s), was coming through the door. If you saw the show, you know exactly what I’m talking about. Jeremih was touching and caressing her in a sexual manner while licking his lips in an “I’d F the crap out of you manner”!
Her “man” walks in right when it occurs, and gives Jeremih a look and then says something about the situation, Jeremih turns and asks her if “she’s cool”.
For one, asking a chick if she cool after her man walks in on some shit like that is a violation waiting to happen, ninja what! But here’s where I have something to say about the situation.
In the confessional part of the show, she states that it felt good to have him caressing her like that. Ding!
But in the show she told Joc that wasn’t nothing going on, although allowing a negro to caress you when thou know that you are supposed to be in a relation ship, is a bit more than nothing. Eh I guess at least she wasn’t kissing him, she was just doing a little bit of harmless flirting, right. Ding Ding!
Then she proceeded to lambast him about his philandering ways prior to what occurred in the studio, to try to justify what she did. Maybe I’m naive but, if nothing was going on and everything was so innocent, why would you bring up the instances in which your significant other was “cheating” on you, I thought you wasn’t on nothing! Ding Ding Ding!
Then what really made me say, that’s that bullshit is when she ran outside behind him calling him insecure about what had just occurred, as if she was being super loyal to him and he didn’t have anything to worry about, ever! I might be confused but isn’t that exactly what you here when you confront your woman/man in a possible situation where you thought that they might be cheating. It’s always, you’re insecure, you don’t have nothing to worry about and then you find out later that that mf’er was cheating all along, yeah that’s how it usually occurs! Ding………… lets just say, four alarm fire just sounded!
Yeah, I know what some of y’all are saying, she was right, dude is insecure, he can do whatever freaky shit he did, but she can’t do shit. If you’re one of those people, count your fingers to 3 and raise the one that it lands on and point it at yourself for me!
Now that you’ve done that, please explain to me how walking in on your woman, being caressed and eye fucked by another dude means that you’re insecure when you call her on it, or vise versa! Y’all got the game all f’d up! Flirting brings about sexual tension, and sexual tension eventually brings about sex, and if you think a person is insecure because he/she has a problem with you having sexually tense moments with the opposite sex, then you’re on BS and trying to cover something up!
As I stated in the beginning, I’ve heard a lot of women cosign this BS as if you are insecure when you call them out on their flirting. What is flirting anyway, “it’s being sexually attracted to someone and letting them know that you are, but not going all the way with them”! She even stated in her confessional that “it felt good to have him touch her like that”, her words!
Woman logic, man flirts with woman, he’s a dirty dog trying to get a bone! Woman flirts with man, it’s all innocent and he’s insecure because he said something about it! Lose, lose for us!
The innocence of flirting is a fallacy period! It’s not innocent, people make that claim because they may not have been willing to go the extra step at the exact time.
Ladies/men how often do you flirt with someone that you would never in a million life times have sex with? Be serious!
No one does, if you’re flirting with someone, you would sleep with her/him if the situation presented itself.
That doesn’t necessarily mean that you would cheat on your man/woman with that person. Some will, some won’t, but if you and your significant other part ways and you run into that person again, those same sexual tensions will still be there, and this time that flirting may go further than the first time!
Oops, that last pic was of her other industry related relationship, but don’t worry Joc, you’re her boo for this storyline! We see you tho Jeremih!
Jay Z, Solange and Sensationalist “Journalism”!
When the elevator recording was leaked that showed Solange Knowles attacking Jay Z in an elevator the internet went wild!
All kind of speculations hit the fan, no one knows what occurred to provoke her to use physical violence on Hov but whatever it was, she surely was pissed. Pissed to the point of “Im a kick the shit out of you” on more than one occasion, type of pissed!
She was mad about something and thanks to no audio to accompany the video; radio DJ’s, pundits and bloggers alike took to whatever medium that they use, to spew they’re on personal opinions on what had to occur in order for Solange to go there.
What I noticed is that, whatever “type” of writer/person that they portray themselves to be on the internet, whatever agenda they propagate, was the understanding that that they wrote from. Most would readily say, okay, isn’t that how everyone reacts, from their own personal outlooks on life. Don’t we all react to things based off our own personal experiences?
Yes we do!
So what does that say about the tweets, blog post and status updates that we witnessed after the leak?
Well it’s simple, read what they said and attribute it to that persons life story! How many of these people were really objective? Did they use any logic or reasoning to come to their conclusions or were their words emotionally charged!?
People started to speculate on what he probably said to her, or what he did to Beyonce, so many post on these various forms of social media seemed to welcome the turmoil in their relationship! People seemed to be happy because their relationship wasn’t as perfect as “they” (meaning the bloggers) wanted to believe that it was. People tend to think that if a couple that’s in the spotlight doesn’t air their dirty laundry for the world to see, then they must be “perfect” or at least pretending to be, like I really want you to know whats going on behind closed doors!
Others whooped and hollered about how she kicked and punched him, and painted him out to be a wimp ass dude, that brags about being tough on the streets in his music but wasn’t tough enough to handle what 100 lb Solange was dishing out! Jay Z bitch made, is what a lot of women were broadcasting.
So if he would have beat her down or choked her out, what would he be then?!
A woman beater, once a gain, bitch made, etc. There was literally nothing he could have done in that situation better than what he did, nothing! But the fact that women are painting him as a soft punk speaks volumes about who they are and what they think!
People started speculating on their marriage and talking about he beats her, and that they are about to get divorced. As if just because they are famous and in the spotlight that they shouldn’t ever argue with each other. And if they do, it’s divorce time.
Ask yourself this, how many arguments have you had with your significant other, how frequently? Did you have one and call it quits? But every single time Jay or Beyonce are seen in public with a frown on their faces, the blogosphere goes bananas with the marital problems posts and pray for their separation. Im guessing so that they can say “I told you so”, and have more BS to write about!
At the end of the day, families have problems, brothers and sisters have arguments, sometimes things get out of hand, but that happens to everyone! The only difference is that people that idolize people hate when those that they idolize don’t live up to the expectations that they think that they should live up to!
To put it short, those who’ve been beat up in a relationship attributes it to him beating her, those who’ve been cheated on claims it was over cheating, and so on! And if that doesn’t speak to who you are, nothing does!
Why Christianity is Bad for Your Wealth…..Building!
It’s a well known fact that African Americans spend billions of dollars annually on just about every product known to man. A lot of this spending is out of our discretionary income and never sees its way into a bank account, which helps to widen the wealth gap between Blacks and Whites in this country. Even with over a trillion dollars in buying power, the actual wealth gap continues to grow because that money is hardly ever saved by us.
Why is that?
Experts have asked this question for the past few decades and no one seems to be able to pinpoint the reason why we spend so much of our income on material things. The reason why no one has been able to accurately pinpoint where the problem starts is because they all use a reductionist method to draw a conclusion, well basically they tackle the situation from the issue and then seek to walk it backwards to the answer.
That method does work, but the problem with it is that in order to do it like that, you have to already have a foregone conclusion at hand. I.E, Blacks don’t save money because they don’t know a lot about financial things. Take that conclusion, break it down and there it is, the answer. We’re not taught about finances at an early enough stage, that’s why we don’t build wealth, case closed right. Wrong! Well that’s at least a portion of the answer, lack of financial knowledge.
This method could be applied to numerous things and low and behold they will all reduce to the answer that the experimenter was looking for in the first place, and if it doesn’t they’ll change variables until the desired result is reached. Yeah, we’ve figured it out!
But at the end of the day, they all fall short of the real culprit!
The real reason that Black people don’t save for the future and build wealth on an overall basis is due to what they have been taught, not what they haven’t been taught!
Let’s break down what we’ve been taught. This begins very early in life and by the time you are a teenager, you have been thoroughly brainwashed to have these thought patterns ingrained in your conscious output.
The very first thing that we are taught starts at church. Yep our good ole Christian upbringings are the very first culprit in why we, Black people don’t seek to save and build wealth.
You are taught that tomorrow isn’t promised to you. With this being ingrained in you as early as the first time that your mother or father takes you to church, you are being bombarded with this message at least once a week until you’re old enough to tell your parents that you don’t want to go anymore. But by that time you have been subconsciously storing that message in your brain for 10 plus years.
The next thing that Christianity is teaching you during this time period is that you should not seek to store up riches on this earth; you should store them in heaven, which is consciously and subconsciously saying that your riches will come at death!
Another thing is that Christianity tells you to give 10% of your income to the church before you give it to yourself. They actually want you to give 10% of your net income per check, not what you have left over after you pay your bills or yourself in a savings account. They seek to shame people into giving by saying that you’re stealing from God if you don’t give off the top of your income, as opposed to the bottom after you pay bills.
Then on top of that, money being called the root of all evil, and the various places in the bible that reference money as a bad thing, you see the type of picture that is being painted. And all this is being done during the early stages of your understanding, which means that it will later be a part of your subconscious thought, without ever knowing it, you are being taught to think a certain way about money.
The next thing that occurs in the Black community is the environmental conditioning of your peers, teachers (at school and on the street) and other stimuli like TV, Radio and Music!
Any Black male that lives in the inner city will recite this saying as fact; “That the life expectancy of a Black male in the inner city is 25 years of age”!
That’s it, 25 years old, and if you make it pass that, you’re lucky. This is the all done through the news, what they see in their communities and the fact that the music that they listen too continues to warn them that they can be killed at any given moment. Not only by Black gang members, but by police officers and any scared white man now. What do you think that does to their psyche?
This is why you’ll hear so many young Black kids say that they are “just trying to survive”, “it’s the survival of the fittest”, or taking Malcolm X’s “By Any Means Necessary” quote out of context. Another popular saying is “I ain’t never seen a Brinks truck following a hearse”, meaning you can’t take all that money you saved with you when you die.
Couple this understanding with the Christian thought pattern about tomorrow isn’t promised to you and you quickly can see why we act and behave the way we do about saving money or building wealth.
So what do you do with all the money you make, spend it before you die? And what do you subconsciously think about how long you will live, 25 years!
Then the final conditioning method is the constant barrage of stuff that you should buy, being crammed into your brain via advertising. They quickly and constantly let you know that you should have this or that if you consider yourself this or that. From huge billboards, to ads in papers and magazines, to radio and TV, to the internet and on a subliminal level, through the music.
At the end of the day, in the mind of a young Black person you start to think that you should have this, or you should have that, because your favorite entertainer said you should. But how do you get that? By Any Means Necessary is usually the answer, this is also the methodology used to create the prison pipeline system, but that’s another post.
So by the age of 10 you’ve been conditioned to believe you can die any day, because God reserves the right to snatch your life away at any moment. You’re now going into some of your most formative years of your life, the tween and teenager years, you now start seeing friends die from gang violence, and you are being told that you might not live to 25 years old. So the ominous 25 years stat, and tomorrow isn’t promised to you become fact.
It’s now a fact of life that you might not see 25, but guess what, during these same years, you have been constantly inundated with message after message about material things, and understandings like “survival of the fittest”, “on the strong survive”, and “by any means necessary” have become part of your everyday thought pattern also. So the logical steps taken after growing up with these type of thought patterns as the basis of your understandings leads you to this.
Why am I trying to save the money I make if I could die at any given moment?
And not only is it a subconscious understanding, I’m seeing it play out daily right in front of me on a conscious level. Young people are dying, the “coolest” people, having the most “fun” are the ones spending their money on the new Jordan’s, Louis Vuitton, Yeezy’s, True Religion, and turning up every day. So guess what I’m going to do, the same damn thing, because I could die at any minute and when I die I can’t take it with me!