hip-hop and corporate america:
Corporations have been usurping and reshaping Black mass culture for decades -- hip hop is just the latest product line.
(...) Hip Hop music is also a product, produced by giant corporations for mass distribution to a carefully targeted and cultivated demographic market. Corporate executives map out multi-year campaigns to increase their share of the targeted market, hiring and firing subordinates -- the men and women of Artists and Recordings (A&R) departments -- whose job is to find the raw material for the product (artists), and shape it into the package upper management has decreed is most marketable (the artist's public persona, image, style and behavior). It is a corporate process at every stage of artist "development," one that was in place long before the artist was "discovered" or signed to the corporate label. What the public sees, hears and consumes is the end result of a process that is integral to the business model crafted by top corporate executives. The artist, the song, the presentation -- all of it is a corporate product.
(...) As the great French author and revolutionary Franz Fanon would have understood perfectly, colonized and racially oppressed peoples internalize -- take ownership -- of the social pathologies fostered by the oppressor. Thus, the anti-social aspects of commercial hip hop are perceived as a "Black" problem, to be overcome through internal devices (preaching and other forms of collective self-flagellation), rather than viewed as an assault by hostile, outside forces secondarily abetted by opportunists within the group.
(...) As "conscious" rapper Paris wrote, there is no viable alternative to the corporate nexus for hip hop artists seeking to reach a mass audience. "WHAT underground?" said Paris. "Do you know how much good material is marginalized because it doesn't fit white cooperate America's ideals of acceptability? Independents can't get radio or video play anymore, at least not through commercial outlets, and most listeners don't acknowledge material that they don't see or hear regularly on the radio or on T.V."
(...) African Americans do not control the packaging and dissemination of their culture: corporations and their Black comprador allies and annexes do. The mass Gangsta Rap phenomenon is a boardroom invention. I know.
(...) By 1990, the major labels were preparing to swallow the independent labels that had birthed commercial hip hop, which had evolved into a wondrous mix of party, political and "street"-aggressive subsets. One of the corporate labels (I can't remember which) conducted a study that shocked the industry: The most "active" consumers of Hip Hop, they discovered, were "tweens," the demographic slice between the ages of 11 and 13. The numbers were unprecedented. Even in the early years of Black radio, R&B music's most "active" consumers were at least two or three years older than "tweens." It didn't take a roomful of PhDs in human development science to grasp the ramifications of the data. Early and pre-adolescents of both genders are sexual-socially undeveloped -- uncertain and afraid of the other gender. Tweens revel in honing their newfound skills in profanity; they love to curse. Males, especially, act out their anxieties about females through aggression and derision. This is the cohort for which the major labels would package their hip hop products. Commercial Gangsta Rap was born -- a sub-genre that would lock a whole generation in perpetual arrested social development.
(...) A young female artist broke down at my kitchen table one afternoon, after we had finished a promotional interview. "They're trying to make me into a whore," she said, sobbing. "They say I'm not ‘street' enough." Her skills on the mic were fine. "They" were the A&R people from her corporate label.