Political Economy Of Black Music

If there is an East Coast/West Coast rivalry over the control of hip hop, it is not unlike the "rumble in the jungle" that recently took place in the former Zaire. Like the situation in the re-christened Congo, where American and European interests are occluded by the media, masked as humanitarian," the control of black music by the corporate entertainment industry is never highlighted. The six major record firms have a colonial-like relationship with the black Rhythm Nation of America that produces hip hop and other forms of black music. Despite the names of a few big money makers - Suge Knight, Sean Combs, and Russell Simmons - or the lurid deaths of Tupac Shakur and Christopher Wallace (also known as Notorious B.I.G. and Biggie Smalls), rap, like most black music, is under the corporate control of whites and purchased mostly by white youths.

No better example of how black artists are colonized by white recording companies - aided and abetted by blacks - than the case of Tupac Shakur. Originally on contract to Interscope, founded by Jimmy Iovine and Ted Fields, heir to the Marshall Fields fortune, Tupac was "handed over" to Death Row Record's Marion (Suge) Knight when the enfant terrible of rap was in a New York State penitentiary. While Death Row Records was the creation of Dr. Dre and Knight, it practically owned its existence to Interscope (and some say to a drug dealer named Michael "Harry-O" Harris). Desperate to get out of jail, Tupac signed an onerous agreement with Death Row that made David Kenner, Death Row's counsel, his counsel and manager, a direct and unmistakable conflict of interest. Tupac, according to Connie Bruck in her July 7 New Yorker article, "The Takedown of Tupac," was trying to extricate himself from Death Row but was killed. Now Interscope is willing to intercede on behalf of Tupac's estate, represented by his mother, Afeni, because it might come under scrutiny and its relationship with Death Row, currently under investigation by state and federal authorities for possible racketeering, exposed.


While the rise of rap had not been foreseen, what rap represents - breaking the "bonds of solidarity in chains"
between the black lower class and the middle class - had been foretold by E. U. Essien-Udom in his book, Black Nationalism. Written more than thirty years ago, Essien-
Udom observed that class tensions were developing between thelower and middle classes, with black middle-class leadership assuming that its leadership represented the strivings of
the masses. "Lower class-Negroes," observed Essien-Udom, "are beginning to define themselves in relation to the Negro 'image' portrayed by the middle class and are attracted to
it; they are also repelled by it because their conditions do not permit genuine identification with middle-class Negroes. As it is in their relations with white society, lower-class Negroes tend to withdraw and disassociate themselves from the middle and upper class Negroes. This estrangement suggests the beginning of class consciousness and conflict among the Negro masses, not directed against whites, but
against the Negro middle and upper classes." Today's black leadership cannot relate to those who are the engines of a $1 billion genre of a multi-billion dollar industry. Such an estrangement is self-inflicted cultural, political and economic genocide.

Black leaders have bought into a whole set of assumptions based on white beliefs and the American rules of the game. Consequently, they have never be able to educate those who have talent about protecting their rights as musicians and artists, to expect to be able to earn a living from their crafts. If black music had been nurtured and understood as a source of cultural pride and cultural capital, blacks would have been able to more fully develop an entre- preneurial class of artists, businessmen and women, lawyers, and accountants, create and support their own institutions. In other words, build the sort of true bourgeois class that would have not been afraid to express its own nationalism and build some level of group economics on its own people's talent, and such a development would have entailed making black workers and artists realize that they are enmeshed in an economic system that had to be struggled against by organizing on their terms and interest rather than just racial solidarity. They, like the Jews who invented Holly- wood, could have had "an empire of their own," as Neal Gabler documented in his aptly titled book. Black music could have been the engine of a black-led music industry with all the necessary contradictions of capital and labor.