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“The Music Industry Funds Private Prisons”: Analyzing Hip-Hop Urban Legend

2022; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 40; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5406/19452349.40.4.15

1945-2349

Alisha Lola Jones,

Caribbean history, culture, and politics

Black love and hip-hop brought Calvin Taylor Skinner and me together in 2018 as we nurtured a commuter relationship between Knoxville and Bloomington, Indiana. During our five-to six-hour drives, I talked about my research on musical masculinity, while my theologian-activist guy shared provocative YouTube videos and podcasts facilitated by hip-hop sages to stir conversation.1 The sages self-identify variously as Pan-African, American descendants of slaves (ADOS) or Foundational Black Americans (FBA), among other Black-centered/African-centered terms. The ADOS/FBA experts probed a constellation of obscure discourses: extraterrestrial encounters, Dr. Sebi, erased ancient African histories, reparations, Black love, and “conscious” hip-hop.2 Discussing these topics with Calvin afforded me familiarity with Black men's curation of complex creative-intellectual space irrespective of dominant culture's understanding of their discourses. Central to this enigmatic genre of orality is speculation, inspecting structural barriers in an idiom their people recognize. From Tidal.com to BlackMagikUniversity.com to 4BiddenKnowledge.com, controlling one's virtual presence is an essential facet of agency in the hip-hop tradition.Our conversations inspired me to return to a juxtaposition I offered my students of esotericism performed in Bone Thugs-N-Harmony's “Meet Me at the Crossroads” (1995) with global esoteric traditions and folklore surrounding Western classical musicians. “In what ways might you imagine your guru as a Black man from Cleveland, Ohio?” Since then, I have been analyzing the sociocultural listening biases that are exposed when we encounter portrayals of the long-winded, spitfire “Hotep” figure in pop culture, for example.3 To “speak to the myth” (rather than the patronizing Western notion of suspending disbelief) and resist sociocultural silencing, A. A. Rashid reminds us, I engage a joint venture urban legend relayed by Krayzie Bone and consult Black sages’ observations ascertaining whether music industrial complex owners/executives are colluding with privatized prison owners.4While organizing a musical metaphysics event in October 2021 featuring online hip-hop curators, I received an intriguing email from a forerunner in online hip-hop curriculum design Portia K. Maultsby, Distinguished Professor Emerita of Folklore and Ethnomusicology at Indiana University: In the early 1990s a former graduate student, then keyboardist for Stevie Wonder, called me upset that some record labels were actively recruiting Black men with criminal records to record rap. He believed that they were encouraging criminal acts among this group. His account supports the views expressed in this video.5Maultsby's accompanying memo illustrates Black pedagogy in which—true to our oral tradition—conversation remains citable. Black music educators are living epistles, griots transmitting the culture, guiding pupils through the academy and beyond through the music industry. Black music educators are their gifted students’ confidantes, culture-bearing seemingly unbelievable stories. The referenced video displays a visibly shaken Krayzie Bone6 reading an intriguing account of a 1991 clandestine meeting: . . . Little did I know, we will be asked to participate in one of the most unethical and disruptive business practices ever seen.The meeting was held at a private residence on the outskirts of Los Angeles . . . Our casual chatter was interrupted when we were asked to sign a confidentiality agreement, preventing us from publicly discussing the information presented during the meeting . . . One of the industry colleagues, who shall remain nameless . . . thanked us for attending . . . The subject quickly changed as the speaker went on to tell us that the respective companies we represented had invested in a very profitable industry, which could become even more rewarding with our active involvement . . . The companies we worked for had invested millions and millions into the building of privately owned prisons . . . built by privately owned companies who received funding from the government based on the number of inmates. The more inmates, the more the government would pay these prisons . . . As [the private prisons] become publicly traded, we'd be able to buy shares . . . since our employees had become solid investors in this prison business, it was now in their interest to make sure that these prisons remained filled.Our job would be . . . making music which promotes criminal behavior. Rap being the music of choice. He assured us that this would be a great situation for us because rap music was becoming an increasingly profitable market for our companies. And as employees we are also able to buy stocks in these prisons. Immediately, silence came over the room. You could have heard a pin drop . . . 7This interview excerpt was not the first time this account was distributed.8 Apparently several blog writers and journalists have diminished the veracity of the scenario revealing intracultural, ideological, stylistic, and generational divides. I am less interested in the story's legitimacy and more engrossed by its reception in Black storytelling communities that prioritize inventiveness through fables, conspiracy theories, allegory, and legends.9 These styles are consistent with ethnomusicologist Cheryl Keyes's findings on rap music. She cites rumor folklorist Patricia Turner contending “conspiracy theories comprise the corpus of contemporary African American legends and rumor narrative.”10 How might we use a hermeneutic of suspicion to decipher embedded information in incredible stories?The plantation capitalism narrative introduces the common individual to rich concepts: encoding of music to shape public perceptions; exploitative business;11 legal documents; private prison industrial complex; stock market trading;12 and hip-hop/rap music as the top multifaceted, cultural export in the marketplace, estimated to be worth $10 billion.13Enslaved Africans used their encrypted music to achieve freedom in the United States, notably through sorrow songs or Negro spirituals. In African American orature, we find this in the astronomical knowledge embedded in the lyrics of “Follow the Drinking Gourd” or the underground railroad geography embedded in “I Stood on the River of Jordan” describing the route to the North. “Swing Low, Sweet (C)Harriett” announced to runaways that the great conductor Harriett Tubman was nearby. We also know that drumming was banned in U.S. colonialism due to anxieties about how the African-derived talking drum worked as a potent communication device. To the enslaver, encoded drumming was the sound of potential insurrection and became readily associated with a criminal element.To surveil the enslaved and their soundscape, they deployed slave patrols as early policing agents. “Fugitive” slaves (who, according to the law, “stole themselves”) were wanted alive or dead; the latter was valuable because viewing the retrieved body signaled the fate that befell anyone who attempted to escape the grueling bondage. Fast forward, such surveillance practices continued in the 1980s War on Drugs with initiatives targeting urban Black youths, intensifying police brutality, police-involved deaths, and the rise in incarceration well into the 1990s.What are the ways hip-hop solidifies white supremacist il-logic, continuing the legacy of slave patrols, a union of law enforcement and vigilantes, surveilling and criminalizing Black bodies?Might revenge be enacted on descendants of the enslaved by intercepting, coopting, and commoditizing their percussion heavy music to demonize Black people and create musical plantations where music and musical bodies are the first fruit harvested for the “cheap” labor force?Leading music producers are disclosing just how deeply the racial bias permeates the industry terminology, repertoire topics, and track production, revealing tangible and metaphysic implications. In a backstage interview, producer Pharrell Williams highlighted the racist language used in the industry. For over 100 years, “masters” and “slaves” referred to the original recording and its copies.14 The YouTube series Drink Champs explores the inner workings of the industry. On the series, R&B producer Tank attested the industry is disinterested in Black love songs, even though they would be empowering. Black violence is more lucrative.15 With regard to tracks, though the creative Ye16 has made incendiary remarks that 400 years of enslavement was a choice,17 he divulged studio techniques such as manipulating the tonal qualities of the 808 bass to make it “off pitch” and to tap into the listener's root chakra, where he says the 808 resides. “That means there is an actual sound in the track that is fucking up your higher frequency.”18 With a (meta-)physic listening, Ye's comment presumably means that the 808 scrambles with one's electromagnetism as they aspire to vibrate higher.Among the contractual propositions, confidentiality agreements are one of several anxiety-inducing legal documents that should be closely inspected. Similarly, host of Drink Champs N.O.R.E. bolstered the case for independent artists and their rejection of 360-degree deals by characterizing cash advances as the worst loan one can take.Since the 1986 demise of Sylvia and Joe Robinson's Sugar Hill records, a Black-owned label that dominated the hip-hop scene, there was a dispersal of artists to non-Black- owned and operated labels. Following the Telecommunications Act of 1996, there was a consolidation of media conglomerates, and thus, the pool of decisionmakers shrunk.20 For instance, in a 2018 interview with the Breakfast Club Power 105.1 radio/YouTube show, former Def Jam decisionmaker and current YouTube exec Lyor Cohen described himself as opportunistic while confessing that he would sign talent who “do” or sell drugs because he has a business to run.21 Former colleague Dame Dash called Cohen a “culture vulture” because, according to Dash, Cohen erases culture and offered substandard contracts to black people—deals Cohen would not offer to his own racial or ethnic groups.22I consider the intended audience for hip-hop and those internalizing dominant cultural values that were green lit by label decisionmakers who have low regard for the cultural producers. For seven years, I taught survey courses to non-music majors at a predominantly white institution in the Midwest. Hip-hop was a top music genre my undergraduates listed in our semesterly survey. We talked about how best-selling rapper Tupac refused classifying his music as “gangsta rap” or that his music incited violence in his 1995 deposition, advocating for hearing rap as poetry.23 We discussed how Kendrick Lamar inherited Tupac's legacy as a 2018 Pulitzer Prize winner, disrupting Eurocentric/anti-Black perceptions of what musical literature is. However, some of the students believed the il-logics, envoicing and internalizing the hip-hop music's caricaturing of low Black self-regard in the absence of actual relationships with multidimensional Black people. In office hours, some of the students who loved Black popular musics debated their right to say “nigger” publicly in the same way they say it privately. They did not want their groove disturbed with self-editing. They struggled recurrently to assert “Black Lives Matter” or to untether themselves from the concept of Black-on-Black crime/violence as a sociopolitical invention.24 I was routinely maligned in student evaluations for enfleshing Black self-regard. Activists describe these contradictions as “they love our culture, but they don't love us.” This entitlement to Black cultural production while internalizing and asserting anti-Black il-logic (“they don't even love each other, why should we love/protect/advocate for them?”) is the true weaponization of hip-hop.To trace the cultural production of criminal sentiment in the industry, a Hip Hop for Change representative25 researched the “myth” and posted video online about the connection between privatized prisons and media conglomerates: In 2012, Core Civic26 formerly known as Corrections Corporation of America, the biggest names in the private prison industry, contacted 48 states offering to buy their prisons. One requirement of eligibility for the deal was particularly strange: an assurance by the agency partners that the agency has sufficient inmate population to maintain the minimum 90% occupancy rate over the term of the contract . . . A mere 232 media executives were responsible for the intake of 277 million Americans controlling all avenues necessary to manufacture any celebrity . . . Time Warner as the owner of Warner Brothers Records can not only sign an artist, but since they're also owners of Entertainment Weekly they can put an artist on the cover by next week. You think you choose what you listen to, but do you? BET and MTV belong to Viacom . . . but when media conglomerates are cross checked with ownership of the biggest names in prison privatization, it's starting to get a little fishy. The largest holder of Core Civic . . . is Vanguard Group Incorporated. Vanguard is the largest holder in both Viacom and Time Warner. Vanguard is also the largest holder in the GOP, the second largest owner of private prisons in the U.S. . . . The people who own the media are the same people who own private prisons . . . 27Verifying share equity interest between media and prison industries is anguishing, particularly for people who understand plantation economies, myriad products for stock market participation, the gradations of insider trading, and entertainment industry streams of income. According to Investment Strategist & Principal Roslyn Weems of Wealth Consortia, LLC, the above reads as “A prison-music industry joint venture is a business arrangement where two or more parties pool resources monetary and material to reach a very specific goal. All share both reward and risk with some reluctant participants navigating, at times, a kind of subtle coercion wreaking of wonkily allocated controlling interest.” This assessment leads one to consider the lengths record label and privatized prison owners go to groom listeners to crave the music we enjoy.Colleagues will read this introductory urban legend analysis and quip: what about the musicians’ agency? Without an intersectional analysis, the response would seem clear cut. However, the conscious community sages remind us that the talent being enlisted in this scenario are socioeconomically vulnerable. They are Black people with criminal records from underresourced and undereducated Black communities who are being offered enough money to change the trajectory of their entire family's lives.Black sages are acquainted with being discredited, despite how well-informed they are. They privilege other questions and canons, our life stories. Professor James Smalls, an elder within the ADOS/FBA hip-hop community, attests that Black artists who have actually tried to organize or retain wealth have been incarcerated, died suspiciously, or were murdered including Michael Jackson and Prince. His mentee, an educated progeny of the Black Panther movement Tupac Shakur had momentum creating an artist collective that was organizing music distribution, a plan he confided in Professor Smalls on the eve of his death in 1996.28 While mournful fans have been distracted with the myth that Tupac, like Elvis Presley, is not dead, his very public murder is still an unsolved open secret. That lack of closure prompts us to ponder the extent to which the music industrial complex is complicit, indifferent, or participates in their artists’ demise, reminding surviving laborers to be grateful they are alive, famous, and entertaining, despite their exclusion from true profit sharing at the top.