Political Economy of Music

Political Economy Of Black Music

Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noire

Summer 1999 (Volume 2, Number 2)

Rhythm Nation: The Political Economy of Black Music

By Norman Kelley

No race that has anything to contribute to the markets of
the world is long in any degree ostracized.
--Booker T. Washington

Black culture is too significant in American culture for
blacks to be glorified employees.
--Russell Simmons, Def Jam Records

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.

Black music exists in a neo-colonial relationship with the
$12 billion music industry, which consist of six record
companies: Warner Elektra Atlantic (WEA), Polygram,
MCA Music Entertainment, BMG Distribution, Sony Music
Entertainment, and CEMA/UNI Distribution. These firms,
according to New York's Daily News, "supply retailers with
90% of the music" that the public purchases (rap accounts
for 8.9% of the total, over $1 billion in 1996; these firms
are currently being investigated by the Federal Trade
Commission for price-fixing CDs ). While there are black-
owned production companies like Uptown Records, Bad Boy
Entertainment, La Face Records, Def Jam, and Death Row,
which make millions, these black-owned companies do not
control a key component of the music making nexus, namely
distribution, and they respond to the major labels' demand
for a marketable product. In turn, the major labels respond
to a young white audience that purchases 66% of rap music,
according to the Recording Industry Association of America
(RIAA), as reported by the Daily News. But the music
industry's dependence on alternative music has led to flat
sales and the only growth has been, once again, black music
in the cultural form of rap. Rap is still on the move.
For example, Lil' Kim, a protege of the late Christopher
Wallace, has sold 500,000 units of her raunchy Hardcore.
While Scarface has sold over 160,000 of his The Untouchable
- without radio airplay.

The relationship between black music and the "Big Six" is a
post-modern form of colonialism. In classic colonialism (or
neo-colonialism) products were produced in a "raw periphery"
and sent back to the imperial "motherland" to be finished
into commodities, sold in the metropolitan centers or back
to the colonies, with the result being that the colony's
economic growth was stunted because it was denied its
ability to engage in manufacturing products for it own
needs and for export. Blacks in the inner cities, if not
as an aggregate, share some of the classic characteristics
of a colony: lower per capita income; high birth rate; high
infant mortality rate; a small or weak middle class; low
rate of capital formation and domestic savings; economic
dependence on external markets; labor as a major export; a
tremendous demand for commodities produced by the colony but
consumed by wealthier nations; most of the land and business
are owned by foreigners. With rap, the inner cities have
become the raw sites of "cultural production" and the music
then sold to the suburbs, to white youths who claim they
can "relate" to those of the urban bantustans. If there is
indeed a struggle for the control of rap, it is merely a
battle between black gnats, for the war for the control
of black music had been won many years ago by corporate
America, aided and abetted by black leadership that has
never understood the cultural and economic significance
of its own culture.

Kevin K. Gaines, the author of Uplifting the Race,
argues that most black leaders (spokesmen and women and
intellectuals) have had a condescending attitude toward
the black lower classes, urban and rural; the black elite's
world view has been built on a white, bourgeois Victorian
model of comportment that internalized white beliefs about
blacks and race. Gaines noted that although the black elite
was outraged at whites' lucrative expropriations of black
culture...," they "extolled Victorian and European cultural
ideals and looked with disapproval, if not covert and guilty
pleasure, upon such emergent black cultural forms as ragtime,
blues [and] jazz..." Black leaders' ideas about "racial
uplift," notwithstanding, were based on differentiating
themselves from the black lower classes who were seen as
"bringing down the race." Even today's so-called black
public intellectuals use various codes to dissociate the
"good black middle class" - themselves - from the "bad black
under-class," which can be translated to hip hop. (Randall
Kennedy's featured article in the May issue of The Atlantic
Monthly is a spin on racial uplift; now it's about racial
extrication based upon class positioning.) Such elitist
attitudes have prevented middle-class blacks and black
leadership from seeing the worth of their "own" folk culture
that spawned the blues and other music forms from the lower
classes, and it, black music, forms the base, the very
foundation of the $12 billion music industry in the
United States.

But there is a problem with black music: it is created by
black people, particularly the rural and urban lower classes,
and the black middle has always disdained those of their
own race who are considered too Negroid, too black and too
ignorant. Black musical forms have been "the juice" that has
driven American musical expressions and whites have grown
rich off of it. The problem has been that the black middle
class has been too incompetent to champion and exploit (in
the best sense of the word) its own folk culture and develop
the geniuses that has produced black music. Instead, black
music has never had an enlightened middle class leadership
to give it a proper business footing. There has been no A.
Philip Randolph or Thurgood Marshall in black music. The
contempt for black artists is so palpable that even blacks
have resorted to the same kind of rank exploitation that
whites engage in.

Unfortunately, the history of black music has been a
continuous one of whites' lucrative expropriation of black
cultural forms. Black music has become a part of a structure
of stealing that ranges from the minstrels shows of pre-
Civil War America to white composers copying black jazz
styles to white rockers covering original black R&B performer
songs to segregating music by black performers as "race
music" thus limiting their audience appeal to publishers
stealing publishing credits to the nonpayment of royalties
by record companies, etc. To be clear, black music forms
are perhaps the single most critical foundation of American
music which is a Creole hybrid of African and European
influences, but the producers of such forms, blacks them-
selves, brought over to the New World as black bodies to
work for whites, have been viewed as either having no
culture worthy of respect or having one that's worthy
of rank exploitation and domination. This is the basis
of the structure of stealing that other national groups
- principally Anglo Saxons (slavery), Irish (minstrelsy),
Jews (Hollywood, record industry) Italians (mob influence) -
have participated in regard to black music forms. American
individualism not withstanding, American society is made
up of economic classes and ethnic blocs, of which a black
individual can only achieve so much because he or she is a
member of a weak group. "Hence, the individual Negro has,"
argued Harold Cruse in The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual,
"proportionately, very few rights indeed because his ethnic
group (whether or not he actually identifies with it) has
very little political, economic or social power (beyond
moral grounds) to wield."

The theft of black music has been so blatant and pervasive
that a Rhythm and Blues Foundation was set up in 1994,
with $1 million contributed by the Atlantic Foundation
of Atlantic Records, Time-Warner and other music industry
organizations. The foundation was set up to assist R&B
artists of the 1940s, 50s, and 60s, who have been "victims
of poor business practices, bad management and unscrupulous
record companies," wrote The New York Times. The money
contributed by those record firms (which have been gobbled
up by larger concerns) is a fraction of the amount of money
that white-controlled record firms have made off of black
artists, directly or indirectly by holding on to some of
these artists' back catalogues.

Because black leaders have ignored the early years of black
music development, others have come into the black community
and have established a foothold before them. Even during
slavery whites were dissing black folks by the back-handed
compliment of minstrelsy, they just couldn't ignore the
creativeness of blacks but knew "how to grow rich off
of black fun," as one minstrel poseur put it. Motown was
that rare exception of black control but didn't come into
existence until the late fifties (and even today it is
basically a shell; a mere label of Polygram, a foreign
company; an expensive footnote in music history when it
recently sold a 50% interests in its catalogue to EMI for
$132 million). The sniping about Jews "controlling" the
music business clouds over the fact that blacks have often
ignored the "cultural capital" potential of blues, jazz, and
R&B until it was too late. The same can be said about hip
hop; it was the independents labels not Motown that produced
the initial acts and the major labels rushed in when they
saw the staying power of the music and that young whites
were buying it. During the twenties, according to Amiri
Baraka in Blues People, when Harry Pace, the owner of Black
Swan Records, began selling blues, he was castigated by the
black middle class for not selling music that was more
racially uplifting. When jazz began circulating through
the speakeasies of America during the 20s and via the new
communication technology of the day, the radio, "the big
brain" denizens of the Harlem Renaissance couldn't figure it
out. As cited by Nathan Huggins in his Harlem Renaissance:

"Harlem intellectuals promoted Negro art, but one thing
is very curious, except for Langston Hughes, none of them
took jazz - the new music - seriously. Of course, they all
mentioned it as background, as descriptive of Harlem life.
All said it was important in the definition of the New
Negro. But none thought enough about it to try and figure
out what was happening. They tend to view it as a folk art -
like the spirituals and the dance - the unrefined source for
the new art. Men like James Weldon Johnson and Alain Locke
expected some race genius to appear who would transform that
source into high culture...[T]he promoters of the Harlem
Renaissance were so fixed on a vision of high culture
that they did not look very hard or well at jazz."

The black intelligentsia of that era could no more accept
the folk reality of its own folk culture than the white
intelligentsia could accept the black basis of American
culture, that American society is a creolized one, pre-
dating multiculturalism. Jazz and blues were urban and rural
expressions of working class blacks, but the black intelli-
gentsia, trained in the aesthetics of the dominant society
and unable to produce a cultural philosophy its own, neglected
a very vital music in hopes of it becoming something else.
There was a market there, for blacks were buying five to six
million discs yearly in 1925 and in 1926 the record business
reached $128 million dollars in sales, and did not reach
that high point again until after the Second World War.

How popular black music is developed, produced, marketed and
distributed receives virtually no attention by today's so-
called black public intellectuals, particularly those who
claim to be cultural critics. Instead, they - Henry Louis
Gates, Jr., Cornel West, Michael Eric Dyson (whose recitation
of rap is much stronger than his analysis of the music industry),
bell hooks, and Tricia Rose - seek to decipher or decode "black
cultural expressivity" or "representation," "tropes," or "identity."
Black music is either praised for its spiritual or cultural
affirmations in regard to black struggle, or music forms
such as hip hop are mined for analytical nuggets before
academic confabs or denounced for its misogynistic flavor
by the left, right and center of American politics - or
its influence is totally ignored. (Stanley Crouch denounced
Tupac Shakur as "scum" but praises Quentin Tarentino who
liberally uses the word "nigger" throughout his films.)
Analyzing black music as part of the consumption/
commodification process is the hip and lazy way out for
most new jack intellectuals. By reading some Frankfurt
School theory and squeezing black culture through the
bankrupt paradigm of "cultural studies," these intellectuals
have no historical understanding of the role of black music
in American culture and have no real analysis of how black
music undergirds the music business.

The speaks volumes and it underscores a nasty secret about
the black intelligentsia that Harold Cruse pointed out
thirty years ago in his seminal but usually overlooked
book, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: most black
intellectuals, and particularly those schooled in the past
twenty years, are incapable of an original thought, and
particularly so when it comes to analyzing and explaining
the unique set of circumstances that confront blacks,
historically and presently. A case in point is the
role of black music.

Curiously, there is no comprehensive historical analysis
of how black music - initially mimicked by white minstrel
musicians when a majority of black were enslaved - has been
part of an informal process of cultural expropriation of
black culture and then the more systematic neo-colonialization
of black music that has occurred during the industrial era
of the late 20th century, and now fed into $12 billion music
industry. Today, most analyses of black culture is processed
through the theoretical prism of the Frankfurt School's
"cultural industry" paradigm or through the theoretical
template of cultural studies, where the lexicon of post-
structuralism thought can be dropped on any subject,
provided one uses the requisite "Acadospeak" to obfuscate
the fact that nothing of real importance is being discussed.

Rather than analyzing the trajectory of black music through
the music industry, today's new jack intellectuals have been
more interested in discussing or breaking down the high/low
distinctions of culture. More interested in "interrogating"
certain "privileged discourses," but have no interest in the
nut and bolts of the music industry:

how artists are recruited,

how contracts are structured for maximum profits for
record firms,

how much firms spend on the production of an artist's CD,

inquiring as to whether or not rap artists make their living
solely by selling units or doing performances (a situation
similar to that of blues musicians),

how musicians lose their copyright to their music and the
lack of royalty payments,

and the incredible monopoly of the Big Six.

These are just some of the primary areas that are not
addressed by today's black intellectuals who parade
themselves as "experts" or "interpreters" of black culture.

Books such as The Power of Black Music by Samuel A. Floyd,
Jr., Black Noise by Tricia Rose, Between God and Gangsta
Rap by Michael Eric Dyson and One Nation Under a Groove by
Gerald Early underscore the intellectual bankruptcy of this
generation of so-called black intellectuals are. They are
skilled in mimicking Euro-theory intellectualism, but
they don't ask a very important question in regard to the
development of the Rhythm Nation: Why is it that a people
who have invented several genres of music don't have more
control over their artistic creations? Instead, rappers have
been more keenly alert to the lopsided condition of black
creativity and its lack of economic rewards. They have
understood the nationalistic and economic group potential
of black music more so than the intellectuals who pimp off
interpreting black music and culture before white audiences.
It seems that no one expects blacks to control their own
resources and have accepted white or corporate domination
as the natural course of things.

While black scholars seem to be asleep at the wheel over
this issue, whites have produced such work as Rock and
Roll is Here to Pay by Steve Chapple and Reebee Garofalo;
Rockonomics by Marc Eliot; The Rise and Fall of Popular
Music by Donald Clarke; Hit Men by Frederic Dannen; Stiffed
by William Knoedelseder; American Popular Music Business in
the 20th Century by Russell Sanjek and David Sanjek, and,
most recently, Mansion on a Hill by Fred Goodman. With the
exception of Rock and Roll is Here to Pay, none of these
books explore the economic exploitation of black music as a
main subject. Chapple and Garofalo's book, to their credit,
has one chapter on it. The point is that whites are at least
cognizant of the issue of commercialization and exploitation
of music and its creators while black intellectuals who are
supposedly "experts" on black culture are not. Never has one
people created so much music and been so woefully kept in
the dark about the economic consequences of their labor and
talent by their intellectuals and politicos.

Four years ago at a New Music Seminar, Public Enemy's Chuck
D made an astute political and economic observation: "If we
don't get up on the good foot - I'm talking to my people -
then we're going to be behind the eight-ball again." Chuck D
also noted that, "White businesses have built themselves up
and blacks are still working for the white businesses." What
is it about the political economy of the Rhythm Nation that
he understands that the neo-Talented Tenth doesn't?

This lack of scrutiny by black intellectuals (a term that
is slowly becoming an oxymoron) allows rap to be treated
as another "black problem" or something that needs to be
contained by moral commissars like C. Delores Tucker and
William Bennett. They object to the moral content of gangsta
rap (or the lack thereof) and are willing to take on the
record industry because of that, but don't seem to cast a
discerning eye on the exploitative relationship that record
companies have with young black artists. Interestingly,
musicians are considered, in the lexicon of black
intellectuals, "cultural workers" and as such their labor
and creative endeavors are fed into the cultural industry.
But black intellectuals, wishing to demystify the so-called
"privileged discourse" of "Art," don't seem to be too
interested in the day-to-day working conditions that confront
these so-called cultural workers, particularly the plight of
black musicians.

If these artists are indeed cultural workers and their
work is no more privileged than any other form of work and
subjected to the same vicissitudes of the market place,
then perhaps they should be organized into some collective
bargaining units when facing the music industry, which
is represented by two trade associations nationally and
internationally, the Recording Industry Association of
America (RIAA) and the International Federation of the
Phonographic Industry (IFPI) What do rappers have? Nothing
- except for a fledgling watchdog group called the Rap
Coalition that was formed in 1992. Rappers are sort of a
free-floating sweatshop posse, but unlike their third world
sisters who produced their footwear of choice, Nikes, most
of them live large for a brief moment and then disappear
from the music scene, not ever knowing what they were up
against. Given the failure rate of most public schools in
urban America, it isn't surprising that young rappers get
slammed; the same thing happened to their blues grandfathers
who were cheated out their copyrights and royalties. It
happened during the halcyon days of early rock and rock, and
it happening now to rappers, along with the violence and the
headmoe lyrics.

But the music industry is virtually off the radar. In a
March Newsweek issue that focused on rap music generation
gap between black adults and youth, rap was, once again,
blamed for all the ills of black America, but the white
controlled industry was no where to be found nor the white
youth buying public. White youths, according to the RIAA,
buy 60% percent of rap, yet no generation gap article was
written regarding white parents and their children's musical
taste. There seems to some sort of fire wall constructed
around two white aspects of rap, namely the corporation's
marketing of it and the white youths buying it.

And what of the white audience - seventy-five percent
according to Soundscan - that's buying the music that the
moral commissars love to bash? As critic Leslie Feidler
observed, "Born theoretically white, we are permitted to
pass our childhood as imaginary Indians, our adolescence
as imaginary Negroes, and only then are expected to settle
down to being what we are told we really are: white once
more." In other words, whites have options and black culture
becomes another commodity to purchase when young and
complained about as either soccer moms or suburban
Republicans when older.

Then there's the rebellion factor. "People resonate with the
strong anti-oppression messages of rap, and the alienation
of blacks," said Ivan Juzang, Motivational Educational
Entertainment, to American Demographics. "All young people
buy into the rebellion in general, as part of rebelling
against parental authority." On one hand, this amounts to
a sort of vicarious emotional pimping that whites across
the board engage in vis-a-vis blacks. Blacks serve as the
"other" for whites; the "others" are allowed to "act out"
since they are out of the bounds of "civilization." For
marketers who want to appeal to white teenagers they go
through the black community and target the inner city and
then the black middle class. Says Juzang: "If we develop the
hardest core element, we reach middle class blacks and then
there's a ripple effect. If you don't target the hard-core,
you don't get the suburbs." In other words, blacks are
unwitting trendsetters whose tastes and talents are observed,
detailed and crunched out as marketing tip points to music
and fashion companies (aptly described by Malcolm Galdwell
in his article "The Coolhunt" in The New Yorker, March 17,
1997).

This has some particularly nasty ramifications. When blacks
react to their environment it is taken up as a style by
whites who have gotten it from an intermediary source,
rappers and music videos. This "style," particularly the
music, is seen as having the desired effect of boosting
sales and thus it becomes the music that allows a rapper
to get paid. The record companies push the music to white
markets and some gangsta rappers then feel the need to act
out the scenarios they have created. Black and white youths
style themselves as hard-heads and act out the music they
have heard, trying to authenticate themselves. The result is
two dead rappers: Tupac Shakur and Notorious B.I.G. Neither
of the moral crusaders, Tucker or Bennett, focus on the
mainstream culture - whites - that buy rap music. Instead,
they attack the creators of rap and the distributors, the
music industry. If gangsta rap is seen as a moral blight,
what does that say of the whites who are purchasing it? Are
the commissars saying, by accusing the record firms, that
the white buying public has no choice in its taste? Are they
victims of a marketing conspiracy? If it is just rebellion,
at whose expense?

The music industry's profits have been flat for the previous
two years, with alternative rock bottoming out, but with
some growth during the first half of this year. The music
with get up and go? Hip-Hop. As quoted by an anonymous music
insider in The New York Times: "The whole music business is
built on rock and roll, but what's selling is urban music,"
meaning hip hop. "...This is troubling," he went on,
"because we're supposed to be making money." According to
the Times later in the article: "What is keeping some labels
solvent, many executives agree, is hip hop and contemporary
rhythm-and-blues." As reported by The Wall Street Journal,
"sales of rap records have grown, to 26 million from 24.8
million in the first half of 1996. The largest category,
however, is rhythm and blues, the broad category that
includes soul and some pop-sounding rap artists; its sales
grew to 63.6 million from 56.3 million." "This year [1997],
largely on the strength of rock, the world wide record
industry will gross over $20 billion, and global media
giants like Time Warner, Sony, Bertelsmann, Philips
Electronics, and Thorn-EMI will view rock bands as key
assets," wrote Fred Goodman in Mansion on a Hill, his
investigation into rock commerce. But when rock takes
a licking, what music forms keeps on ticking?

Warner Music (WEA) has taken a beating because it sold its
interest in Interscope Records which labels Snoop Doggy Dog
and the late Tupac Shakur. MCA, once seen as the weakest
of the labels, has become a contender because it picked up
Interscope when Warner sold it due to stockholder pressure
because of gangsta rap's lyrics. And EMI picked Priority
Records, home of the ice brothers, Ice-T and Ice Cube (and
purchased a 50 % interest in Motown's catalogue). But there
is a problem with "urban music." Because it "evolves more
quickly," said the Times, "it is more trend-based" and
"generally does not foster career longevity or back-
catalogue sales, two factors crucial to long term
health of the industry."

This obfuscates the fact that the music industry makes short
work of artists who don't perform quick enough to keep the
industry's profits "healthy." Contracts are structured in
such a way that the odds are against musical neophytes
remaining in the business for very long. They see the
likes of Michael Jackson, Prince, Tupac, Snoop Doggy Dogg
or Quincy Jones, dazzled by the big money makers but don't
understand how the music industry depends on a fresh crop of
naive, young and talented artists - black, white, and Latino
- to grease the industry's wheels. Most of those who sign
contracts will not enjoy long careers and the industry has
ways to recoup the money that it spends on producing and
promoting what they call "talent," but viewed as either
disposable or exploitable.

An example is the trio TLC. Last year the members of the
Atlanta-based rhythm-and-blues and hip hop trio - Rozonda
Thomas, Tionne Watkins and Lisa Lopes - had declared
bankruptcy despite the fact that two of their albums had
gone beyond platinum, generating more than $100 million in
sales while getting around $75,000 a year each. Profligacy?
According to the paper of record, The New York Times, these
young ladies "have spent money more like yuppies than like
stars. They shopped at Rich's and the Limited, ordered
jewelry from Zale's and bought Jeeps and BMWs..." Why then
bankruptcy? Maybe it's their contract. As explained by the
Times:

"TLC's contract with Pebbitone [then the group's manager]
gives the group 7 percent of revenues from the sales of the
first 500,000 copies of the debut and second albums. That
increases to 8 percent over a million copies - a "platinum"
seller. Even if the group stays hot long enough to justify
an eighth album - a rarity in the genre - the members'
percentage increases to just 9.5 percent on sales of more
than a million copies. The royalty ranges in the industry
varies from TLC's rate at the low end to up to 13 percent
at the high end."

In April 1996, a federal bankruptcy judge upheld the
bankruptcy filings of the trio.

Recording artists are resorting to bankruptcy as a means of
extricating themselves out of onerous record contracts. The
very structure of recording contracts are often designed in
anticipation that an individual or group will not survive
long enough to make subsequent albums. In other words, given
the lack of longevity of talent, which on the average is
short, the contracts are designed to maximize profits for
the management firms, and record companies. A group can be
of a short duration but make a great of deal of money for
a record company and still not make any money because its
royalties are extremely low. In TLC's case, management was
Pebbitone, and the recording company La Face, a unit of one
of the largest recording firms in the world, Bertelmans.
What is also interesting to note is that both Pebbitone
and La Face are black-owned firms which means, despite
the chestnut about "Jews controlling black music," there
is a fair amount of collusion between whites and blacks in
exploiting black artists, especially those who are unaware
about the business aspects of music: contracts, copyright,
and music publishing. Motown was known for its below the
board practices with some of its artists. Yet these are some
of the sort of businesses practices that have gone on in a
field of business and art that blacks have contributed their
immense talents to. When the record industry is scrutinized,
as the NAACP did roughly ten years ago in its report "The
Discordant Sound of Music," it is usually done toward
securing cushy management positions for arriviste blacks
who are neither concerned about the industry's practices
nor about the plight of rank and file black musicians. The
exploitation of black artists by black record labels is
known in some quarters as "black-on-black crime."

Some blacks within the music industry serve as "compradors,"
agents who bring in a fresh crop of black talent into the
neo-colonial system, into the music industry's exploitation
of black music. Since the days when illiterate blues
musicians where robbed of their royalties and publishing
rights, black leaders have been virtually silent on the
music industry's business practices. It is much easier for
Jesse Jackson to complain about blacks not getting enough
Academy Awards nominations rather than systematically and
consistently take the music industry to task over its
exploitative practices. Black leaders have never understood
that black music is cultural capital that has been turned
into a valuable commodity outside black control. (Now that
Suge Knight has gone back to the big house, guess who may be
running the day-to-day affairs of the multi-million enterprise
called Death Row Records? A white attorney named David Kenner,
Suge Knight's chief counsel. Need I say more?)

With the NAACP reconsidering the efficacy of busing and
integration for integration's sake, integration itself now
appears to be a failure due to the simple fact that black
leaders rushed into it without adequately thinking about the
economic consequences of integration. They had no plan or
desire to build an economic base because integration would
be the salvation of blacks, especially the poor. Blacks are
a $400 million segment of the U. S. economy, but that money,
spent by black consumers, is directed and circulated into
the dominant economy, not into the black communities of
America, and rap music itself generates $1 billion! Now,
with the slow chipping away of affirmative action programs
and minority set-asides, blacks are beginning to think,
"Uh-oh..."

W.E.B. DuBois once proposed that blacks strategically engage
in self-segregation in order to address certain problems that
society would not address in the black community and then
integrate into the majority society from a position of
strength. He argued that a black economy would have
been incomplete but was prescient when he wrote:

"It is quite possible that it could never cover more than
the smaller part of the economic activities of Negroes.
Nevertheless, it is also possible that this smaller part
could be so important and wield so much power that its
influence upon the total economy of Negroes and the total
industrial organization of the United States would be
decisive for the great ends toward the Negro moves."

The irony is that DuBois, the progenitor of the "Talented
Tenth" concept, which he later repudiated, was the sort of
black elitist who would not have seen black music as that
important part that could wield so much power and influence
on the black and the larger economies. And it is black
music, as part of the "culture industry," that "wields
so much power" over one aspect of the American economy.

Blacks are now vulnerable because black leadership has
sought "civil rights without seeking group political power
and, then demands economic equality in the integrated world
without having striven to create any kind of ethnic economic
base in the black world," as Harold Cruse wrote. Hence, the
weakness of the black middle class is that it has never been
able to employ its own people, but, in the words of Carter
G. Woodson, the author of the Miseducation of the Negro,
"Foreigners, who have not studied economics but have studied
Negroes, take up ... business and grow rich." They have grown
rich in black fun.

This invariably leads into a discussion about the "black
economy" which is now a moot point. Granted, there were
structural impediments that hampered blacks in businesses
and the development of blacks in music - lack of credit,
under-capitalization, poor distribution, inability to
advertise, etc. Intellectuals have always scoffed at the
possibility of so-called black economy but as Cruse has
written:

"The black economy is a myth only because a truly viable
black economy does not exist. It does not exist simply
because Negroes as a group never came together to create
one, which does not mean that it would be a simple matter
to create a black economy. But it could be done - with the
aid of attributes the Negro has never developed, i.e.,
discipline, self-denial, cooperative organization and
knowledge of economic science."

But that, as Cruse also argued, would take a

"....[C]ertain community point of view, a conditioned
climate, in order to exert impact (political, economic
and cultural) on the white economy. It means the studied
creation of new economic forms - a new institutionalism
- one that can intelligently blend privately-owned,
collectively-owned, cooperatively-owned, as well as state-
sponsored, economic organizations. It means mobilizing the
ghetto populations and organizing them through education
and persuasion (if not through authoritarian measures from
above)."

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 the
lower 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.

Contrary to Russell Simmons's view, blacks are now glorified
employees in American Culture, Inc.

HOME

INFO

ARTICLES

CONTACT

LINKS