Conspiracy Theories?

Maybe that’s all conscious music ever was- another flavor of the month. It certainly was from a music industry perspective- one of many flavors, as easily discarded as a disposable razor blade. All the college kids with Public Enemy t-shirts got themselves jobs, bought themselves houses, and traded idealism for realism. The only time the phrase “Fight the Power” comes to anyone’s mind these days is when a DJ nostalgically spins it at a club as part of a “who remembers this jam?” throwback set.

But that’s not the whole truth. The Million Man March did happen- and people did become more aware of their historical context. For all our country’s racial baggage, those of us in our 20’s at the time had no problem embracing all this delicious black culture, even as outsiders. Movies like Jungle Fever and Zebrahead tackled inter-racial relationships head on, and to us, such radical ideas just seemed obvious. What white guy wouldn’t want a beautiful black girlfriend? I know we were naive, but we were also genuine- as was the hope our generation carried with it. All that wonderful self-expression, empowerment, and enlightenment did have an impact- in my life, specifically, and in the lives of a lot of people as well. That impact has shaped our growth and the way we are now raising the next generation, whom we hope can finally- FINALLY- shed these stupid racial chains that continue to bog America down.

“It did affect people,” continues Speech. “During those times, statistics show that black college enrollment skyrocketed. The support of black on black businesses skyrocketed- which is important by the way; it’s not a separatist thing. It’s a way of helping economies within our own neighborhoods become more independent so that we’re not depending on illegal activities like drug dealing and prostitution and all these other things. People were literally changing their lives during that time period.

“And yet- corporations had no personal investment in conscious music. It was doing well financially, and movies like Malcolm X and Boyz N the Hood were doing well at the box office, but as far as corporations were concerned, if there was another type of music and film that would do just as well, then fine! We’ll take it! And when things like a Nas hit big, then the message to the corporations was: ‘here’s different material that’s doing just as well, and it’s promoting gross materialism, which is boosting the sales of all types of product out there. It’s a win-win situation, there’s no White Guilt, there’s no having to rally for change, no one has to get real introspective about things… it’s a road that’s much easier to travel, with less conflict. If both of them are going to make money, we’ll go with this one.’ That’s what I believe happened.

“Now, some people will say it was more sinister. Some will say, and I won’t necessarily disagree with them, that corporations, along with various extremely rich men, were deciding purposely to put out music that was going to destroy conscious music and the movement. Some will say these things were also meant to enhance the privatization of prisons, to keep those beds warm and make sure there was a pipeline from the street straight to the prison. I’m not going to say that it’s impossible for that to happen. I’m not really sure, to be honest. I will say that, without a question, the access was definitely given more to unconscious music than it was to conscious music.

“When we put out Zingalamaduni, we had just sold four million copies of Three Years, Five Months, and Two Days In the Life of… we had had an international, unprecedented success. We were named band of the year by Rolling Stone in 1993; we were undoubtedly a successful act. And yet for our second album, they were not willing to give us any budget comparable to a band that had just sold 4 million albums prior. There was a definite sort of stiff-arm put towards us that any other successful band, like a Nirvana, did not receive. They’d get a bigger budget so that the band could do even bigger and better things… we did not. The rug was completely pulled out from under us- promotion for our album turned into nothing after just a couple of months, and everything was abandoned, as far as we were concerned. And a similar thing happened to other conscious groups we knew. So yeah, I think the corporations definitely made a decision that they were going to go with this other style of hip hop, less confrontational, easier to swallow… and in their minds, at least, total entertainment.”

Those are some heavy claims, but again, the facts back Speech up. Whether or not there was a conscious decision by corporate America to kill the movement, there is no question our government and private industry have worked hand-in-hand to increase the prison population- converting many of our prisons into privately-run businesses, and using this increased prison population as literal slave labor for corporations all across the country. When you consider that one third of Americans are black, yet two thirds of our prisoners are black, the whole thing starts to look like a very deliberate attempt at bringing back the days of slavery through a nice and legal sheen. Check out Wanda James’ story; she’s an upper middle-class lawyer whose 17-year old brother was arrested for marijuana possession. No prior arrests, but because he was black and in Texas, he was allowed no lawyer and declared a felon by a judge- sentenced to four-and-a-half years picking cotton in prison as a result. Picking cotton. The irony couldn’t be more ridiculously insulting, yet last year alone, over seven hundred thousand people were arrested for the same thing, with black folks holding the dubious honor of being four times more likely than white folks to get arrested. The whole thing is outrageous enough to turn you into a bona fide conspiracy theorist.

Not convinced? Check out this historical chart of the U.S. Prison Population, and notice how much it started growing exponentially a) after Reagan became president and b) after Clinton passed his Tough on Crime Bill. Now look at how many people were in jail because of drug offenses in 1980 vs today. We’ve got hundreds of thousands of living bodies roaming around incarcerated, not for violent crimes but because of drugs. Finally, compare the odds: if you’re a black man, you have a 33% chance of being incarcerated, but if you’re white, that chance is under 6%. Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow details the prison-corporate-America relationship well and is definitely worth a read, but even just a little research on your own will reveal how companies like Kitchell Inc. have made millions of bucks building prison after prison, or how several prison-supply companies are doing amazing business in this burgeoning industry. I shouldn’t have to mention that the point of a prison is to punish and reform humans who disrupt society, and not to act as a substitute slave factory unaffected by our labor laws.

I first heard about this enraging prison scam back in 1997, when Michael Moore spoke to a former inmate from a Ventura, CA prison who confessed he used to take airline reservations over the phone for TWA while in jail (you can watch the disturbingly hilarious interview yourself in The Big One if you’re curious.) And it’s not just TWA; tons of household-name companies like Microsoft, IBM, Target and even Macy’s are all cashing in on this great little opportunity, too. So once you start compiling the amount of people and companies profiting from an increased number of black men in prison, is it so hard to imagine that the first order of business was to get rid of this pesky Black Consciousness Movement (whose goal was to empower people and reduce crime)? Would you encourage something that is completely opposed to what you’re trying to achieve?

Playing Monopoly

There’s another key player in conscious hip hop’s demise- an unwitting one from the land of technology and public policy.

The FCC was created in 1934 via the Communications Act, which established America’s broadcasting rules in an effort to regulate the emerging markets of telephone, radio, and television. For 60 years, America operated under these same rules, believe it or not- but by the mid 90’s, the rapidly-changing face of technology was forcing our government to come up with something more relevant. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 was their answer; I won’t bog you down with the many things it accomplished (Wikipedia actually has a decent summary of the whole thing) but one thing it did real well was turn media ownership into a giant Monopoly board, which is ironic since the entire point of the act, as stated by our lawmakers, was to foster competition and increase diversity through deregulation. Here’s an important story that sets up the 1997 TC Act [3], and illustrates just how far our country has gone from serving the public interest to serving corporate interests, which ties in directly to our hip-hop story:

In the late 80’s, a company named Metro Broadcasting was one of several applicants hoping to secure an FCC license for a new TV station in Orlando, Florida. They lost the bid to Rainbow Broadcasting, on the grounds that one of the FCC’s goals is to promote broadcast diversity. Rainbow was 80% Hispanic-owned, while Metro had only one minority partner in its ranks, so the FCC handed the contract to Rainbow. Metro appealed on the grounds of reverse discrimination, and the case went back-and-forth in the lower courts until 1990, when it reached the Supreme Court- led at the time by the conservative William Rehnquist. After much deliberation, the court upheld the ruling 5–4, and you should check out Justice Brennan’s written opinion on the matter. Here’s an excerpt:

“Although for the past two decades minorities have constituted at least one-fifth of the United States population, during this time relatively few members of minority groups have held broadcast licenses. In 1971, minorities owned only 10 of the approximately 7,500 radio stations in the country, and none of the more than 1,000 television stations; in 1978, minorities owned less than 1 percent of the Nation’s radio and television stations; and in 1986, they owned just 2.1 percent of the more than 11,000 radio and television stations in the United States. Moreover, these statistics fail to reflect the fact that, as late entrants who often have been able to obtain only the less valuable stations, many minority broadcasters serve geographically limited markets with relatively small audiences.

[W]e are compelled to observe that the views of racial minorities continue to be inadequately represented in the broadcast media. This situation is detrimental not only to the minority audience, but to all of the viewing and listening public. Adequate representation of minority viewpoints in programming serves not only the needs and interests of the minority community but also enriches and educates the non-minority audience. It enhances the diversified programming which is a key objective not only of the Communications Act of 1934 but also of the First Amendment.”

The dissenting opinion, as voiced by Justice Kennedy, saw this decision simply as unfair affirmative action:

“I cannot agree with the Court that the Constitution permits the Government to discriminate among its citizens on the basis of race in order to serve interests so trivial as “broadcast diversity.”

The whole “affirmative action” debate is one that will be argued for a long time yet, but to take a group of people who have been systematically discriminated against, not to mention beaten, persecuted, and hated for hundreds of years and call their cultural need to communicate ideas “trivial” is not just insulting and ignorant, it’s borderline racist. Or, like, completely, totally racist. Regardless, this case makes quite clear where both the FCC and the Supreme Court were philosophically at in 1990- yet seven neoliberal years later, our country was a very different place. NAFTA, the elimination of the Glass-Steagall Act, and now this Telecommunications Act are all Clinton-era decisions that gave corporate giants the ability to own larger and larger shares of their respective markets, and the ensuing years saw multiple lawsuits by companies such as Fox pushing to reduce the FCC’s regulating power- which is exactly what happened.

Only three years after the act, reports were already exposing this disturbing trend in radio consolidation, and by 2002, Clear Channel had gone from a small, 40-station fish to a 1225-station Great White, controlling a huge chunk of the radio pie. All of this consolidation pretty much booted alternative media from the general public’s eyes and ears, whittling our arts & entertainment choices to a few, lowest-common-denominator options even the biggest media recluse couldn’t escape from (I’m talking to you, Britney, Backstreet Boys, & Ace of Base.) The world of hip hop was no different; what had merely been a trend before was now an unstoppable behemoth, as Dre, Biggie, Nas and Jay-Z made sure there could be only one (style of hip hop, that is.)

“When that happened, it pretty much sealed the deal,” Speech corroborates. “It’s what allowed an artist like Jay Z to have the numerous huge hits that he’s had, since, basically, all the record labels became three giant labels. Those three labels pretty much controlled the medium in every city. They had partnerships with the TV channels that would play music videos, they owned the radio stations that would play rap music, and they owned a lot of the newspapers as well. For the artists that they wanted to promote, it was a carte blanche ability to reach all listeners in all cities across the nation at one time. And a lot less people were making a lot more decisions for the rest of us.

“Before the switch, groups like the Pharycide to MC Hammer to Arrested Development to Young MC to PM Dawn to NWA could all coexist on tours together, on radio together, and no one complained. After the switch, it become what you still see today: one hip hop style of music, and a subject matter that’s very narrow, one-dimensional. You have a couple of exceptions like Kendrick Lamar, but for every one of him or J. Cole, you have about five thousand other groups doing the opposite. Most people can’t even name ten conscious artists that exist in the mainstream of rap today- they’ve all gone underground.

“Access is the key word. Conscious music was no longer given access. If you played the game, the rules became ‘look, just dumb it down. Stop talking about those same things. Get on the bandwagon and embrace this new “urban culture” that’s coming aboard. Embrace the pimp culture, the drug dealer culture, the street hardness, and we’ll continue to promote you. And if you don’t do that, you’re simply not part of the narrative we’ve created.’ And in that way, it became a form of censorship.”

Richard T. Craig’s African Americans and Mass Media uses the parallel case of BET’s rise and fall to illustrate a similar point. It’s a fascinating (but painful) story: Robert L. Johnson started Black Entertainment Television for the obvious reason that there wasn’t a single network owned by or operated for the African American community. BET blew up during the same hip-hop era we’ve been talking about: late 80’s through mid- 90’s. From the start, Johnson made his agenda clear: the only way for African-Americans to get the kind of programming they wanted was to own media outlets, and at that moment they owned none. BET was here to change that dynamic, and Johnson worked hard at making it happen. By the time the Telecommunications Act came along in 1996, BET was airing five diverse news-oriented shows daily or weekly, providing much-needed commentary and critique to the black community at large. But then, somewhere between 2000–2001, Johnson did a bizarre thing. Despite proving to the world that a black-owned cable network was not only financially possible but necessary, Johnson decided to sell his baby to Viacom- and with it, the network’s soul.

Things changed right away. Despite their success, three of these staple news shows were given the axe, along with popular BET Tonight host Tavis Smiley. By 2005, even their flagship show BET Nightly News was gone. None of this should be surprising to anyone who’s lived through the last 20 years of mergers and acquisitions, but it’s the irony that hurts the most. Robert Johnson had created BET to combat the exact thing it was now doing- letting white people make decisions for black people, and eliminate the diversity of ideas African-Americans were starving for in the public sphere. By handing the reigns to Viacom, Johnson not only sold his people out- he made it clear that diversity was definitely not in the best interest of Corporate America, whose advertisers had no desire to fund critical, investigative news shows that might encourage their viewers to question things. And that’s exactly where things stand today.