(ThyBlackMan.com) Remember when the federal government restricted tobacco companies from marketing to children? They did this because they know that marketing can modify behavior and they didn’t want young people to be influenced to engage in unhealthy activity. Well, what happens when you are marketing mass murder to teenagers? Should that be restricted as well?
As I’ve always stated, I’m a huge fan of hip-hop. I fell in love with the musical art form at the age of 11 and have been listening to it ever since.
I’ve also become familiar with the power of hip-hop to transform minds and communities, creating realities that we may have never thought possible in the past. This power can be used for extraordinary good, but it can also be used for unparalleled amounts of evil. What’s even more disrespectful to hip-hop is the fact that big corporations are now paying unsuspecting teenagers to use hip-hop as a vehicle for the transmission of homicidal messages. It’s like convincing an expert marksman to aim his gun between the eyes of his own children.
With this in mind, I saw a recent video by Bobby Shmurda, an artist signed by Epic Records. The video consists of the standard formula of hip-hop
self-destruction: Consistent references to black men blowing each other’s brains out, drugs and alcohol, referring to women as b*tches and hoes, wasting money at every opportunity, and nearly every other thing that a black man can do in order to ruin his entire life.
Then, I noticed the number of views that the video received: Over 14 million. This was surprising, since it’s extremely rare for an underground, unsigned artist to get that many views on a Youtube clip. My suspicion was that this young man’s genocidal message had received backing from some big (typically white) corporation that stood to profit from young black males being trained to murder one another.
That company is Epic Records.
In addition to the money that Epic Records is going to earn from Bobby Shmurda’s success, I noticed that even Beyonce did the “Shmoney Dance” on stage at a recent concert. Established rappers such as TI and Young Jeezy did remixes to his song “Hot N*gga.” So, it appears that some artists and companies are willing to back anything that appears to be popular, no matter how toxic and destructive it might be.
For wealthy, out-of-touch members of the black elite (i.e. executives at BET), this might only appear to be entertainment. But for men like Father Michael Pfleger, who receives phone calls in the middle of the night after young men he mentors have been murdered, it’s beyond real. This is likely also the reason that Father Pfleger had the courage years ago to climb up and spray paint over billboards that were promoting violent music in his neighborhood.
Just a few weeks ago, millions of black people were aligned to protest the shooting of Michael Brown by the Ferguson Police Department. Even hip-hop artists were demanding that Americans show sensitivity to the outrageous numbers of black men who’ve been killed at the hands of police.
At the same time, we are supporting artists being signed by big corporations that are making a direct profit by promoting genocidal activity amongst African American teens.
Does anyone else see just how sick this is? That’s like a father being upset that a boy raped his daughter when he’s been having sex with her himself since she was a baby.
My argument is that the artist, Bobby Shmurda, is a young kid who probably doesn’t understand the impact of his actions. He’s following the crowd, his father is incarcerated, and he’s just trying to make money. While I would love to mentor this young man and help him find more productive ways to use his genius, he probably won’t listen to me and may have even been trained by his overseers to identify me as the enemy.
But the ones who can be held accountable are the adults who are enabling this music, signing massive checks for the promotion of the most destructive homicidal force since Nazi propaganda that led to the mass extermination of the Jews during World War II.
Black people, in case you haven’t noticed, many of our young people are being exterminated. They are filling the prisons and caskets faster than they can build them, and at the end of every homicide is some wealthy man laughing and cashing a massive paycheck. The harsh realities being felt by families who are impacted by the violence will never be felt by corporate executives who just see the music as harmless entertainment and not the marketing juggernaut that it actually is.
These companies, Epic Records for example, should be sued. They should be sued for the promotion of toxic products in the same way that tobacco companies were sued for selling poisonous cigarettes. If I were to start a record label and pay artists to repeatedly say “Gay men should be killed,” that company would be shut down faster than you can say the word “vulture.” But for some reason, we’ve all been trained to believe that the life of a black man is of such limited value that we can sing, dance, rap and booty-shake to a beat while the artist is bragging to you about how he would love to put a gun in your son’s ear and splatter his memories all over the carpet.
We can’t stand for this nonsense any longer. Somebody needs to go down.
Side note:
Sadly, I just read that the rapper Bobby Shmurda was arrested on a gun charge and is going to do three years in prison. So, by encouraging young black men to promote illegal activity, record labels are feeding into the profitability of the prison industrial complex.
“We can make it cool to carry guns and then make money when they are arrested.”
As Malcolm X once said, “The white man will put the liquor bottle in your hand and then arrest you for getting drunk.” He then said that this is why he works to take the liquor bottle out of the black man’s hand. The same can be said about marketing messages that promote illegal activity among young black men. If Michael Jackson could be forced to have his lyrics changed for saying “Jew me” in a song, we can certainly force record labels to mass marketing black-on-black teen homicide.
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Staff Writer; Dr. Boyce Watkins
Dr. Boyce Watkins is the founder of the Your Black World Coalition. For more information, please visit http://BoyceWatkins.com.