(ThyBlackMan.com) By now the Chuck D/Hot 97 beef has been well-documented by blogs, and anyone with access to Twitter can see the back-and-forth exchange that’s spanned several days.
Long story short, Chuck D blasted Hot 97 for this year’s Summer Jam show, calling it a “sloppy fiasco” and criticizing the liberal use of the n-word, questioning where Hot 97 would be if the concert had been filled with Anti-Semitic and gay slurs. He wants urban radio to “get it right or be gone.”
Ebro Darden and Peter Rosenberg of Hot 97 responded, and a war of Twitter words ensued.
On the surface this seems like just another social media spat that will be forgotten tomorrow, but in reality it runs much deeper than that.
This is not just about a sloppy show or racial slurs. It’s not about Summer Jam or Hot 97 or Ebro and Rosenberg. It’s not about specific hip hop radio
stations or specific hip hop concerts. It’s about what all of these things collectively add up to. This is about what “hip hop” has become, and Summer Jam was just the most visible example.
This is about the fact that a culture that was based on peace, love, unity and having fun, one that served as a form of self-expression for marginalized and oppressed people, has become a corporate-controlled means to reinforce the very oppression it was created to fight.
This is about the fact that we openly degrade ourselves through hip hop, that our “values” have shifted from life-affirming qualities to a death program of promiscuity, anti-love, drug use, drug dealing, materialism, violence and criminality, and people who claim to love hip hop promote these “values” every day.
It’s ironic that Hot 97’s tag line is “where hip hop lives” because if we’re talking about hip hop culture in its original, true form, Hot 97 is not where hip hop lives, it’s where hip hop dies. And Hot 97 is just one of many corporate “ambassadors” of hip hop that are actively killing the culture’s essence every day.
Granted, I don’t think that Ebro, Rosenberg and their Hot 97 counterparts are evil people who wake up every morning with the intention to destroy hip hop. I don’t think their actions are malicious. I do think they operate under a banner of ignorance and general lack of awareness about black history, racism, stereotypes and the social implications of art, and they’re guided more by selfish motives than social conscience.
Because it’s not terribly difficult to see how mainstream hip hop is helping to destroy black people if you have a basic knowledge of:
- black history in America
- how stereotypes have been used to demonize and destroy blacks since slavery
- the similarity between black stereotypes invented during slavery and the stereotypes that dominate mainstream rap, generally focused around criminal and sex-crazed behavior
- how stereotypes equating blackness with danger lead to biased Stop and Frisk policies, lengthier prison sentences and the murder of unarmed blacks
- how propaganda was used during the Holocaust to vilify Jews and other “undesirables” and justify Nazi atrocities
- how art can be used as propaganda
- how minstrel shows were used to degrade blacks for entertainment and profit
- the fact that control of black art such as jazz music has always been wrested from black hands
- the fact that every movement that represented black progress has been infiltrated and destroyed by an outside organization, usually one operated by the government (COINTELPRO, for starters)
Finish story over at;
http://raprehab.com/why-chuck-d-was-right-about-hot-97/
