Listening to rap music in the 1980s I found it somewhere between amusing and tedious that rappers spent most of the time boasting that their rhymes were the fastest and sharpest From Run DMC to the Beastie Boys, Kid’n’Play to Eric B & Rakim, the theme was similar. This harmless bragging changed at the end of the decade, when hip hop took a harder racial stance, as expressed by Public Enemy and NWA.
The 1988 album Straight Outta Compton by Los Angeles rappers NWA featured the track ‘Fuck the Police’. I remember at the time thinking that this was inappropriate for a major record label. Then in 1991 the movie New Jack City established the genre of gangster rap, with hard drug dealing and brutal violence. I had stopped listening to hip hop by the time of Canadian rapper Snow’s ‘Informer’ (1992), the video showing a young white guy lying to police to help a black suspect.
Gangster rap left a trail of murder, including rappers themselves (Tupac Shakur in 1996, and The Notorious BIG a year later, were among many leading artists killed in drive-by shootings). Shockingly, this carnage was the intent of people in power. An anonymous letter posted on a hip hop website in 2012, by a music industry insider, told of a secret meeting in 1991 at a large private house in Los Angeles, with armed guards outside. You can read the revelations here “The Secret Meeting that Changed Rap Music and Destroyed a Generation” | Hip Hop Is Read
The gathering of around thirty people mostly comprised record company staff, but there were faces that didn’t fit: smartly dressed, tight-lipped men who looked odd at a meeting that was meant to discuss the future of rap music. When these men spoke, the room was shocked into silence. The government was encouraging the building of private prisons, and to make these profitable they would need to be filled. The music company A&R men had signed a confidentiality agreement, but if they had spoken the media there would have been outrage, if not riots. The suited men wanted rap music to incite crime, with payback for the music companies from the penitentiary providers’ government fees per place.
Ten years later a former CIA agent, John Homeston, corroborated the claim. Gangster rap, he said, was promoted to ‘glamorise criminal behaviour’ and ‘fill private prisons’. Aggressive hip hop would increase cynicism towards the authorities and push narcotic use. Former CIA Agent Admits Agency Created Gangster Rap to ‘Fill Private Prisons’ – Fighting Errors in the Modern World – Catholic Info
Neither of the two testimonies are fully verified, and they may seem far-fetched. But is it so unlikely, when Warner and other major record labels that release hardcore hip hop ultimately have the same owners as CoreCivic and other firms running correctional facilities (i.e,.BlackRock and Vanguard)? The alleged conspiracy has been given renewed attention recently by Ice Cube, one of the biggest stars of hip hop.
Undeniably, by the early 1990s no hip hop artist with a conscience was being signed by record companies. It was gangster rap or bust. Furthermore, the CIA, reputedly, was writing the lyrics!
Blatant misogyny was prominent in gangster rap, with lyrical and video content that was inappropriate for adult audiences, but regularly viewed by kids in the ‘hoods. Double standards applied to black and white artists. The contrived furore over the song ‘Blurred Lines’ by white singer Robin Thicke led to its ban from DJ and broadcast playlists. Yet this song paled in comparison with the ubiquitous treatment of ‘bitches’ and ‘hos’ in rap music.
Black men’s lives were ruined not only by mind-numbing and seditious rap music, but also by decriminalising of cannabis, consumed in the toxic form of ‘skunk’, while the supply of more dangerous drugs flows into the ‘projects’. The Black Lives Matter campaign that burst out globally following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis was no grass-roots movement but a lavishly funded instrument of globalist wreckers. Indeed, selection of a felon with a long record of sadistic violence seemed to be conveying the notion that black men generally do these things because of racism.
Sometimes the music industry has killed the goose that lay the golden egg. Whitney Houston, daughter of Motown singer Thelma Houston, had a background in gospel singing. Her ballads were hits all over the world in the 1980s, and she entered the big screen in Bodyguard. In that ‘blockbuster’ movie, Kevin Costner is the minder, a role reversal of a white man serving a black woman. But such social harmonisation was at risk of diluting distinct black culture. Whitney Houston’s career was diverted to another track when she married R&B singer Bobby Brown, a notorious philanderer who ran drug-fuelled orgies. The nightingale of New York became hooked on narcotics, driven to ruin and her untimely death by drowning in a bath.
Prior to meeting Brown, Houston was heckled by some members of black audiences. The booing hurt her. She was a victim of her success. Meanwhile the music industry urged Mariah Carey to identify more with her blackness (she is mixed-race). In the UK, where pop music was never segregated on racial lines as in the USA, an annual ‘Music of Black Origin’ award ceremony was launched.
There appears to be a strategy of simultaneously promoting while ghettoising urban black music. Lauryn Hill, whose acclaimed rap / R&B album The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill topped the charts in 1998, said that she didn’t want white men buying her music. Black grievances may be easily tapped, but I suspect this line was fed to Hill.
Divide and rule, as usual, is the objective of the powers-that-be. There is much money to be made from critical race theory, while the Deep State ensures that the energy of impoverished urban black males is contained. They are held as clients of the system, whether as welfare claimants, convicts – or, as drumbeating for war escalates – conscripts.
