Cobb: Ours to Take Back?

March 01, 2005

Ours to Take Back?

Essence magazine and several others notable have come with the hardline to 'Take Back Our Music'. I find this an admirable exercise of common sense, morality and courage, but mostly common sense.

I've been excoriating hiphop from time to time, remembering what it used to be in the days of the New Jack Swing, when the Beastie Boys were as crazy as the genre got. Some of you can probably remember Kid & Play, and others, before just about every rapper bent forward with a mic in his face and made wild gyrations with the off-mic hand. You know, when rappers used to actually dance dances with difficult steps.

I remember living in Brooklyn when the rumor came out that some racist Afrikaaner was behind the new mysogyny and violence in rap characterized by the rise of groups like Onyx, whom in retrospect hardly did as much damage to the reputation of women as today's decendents of the worst side of Sir Mix-A-Lot. 'Nuff said, the crap has gone downhill to the point at which it is barely tolerated by many who used to live it. Like a neighborhood infested by roaches and crack, it's just not home any more.

It wasn't the Boers who made funded the crookedness of hiphop, but the supply-siders were fundamentally right. It isn't consumption that makes hiphop what it is, it's production. The art of hiphop became a pseudo-science of marketing, but none of that would have happened without money and direction. Arguments about what dysfunctional suburban white boys wanted from hiphop was, is and always will be a cop-out. Suburban white boys don't spend any more on CDs than anyone else - they consume just like everyone. They do just what (good) rapper Rob Base said: "Take it off the rack, if it's wack, put it back." That's called shopping. It takes a fifth grade education to buy something from a store - the convenience built into the system of distribution makes it simple to get whatever is on the rack.

I'm not going to dismiss the demand side of the equation, because I sure as hell don't when it comes to all the things that ghetto residents get into their corner stores from the far corners of the globe, including bananas, orange juice in winter and crack. I do think people should be free to buy straight porno, and that's what I consider most of hiphop to be these days. But broadcast porno? No. No. No.

So when it comes to the question of taking the music back, what we are going to need to hear more of are people like Regina Robertson playing their part. People who make the choices about what to produce for mass consumption have a grave responsibility to the public, and people who produce entertainment products have more than just a passing responsibility to standards of decency. These are the thinking people who plan with the millions. When then sell out their values, the marketplace is poisoned.

So we have to ask, how much of this campaign is actually going to affect those people who sit atop the production dollars? We didn't name 'Murder Inc.', nor did we rename it 'Tha Inc.' That's got to be a top-down move. It's going to take pushing the envelope in a new direction.

The bottom line falls on moguls like P. Diddy and Jay-Z at Viacom. They are The Man. They can make or break an act in the business. They direct the dollars, and the investment dollars flow on their say so. If it wasn't that way, we wouldn't hear rappers constantly timestamping their records with lyrics verbalizing who their producers are.

Back when Latifah only rapped, she and Chuck D did their thing called 'Self-Destruction'. They did that when there was only 1/5 of the black power in hiphop production that there is today. If the music is 'ours' to take back, then P Diddy and Jay-Z are 'ours' and they'll do the taking. Otherwise all we have is common sense.

Posted by mbowen at March 1, 2005 12:15 PM

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