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THE SELLING OF OUR SOULS: MY TAKE ON DIDDY AND HIP-HOP

Writer's picture: Evelyn FortsonEvelyn Fortson



They say opinions are like a-holes; everybody has one. So, here’s mine. I don’t celebrate anyone's downfall. I’m old enough to remember when hip-hop came onto the music scene. A nephew of mine was very excited about it, but I didn’t get it because those guys weren’t singing. They were talking. It wasn’t until I began to really listen to what they were saying that I understood the enormity of hip-hop. Young African American men had innately tapped into what their souls had been created to do. They were doing what their ancestors before them perhaps would have done if it had not been for the Transatlantic Slave Trade. These modern-day griots were telling the stories of their villages on vinyl in lyrical poetry form. That is, until they sold their souls for a record contract. Looking back at the early days of hip-hop, especially when it was still underground and spoke of social injustice, hip-hop was a cultural expression of what it meant to be Black in America. However, the thing that they call hip-hop today is not,” The Culture” as the Recording Industry, BET, or Essence would have you believe. Hip-hop, like everything good and beautiful that African Americans have created from their shared experiences has been stolen and broken into distorted pieces. Instead of spotlighting inequities and calling for social justice in this country, rappers put out diss tracks verbally attacking each other. But even before the personal diss tracks got to the present-day level, we had the East Coast-West Coast rivalry that, I’m sure, led to the unnecessary deaths of an unknown number of young people caught in the crosshair of gang rivalry hyped up by a lyric of a song. The commercialization of this art form, which was effectively the selling of the artist's soul when the artist chose to say the Black women were big booty bitches and hoes; and Black men were drug dealing, pimps, and players who couldn’t commit to anything or anyone was when hip-hop was no longer, “The Culture.”


We have got to stop selling ourselves. We don’t need to denigrate our women, our men, or ourselves to sell a record. Female artists, keep your clothes on when you go onstage, and let your voices and the lyrics move your audience. Male artists, we don’t need you to tear down another Black man or lie about your drug or gang-banging background. Just tell us what you have learned in your life’s journey, how you came to be a man in this foreign land, and how you love without too much detail.


If this Diddy thing is true, he was not alone in it. He was not allowed to operate for years without people in the record industry knowing what was going on. I say, let him and anyone else who participated or allowed him and others to rape children and other adults be revealed and punished. Let the industry burn down to the ground, and then maybe Hip-Hop can start over again and become what it was meant to be.

 


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