After inciting public outrage from Emmett Till’s family for controversial lyric, Lil Wayne has issued an official statement to apologize for his actions.
Wayne offended the Till family on his unauthorized remix of Future’s “Karate Chop,” in which he rapped, “beat the pu**y up like Emmett Till.” Epic Records would eventually pull the song from the Internet and re-release it with censored lyrics. However, Wayne remained unapologetic throughout the whole ordeal.
Recently, the family has also tried to halt Lil Wayne’s endorsement deal with Mountain Dew. Much like when Reebook pulled their campaign from Rick Ross, the family hoped it would force an apology.
In Wayne’s apology, he acknowledges the pain he might have caused on the Till family. Then, he promises to never perform the song live or reference Emmett Till in future songs again. Read the full letter below.
Dear Till Family:
As a recording artist, I have always been interested in word play. My lyrics often reference people, places and events in my music, as well as the music that I create for or alongside other artists.
It has come to my attention that lyrics from my contribution to a fellow artist’s song has deeply offended your family. As a father myself, I cannot imagine the pain that your family has had to endure. I would like to take a moment to acknowledge your hurt, as well as the letter you sent to me via your attorneys.
Moving forward, I will not use or reference Emmett Till or the Till family in my music, especially in an inappropriate manner. I fully support Epic Record’s decision to take down the unauthorized version of the song and to not include the reference in the version that went to retail. I will not be performing the lyrics that contain that reference live and have removed them from my catalogue.
I have tremendous respect for those who paved the way for the liberty and opportunities that African-Americans currently enjoy. As a business owner who employs several African-American employees and gives philanthropically to organizations that help youth to pursue their dreams my ultimate intention is to uplift rather than degrade our community.
GoldenUndergroundTV recently released an interview I did with them late last year. I got a bit animated at the end. Only so many interviews in a row I could handle being asked about Chief Keef.
My tirade wasn’t really about Chief Keef. It wasn’t about Gucci Mane or Wocka Flocka or any of the acts spontaneously catapulted into stardom by synchronized mass media coverage despite seemingly universal indifference (at the very best) regarding their talent. Whose arrests, involvement in underaged pregnancies, concert shootouts, and facial tattoos, dominate conversation for weeks at a time, with their actual music a mere afterthought, if thought of at all. My tirade was about marketing. It was about media powers seeking out the biggest pretend criminal kingpins they can find, (many of whom who shamelessly adopt the names of actual real life criminal kingpins like 50 Cent and Rick Ross), and exalting them as the poster children for a culture. It was about an art form reduced to product placement, the selling of a lifestyle, and ultimately, a huge ad for imprisonment.
This is not my opinion.
Last year Corrections Corporation of America (CCA),
the biggest name in the private prison industry,
contacted 48 states offering to buy their prisons.
What kind of legitimate and ethical measures could possibly be taken to ensure the maintenance of a 90% prison occupancy rate?
Two months later an anonymous email was sent out to various members of the music and publishing industries giving an account of a meeting where it was determined that hip-hop music would be manipulated to drive up privatized prison profits. Its author, despite claiming to be a former industry insider, did not provide the names of anyone involved in the plot, nor did he specify by which company he himself was employed. As such, the letter was largely regarded as a fraud for lack of facts.
Last year a mere 232 media executives were responsible for the intake of 277 million Americans, controlling all the avenues necessary to manufacture any celebrity and incite any trend. Time Warner, as owner of Warner Bros Records (among many other record labels), can not only sign an artist to a recording contract but, as the owner of Entertainment Weekly, can see to it that they get next week’s cover. Also the owner of New Line Cinemas, HBO and TNT, they can have their artist cast in a leading role in a film that, when pulled from theaters, will be put into rotation first on premium, then on basic, cable. Without any consideration to the music whatsoever, the artist will already be a star, though such monopolies also extend into radio stations and networks that air music videos. For consumers, choice is often illusory. Both BET and MTV belong to Viacom. While Hot 97, NYC’s top hip hop station, is owned by Emmis Communications, online streaming is controlled by Clear Channel, who also owns rival station Power 105.
None of this is exactly breaking news, but when ownership of these media conglomerates is cross checked with ownership of the biggest names in prison privatization, interesting new facts emerge.
According to public analysis from Bloomberg, the largest holder in Corrections Corporation of America is Vanguard Group Incorporated. Interestingly enough, Vanguard also holds considerable stake in the media giants determining this country’s culture. In fact, Vanguard is the third largest holder in both Viacom and Time Warner. Vanguard is also the third largest holder in the GEO Group, whose correctional, detention and community reentry services boast 101 facilities, approximately 73,000 beds and 18,000 employees. Second nationally only to Corrections Corporation of America, GEO’s facilities are located not only in the United States but in the United Kingdom, Australia and South Africa.
You may be thinking, “Well, Vanguard is only the third largest holder in those media conglomerates, which is no guarantee that they’re calling any shots.” Well, the number-one holder of both Viacom and Time Warner is a company called Blackrock. Blackrock is the second largest holder in Corrections Corporation of America, second only to Vanguard, and the sixth largest holder in the GEO Group.
There are many other startling overlaps in private-prison/mass-media ownership, but two underlying facts become clear very quickly: The people who own the media are the same people who own private prisons, the EXACT same people, and using one to promote the other is (or “would be,” depending on your analysis) very lucrative.
Such a scheme would mean some very greedy, very racist people.
There are facts to back that up, too.
Prison industry lobbyists developing and encouraging criminal justice policies to advance financial interests has been well-documented. The most notorious example is the Washington-based American Legislative Council, a policy organization funded by CCA and GEO, which successfully championed the incarceration promoting “truth in sentencing” and “three-strikes” sentencing laws. If the motive of the private prison industry were the goodhearted desire to get hold of inmates as quickly as possible for the purpose of sooner successfully rehabilitating them, maintenance of a 90% occupancy rate would be considered a huge failure, not a functioning prerequisite.
Likewise, the largest rise in incarceration that this country has ever seen correlates precisely with early-80′s prison privatization. This despite the fact that crime rates actually declined since this time. This decreasing crime rate was pointed out enthusiastically by skeptics eager to debunk last year’s anonymous industry insider, who painted a picture of popularized hip-hop as a tool for imprisoning masses. What wasn’t pointed out was that despite crime rates going down, incarceration rates have skyrocketed. While the size of the prison population changed dramatically, so did its complexion. In “‘All Eyez on Me’: America’s War on Drugs and the Prison-Industrial Complex,” Andre Douglas Pond Cummings documents the obvious truth that “the vast majority of the prisoner increase in the United States has come from African-American and Latino citizen drug arrests.”
Add to this well-documented statistics proving that the so-called “war on drugs” has been waged almost entirely on low-income communities of color, where up until just two years ago, cocaine sold in crack form fetched sentences 100 times as lengthy as the exact same amount of cocaine sold in powdered form, which is much more common in cocaine arrests in affluent communities. (In July 2010 the oddly named Fair Sentencing Act was adopted, which, rather than reducing the crack/powder disparity from 100-to-1 to 1-to-1, reduced it to 18-to-1, which is still grossly unfair.) This is not to suggest that the crack/powder disparity represents the extent of the racism rampant within the incarceration industry. The U.S. Sentencing Commission reported in March 2010 that in the federal prison system, even where convicted for the exact same crimes, people of color received prison sentences 10% longer . Where convictions are identical, mandatory minimum sentences are also 21% more likely for people of color.
Yasiin Bey (formerly Mos Def) put it best; “‘hip-hop” is just shorthand for ‘black people.’” Before our eyes and ears, a “web of business relationships that now defines America’s media and culture” has one particular business raking in billions of dollars while another defines the culture of a specific demographic as criminal. Both business are owned by the same people. Mainstream media continue to endorse hip-hop that glorifies criminality (most notably drug trafficking and violence), and private prison interests, long since proven to value profits over human rights, usher in inmates of color to meet capacity quotas. The same people disproportionately incarcerated when exposed to the criminal justice system are at every turn inundated with media normalizing incarceration to the point that wherever there is mainstream hip-hop music, reference to imprisonment as an ordinary, even expected, component of life is sure to follow.
Conspiracy theorists get a lot of flak for daring entertain the notion that people will do evil things for money. Historical atrocities like slavery and the Holocaust are universally acknowledged, yet simultaneously adopted is the contradictory position that there can’t possibly be any human beings around intelligent enough and immoral enough to perpetrate such things. Even in the midst of the Europe-wide beef that was actually horse-meat fiasco, and the release of real-life nightmare documenting films like “Sunshine and Oranges,” there is an abundance of people content to believe that the only conspiracies that ever exist are those that have successfully been exposed.
The link between mass media and the prison industrial complex, however, is part of a very different type of conversation.
The information in this article was not difficult to find; it is all public.
Boots Riley from the Coup, Jasiri X, and Mark Gonzales
Saturday, March 30th 2013
Last week we celebrated the birthdays of 2 of Hip-Hop’s founding fathers and icons, DJ Kool Herc and Afrika Bambaataa. This got me reflecting on the origins of Hip-Hop and how far we’ve gotten away from them. Afrika Bambaataa defined Hip-Hop as Peace, Love, Unity, and Having Fun. He used Hip-Hop to unite the gangs in New York City and give the youth in poor communities a outlet besides fighting and drug abuse. Most of what is being marketed to our children as Hip-Hop, is in fact the very opposite.
One of the most powerful comments to come out of the whole Rick Ross and Rape controversy was by Hip-Hop activist and former Vice Presidential candidate Rosa Clemente when she declared that artists like Rick Ross were not Hip-Hop, they are part of the Rap Industrial Complex. She’s 100% right, especially when looking at Hip-Hop’s roots. Hip-Hop is social activism, as stated in the above video, which features, Davey D, M1 from Dead Prez, Stahhr, Aisha Fukushima, Boots Riley, Jahi, Mark Gonzales and myself. And if you’re spitting raps promoting drug use, the abuse of women and glamorizing violence just to get paid, you ain’t Hip-Hop.
Feel free to check out and share my latest video about us rising up and challenging these forces that continue to exploit us and divide us. It’s called “Raise Your Flag” and it’s off of my new album “Ascension”
Not Ready to die, but wanting to die: Depression, Hip Hop and the death of Chris Lighty
Disclaimer: No cause of death for Chris Lighty has been officially released.
“We need a very serious and healing discussion on depression for the Hip Hop generation. As one who suffers from depression myself, it breaks my heart to see those lose this very difficult and often lonely battle.” 8/30/12 my Facebook status after hearing of Chris Lighty’s death
Right now I should be finishing a paper for my independent study. But I just heard the news about Chris Lighty’s death. Though I never meet him, being part of the Hip Hop village, I always heard good things about him. Reading my sister, Joan Morgan’s, one word post on Facebook, “devastated”, I broke down and thought, another possible suicide in our village. Why is this happening? All of us living and breathing are dealing with a myriad of challenges, especially financial ones, so what is it that makes one want to kill themselves? And why is there so much silence in communities of color? We all grew up hearing about suicides, and for a long time I believed that only white kids killed themselves. When I was in high school, there was a rash of suicides that I heard about, read about. I would say to my friends, “white kids are crazy”, little did I know that I myself might have been a little bit “crazy”.
“Today my silence stops. My shame ends. I am going to say the one thing you are never ever ever supposed to say; I wanted to die. Some of us reach this point, and it is the most frightening thing to say and feel”.
It was not until 2005 that I was diagnosed with Bipolar disorder and depression. I was 34 and after a very hard pregnancy, in which I suffered from a rare disease, hyper-emesis, along with postpartum depression, did I finally admit to myself that I had been suffering with depression since my mid-twenties and I desperately needed help. Depression manifests itself in many ways. For me, it manifested as manic episodes of high energy, no sleep, compulsive cleaning and bursts of anger. As I look back at my life I recall encounters in which I acted irrationally, impulsively and destructively, sometimes publicly. I recall episodes of manic states in which I would stay up for days, clean and write like a fiend. When the panic state ended I would shut down and isolate myself for days in my room and cry myself to sleep, thinking of death. In the subsequent 7 years since my diagnosis I have sought treatment that includes medications, talk therapy, acupuncture and tried more holistic techniques. I have great days and some very dark ones but I believe I am better and as I continue to live I have come to truly understand this disease. One of the hardest things was telling friends who would then tell me all the evils of these meds and urge me to drink this tea, do this exercise, eat this food or just go out and take a walk, it’s just the blues. As well-meaning as my friends were they just did not get it. Too many times those of us who deal with issues of mental health are silenced, ignored or told, “everything will be all right” “you’re strong” and often we want to scream back at them and say, “How do you know everything will be all right? I am sick of being strong!” When we hear that it makes us shut down even more and retreat into that corner. When we see that look in your eye we wish we never would have told you. No matter how many friends you have, how many people tell you they love you, these things do not cure depression. Some of us need medications, some of us cannot meditate or exercise our way out of it. Most of us inherited this and because of the silence in our families we may never truly know the extent to which this is passed down. I worry every day that my daughter has inherited this from me. Every time she cry’s or shows signs of anxiety or stress I am terrified that my little girl has “the gene.”
I turned 40 this year and I told myself I would live my life in my truth. Every day I wake up and I know that as much as I want to have a great day the slip back into a depressive state lurks around the corner. Unfortunately, so many do not have the information, the networks or the support systems I do. Damn, so many are not privileged enough to have health insurance that covers mental health services. In one of my recent sessions with my therapist she reminded me that there is no cure for depression, there is living with depression. Hip Hop and the larger community of Black and Brown, progressive, radical, social justice activists must figure out a way to begin a dialogue, to not just break the silence around depression, but to stop the shaming of those who suffer this disease. Often times I feel that if I had an ailment that was physical or one that people could actually see people that their hearts and minds would be more open to that disability then to my mental health disability.
“Too many times those of us who deal with issues of mental health are silenced, ignored or told, “everything will be all right” “you’re strong” and often we want to scream back at them and say, “How do you know everything will be all right? I am sick of being strong!”
Today my silence stops. My shame ends. I am going to say the one thing you are never ever ever supposed to say; I wanted to die. Some of us reach this point, and it is the most frightening thing to say and feel. That day in April 2005, living in Brooklyn, I felt that feeling. The sick nauseating, head spinning, heart pounding feeling of wanting to die, visualizing how I would die and who would find me. As I lay on my bedroom floor ravaged with pain and tears, hoping to get the strength to walk to the 7 on Parkside and Prospect all I could feel is that soon this would be over, this monster inside of me would finally be gone and so would I. At the moment a bit of light broke through and I did the one thing so many cannot and do not do, I picked up the phone; I called my best friend who called my mother who called my aunt who called a friend who is a psychiatrist. She stayed on the phone with me until my husband came home from work and the next morning I was in a doctor’s office. Since that dark day in Brooklyn and until the day I am SUPPOSED to leave this world, I will be living with and battling this disease.
As I said, I never meet Chris Lighty, but I keep imagining the movement he put that gun to his head, the pain and despair he must have felt is unfathomable. The thought of it makes me physically ill. As many write about his death, some will say he did not commit suicide, some will say that he showed no signs that he was depressed; some will blame his financial issues, some will be angry; some will ask themselves what could I have done and unfortunately, some will pass judgment and some will never be able to admit that he lost his fight. The despair he must have been in might not have been noticeable even to those closest to him. Maybe no one knew. That’s the thing about depression; it’s a disease that is often suffered in silence, alone, behind a closed door, in the corner of a dark closet, under the covers of a bed. I have often said that Hip Hop saved my life; now we need Hip Hop to do what it does best; tell the hard truth, bring people together to create the means to battle whatever ails us and try to save lives. For those of us in this Hip Hop village suffering from this wretched debilitating disease we must Break the Silence, we must Stop the Shame. We must do it for those that are still living and in remembrance of those like Chris who did all they could to survive but lost their battle to this demon.
Rosa Clemente is Hip Hop Scholar and Activist, 2008 Green Party Vice-Presidential Candidate. Currently she is a doctoral student in the W.E.B. Dubois department at UMASS-Amherst and can be reached on Facebook, Twitter @rosaclemente or via email at clementerosa@gmail.com
Please share this letter with your networks, feel free to post and below are links to some great mental health resources that focus on people of color.
Hip-Hop Artists Stand for Human Rights
Chino XL, Rhymefest, Immortal Technique, Jasiri X (Photo by Paradise Gray)
Most of the discussion around rap music is almost always about it’s negative effects. Blog after blog of so called intellectuals rant about mainstream rap music’s bad influence on youth. I often wonder why they never mention the countless MCs all over the country and overseas using Hip-Hop music to educate, organize, and raise awareness about injustices in their communities. One organization that should be at the top of that list is The Sound Strike, founded by Rage Against the Machine’s front man Zack de la Rocha.
Sound Strike is a coalition of Artists that have committed to supporting the International Boycott of Arizona in the wake of the passage of SB 1070, a racist law that targets Latinos and subjects them to racial profiling, harassment and mass incarceration. Last Friday Sound Strike and Executive Director Javier Rodriguez organized one of the best Hip-Hop shows I’ve ever been a part of. Immortal Technique, Rhymefest, Chino Xl, and myself headlined a benefit show in Phoenix with 100% of the proceeds going to Puenteaz a youth based grassroots organization in Arizona that has a long history of fighting immigrant attacks. Hundreds of people filled the parking lot of Puenteaz’s new office creating an electric atmosphere of unity and positivity. Mariachis, fire dancers, local acts Vprolific, Grime and Olmeca and authentic food added to an incredible evening.
From AZ me, Javier, Rhymest, and Paradise the Arkitech, of the legendary rap group X-Clan, traveled to Birmingham to raise awareness of a bill even harsher than Arizona’s SB1070, Alabama’s HB56. There we met with organizers from America’s Voice and community activist William Anderson, who made national headlines by challenging Kanye West to speak out against Alabama’s racist bill. We heard personal stories of families who were ripped apart and children who’s parents were taken away, brutalized and dehumanized for not having a piece of paper. Incredibly it takes an average of 26 years to get American citizenship. In the mean time human beings seeking a better life can be detained, some indefinitely.
One Palestinian family was forced to watch as police stormed their home and arrested their mother, father and older brother. They fought back tears describing how their parents and brother were shipped to 3 different detainment facilities and how since that day their family has never been the same. Members of Occupy Birmingham attended and spoke about a rally their organizing with William Anderson on December 3rd where they are planning to march on a detention facility to protest these harmful policies. Tonight, 10 congressman lead by Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-IL) are holding a ad hoc hearing on immigration and Alabama’s HB56 immigration law. I’m honored to be on the frontlines of the Hip-Hop community, proving we’re not only the music of the revolution but also active participants.
