The problem with hip hop journalism
No genre of music has experienced a more dramatic negative shift in values and content over the past 30 years than hip hop.
No genre of music has experienced a more dramatic negative shift in values and content over the past 30 years than hip hop.
Time and time again, the real decision makers get away with murder while rap artists are projected as the embodiment of everything that is wrong with Hip Hop and young Black males.
Blackout is an explosive look at the corruption that is running rampant throughout the music industry.
Having used Hip Hop culture as a medium to empower youth for the last 15 years, I’ve seen first hand how mainstream rap impacts young impressionable minds.
Today, rap music is filled with messages that tell its consumers what to buy and how much one must spend in order to be cool, hip, accepted, successful, and one of the new popular go-to words, “relevant.” When Jay-Z proclaimed the only way to look cool and get women in a club was to “pop” bottles of $200 bottles of Cristal, people followed suit.
“Hip Hop artists fail to recognize that they are routinely exploited at the expense of their dignity, their families and even the communities from which they derive.”
There are thousands of people out there creating music, there are only a handful of those people that really understand what it takes to succeed and they are the ones that are truly shining.
Rap music was unequivocally our social, news, and educational medium.
Supplying great content is the key to growing your fan base. If your site isn’t getting traffic, if you’re not getting any re-tweets on Twitter, if you’re not getting many likes on your Facebook fan page it’s because your content isn’t important or useful enough to the audience your trying to reach.
Everyone is always talking about the artists’ team, the critical support structure that helps spread the music and manage fanbases. But when it comes to successful artists, the most important and well-paid members are lawyers and accountants – then the webmaster, booking agent, manager, and everyone else.