[News] Hip-Hop, Mass Media and 21st Century Colonization

Wed Mar 21 11:57:22 EDT 2007

http://www.greeninstitute.net/subpages/ball_hh_pt1.asp
             Hip-Hop, Mass Media and 21st Century Colonization

             Jared A. Ball, Ph.D, Communications Fellow

Given the societal need and function of mass 
media and popular culture, all that is
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popular is fraudulent. Popularity is in almost 
every case an intentionally constructed 
fabrication of what it claims to represent.  Too 
few who comment on the lamentable condition of 
today’s popular hip-hop seem to grasp this, the 
political nature of the nation’s media system, 
nor the political function that system 
serves.  Hip-hop is often taken out of the 
existing context of political struggle, 
repression, or the primacy of a 
domestic/neo-colonialism in the service of which 
mass media play a (the?) leading role.  Media, 
often incorrectly defined by their technologies, 
are the primary conduits of ideology or worldview 
and must be seen as such.  Therefore, their 
highly consolidated ownership and content 
management structure (corporate interlocking 
boards of directors, advertisers, stockholders, 
etc.) cannot be understood absent their ability 
to disseminate a consciousness they themselves 
sanction and mass produce.  Nowhere is this more 
clearly demonstrable than in hip-hop.

Like mass media and popular culture, hip-hop too 
is often removed from its proper context as the 
cultural expression of a domestically-held 
internal colony otherwise known as Black 
America.  The colonialism that prefigures its 
creation and subsequent popularity is too often 
absent from popular discussion of hip-hop and as 
such leads to confused analyses and a tremendous 
amount of inaction surrounding the issues 
involved.  I use the term colonialism simply to 
draw attention to the systemic (i.e. intentional) 
maltreatment of a majority of those considered 
“citizens,” and to the particular form that this 
maltreatment takes regarding North America’s 
Black/African internal colony.  By this I mean 
that the basic tenets of a colonial relationship 
remain intact for Black people in the United 
States.  That is: 1) Black people remain held in 
spatially distinct communities, neighborhoods, 
projects, etc. where they, 2) form the basis of 
this country’s source of cheap labor and, 3) raw 
materials – which include cultural expression 
and, specifically, hip-hop.  That is, held 
intentionally in poverty so as to create 
conditions of desperation, Black people must then 
sell their labor cheaply and/or be willing to 
conform themselves to the needs and will of an 
elite in order to “succeed.”  Hip-hop, like every 
other cultural expression generated from this 
community, has over the last twenty years been 
grafted to this structural need to systematically 
produce what is conducive to this system’s 
survival.  This is quite natural and 
understandable and would only be confusing were this not the case.

             The pervasiveness of 
self/community-directed violence, misogyny, 
conspicuous consumption, product placement 
promotion, and general lack of ingenuity in 
popular hip-hop is the aforementioned specific 
systemic need produced systematically via its 
media representative, in this case, the music 
industry.  Understood properly we would note that 
corporations are themselves legal entities that 
give sanction and anonymity to those involved in 
the process of protecting the ruling 
elite.  Therefore, their ability to sign (via 
contract), promote, disseminate, etc. the 
cultural expression of the colonized allows them 
to determine the direction or content in most popular hip-hop.

             The tremendous amount of hip-hop 
created that does not suit this political need, 
which again is primary, is simply omitted.  And 
without this current analysis, even our brightest 
thinkers ignorantly suggest, as did Michael Eric 
Dyson recently on Paula Zahn’s CNN special on the 
subject, that to be successful (i.e. “popular”) 
politically conscious artists need “better 
beats.”  This precludes the continuing power 
struggle which necessitates both the maintenance 
of the Black colony, but also a specific image of 
that colony to be imposed on the country and 
world.  In other words, there can be no popular 
representation of the colonized that does not 
reflect a justification or omission of their 
colonized status.  It is the status of a 
neo-colony that needs changing, not the beats 
used by those expressing a desire for something different.

             Zbigniew Brzezinski, in defense of 
this system, explained this reality quite clearly 
when writing in The Grand Chessboard (1997) that 
what will separate the United States as an empire 
from those of the past is this nation’s control 
over “international communication and popular 
entertainment.”  Media today are more pervasive, 
powerful, and capable of the maintenance of 
colonialism than at any other time in world 
history.  This is the result of the intentional 
and concomitant rise of both mass media 
technology and their consolidated ownership in 
the hands of the world’s only true “minority” 
elite: white men.   Fewer people, almost all 
exclusively within the same self-identified 
racial, class, and gendered interest group, have 
a greater ability today than at any other time to 
produce a global consciousness conducive to their 
interests.  Hence my earlier statement about the 
inherent fraudulence of popular culture.  In a 
society where culture is used as a primary 
component or mechanism of social control, that 
which becomes “pop culture” is fraudulent in that 
it is forced, as Fanon has explained, to “testify 
against” its creators and to serve those able to 
determine its reach or societal penetration. 
Rarely is what we know of as “popular” the 
initial intention of the culture or individual 
from which that expression comes.  Most often 
what is the final product is what is decidedly 
different than what its creator initially set out 
to make and is more than likely no longer in their own best interest.

             While much of what is made popular 
in hip-hop glorifies the impoverished conditions 
out of which the cultural expression emerges, 
little has changed regarding those fundamental 
colonial conditions.  In the thirty years of 
hip-hop’s ascendance and its annual generation of 
billions of dollars, the fundamental relationship 
between that population and the greater society 
remains intact.  Hip-hop’s popularity has done 
nothing to improve Black America’s overall 
wealth, education, health-care, or certainly 
rates of imprisonment.  In fact, the popularity 
of hip-hop is used to deny these conditions or 
explain them as natural to the conditions of 
African America.  It is not to the people that 
these conditions are natural but, instead, to the 
condition of being colonized.  Popular media and, 
therefore, hip-hop cannot be changed prior to a 
societal shift (revolution) in who holds power 
and how that power is to be wielded.

In future columns I will detail the historical 
shift in hip-hop, the corporate/industrial 
mechanism, detailing how the final product is 
shaped to these political needs and offer 
detailed strategies and current movements/artists 
whose work is in assertive resistance to this neocolonial condition.

Dr. Jared A. Ball is an assistant professor of 
communication studies at Morgan State University. 
He is editor-at- large of the Journal of Hip-Hop 
and Global Culture from Words, Beats and Life and 
hosts Jazz & Justice Mondays 1-3p EST on DC's 
WPFW 89.3 FM Pacifica Radio. Ball is also the 
founder and creator of FreeMix Radio: The 
Original Mixtape Radio Show, a hip-hop mixtape 
committed to the practice of underground 
emancipatory journalism. He is currently working 
on his first book Hip-Hop as Mass Media: The 
Mixtape and Emancipatory Journalism and can be found online at voxunion.com.

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