![]() ![]() Asante Jr.’s book It’s Bigger Than Hip Hop: The Rise of the Post-Hip-Hop Generationand from Tricia Rose’s book The Hip Hop Wars: What We Talk About When We Talk About Hip Hop - and Why It Matters. Several years prior to becoming a high school electives teacher at a charter school in my home city of Washington, D.C., I started to learn about the hip-hop industry, particularly from M. I teach primarily Black and Brown students - a number of whom are growing up cash-poor and under similar circumstances as me when I was in high school. The relationship between most emcees with record deals from major industry labels can be likened to the relationship between Pinocchio and Geppetto: The industry pulls strings, dictates what gets promoted, and what gets sold, and many emcees with record deals lip-sync to the tune of whatever sells, even at the expense of their personhood and/or community. But the hip-hop industry is neither owned nor controlled by the people who create the music this is reflected in much of the content of commercial hip-hop music. Hip-hop music was conceived by impoverished Black and Brown youth, a score of whom were immigrants or the children of immigrants in the South Bronx, New York, in the 1970s following the Black Freedom Struggle of the 1950s and 1960s. (Since I originally wrote this lesson, the industry has further consolidated and the Big Four has become the Big Three.) She and other students were dismayed to learn that four major record labels, the Big Four - Universal Music Group, Sony BMG, EMI Group, and Warner Music Group - produce and distribute more than 80 percent of the music that is sold and purchased. Natasha raised these questions during our study of the commercialization of the hip-hop industry. Rucker, those companies profit off of culture they appropriated? And we purchase the music that we grew up with, but it’s not truly our music, but it comes from our culture?” ![]()
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