Hip-hop music is being flushed out by capitalism, award-winning MTV VJ Amanda Lewis said last Friday at a black arts panel discussion at Harvard University.
Titled ‘Whose Music Is It Anyway: History of Jazz, Rock n’ Roll, and Hip-Hop in the 21st Century,’ the panel also included Harvard African-American Music professor Ingrid T. Monson, Avatar Records president Larry Robinson, music video director Little X and The Boston Globe Arts and Entertainment writer Vanessa Jones. Topics ranged from ownership to a musical genre to the misrepresentation of women in music videos.
‘The creative people are owned and operated by people who have no creativity,’ said Lewis, who dominated the panel.
Robinson, who controls the copyrights to more than 1,000 songs including those recorded by Brandy, Tupac Shakur, Redman and others, said a new trend is emerging, however.
‘Every kid in America wants to be Puffy or Dre,’ Robinson said, ‘and kids wanting to control the business side is new.’
But ‘when all we see is diamonds,’ Lewis added, referring to the public antics and iced-out producers such as P. Diddy, ‘our priorities get all screwed up.’
Although Robinson admitted ‘there’s a lot of press about the ‘bling-bling,” the panel had a larger issue with the hip-hop lifestyle portrayed in music videos.
When Little X, the director behind Mystikal’s ‘Danger’ and Jay-Z’s ‘Big Pimpin” videos, began to defend such videos, the other panelists eagerly disagreed.
‘And why are all of those girls naked?’ Robinson asked.
Although Little X claimed he is no longer interested in making such videos, he attempted to justify his previous works.
‘When you put a group of women next to my artist, people will look,’ Little X admitted. ‘Sex is always going to be around.’
‘But a lot of those videos,’ he said, referring to Mystikal, ‘should have never been shown on TV before 2 a.m. because it was so raw.’
Since racism in this country has so often been sexualized, as pointed out in the lecture by Monson, African-American women, both on the panel and in the audience, said they were offended by such objectified representations of woman.
‘My problem comes from shots just from the neck down,’ Lewis said, ‘because in a music videos you are only seeing visuals, and those visuals say a lot.’
In defense of the industry, Robinson admitted ‘record companies are like sheep,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t matter which way they go as long as it sells.’
But recently, record companies have been selling a lot of white artists performing styles historically typical of black music. Little X said those genres will remain characteristic of black artists, however.
‘But no matter how many Elvises or Eminems there are, you can’t take it away,’ Little X said. ‘It is our gift and once it is out there it is an influence. No one can own an influence.’