On Balls Crazy Emails, The Illuminati & Criminally Minded Hip-Hop

The thing about being an even semi-quasi public figure is that you get emailed all sorts of balls crazy shit. I expect emails from rappers, but everyday I get emails from Dutch cat owners, water filter salesmen and other lost souls who, thanks to the wonders of the internet, don't have to contain their craziness to the people physically around them. But yesterday I got one of the most balls crazy emails of all-time, and since it actually and accidentally raised some good points, I'm posting it.

Check it out below, then I'll break it down. And yes, this is verbatim from an actual email.



"After more than 20 years, I've finally decided to tell the world what I witnessed in 1991, which I believe was one of the biggest turning point in popular music, and ultimately American society. I have struggled for a long time weighing the pros and cons of making this story public...So I've simply decided to leave out names and all the details that may risk my personal well being and that of those who were, like me, dragged into something they weren't ready for.

Between the late 80's and early 90’s, I was what you may call a “decision maker” with one of the more established company in the music industry.The industry was different back then. Since technology and media weren’t accessible to people like they are today, the industry had more control over the public and had the means to influence them anyway it wanted. This may explain why in early 1991, I was invited to attend a closed door meeting with a small group of music business insiders to discuss rap music’s new direction. Little did I know that we would be asked to participate in one of the most unethical and destructive business practice I’ve ever seen.

The meeting was held at a private residence on the outskirts of Los Angeles. I remember about 25 to 30 people being there, most of them familiar faces. Among the attendees was a small group of unfamiliar faces who stayed to themselves and made no attempt to socialize beyond their circle. Based on their behavior and formal appearances, they didn't seem to be in our industry. Our casual chatter was interrupted when we were asked to sign a confidentiality agreement preventing us from publicly discussing the information presented during the meeting...A few people refused to sign and walked out. No one stopped them. I was tempted to follow but curiosity got the best of me. A man who was part of the “unfamiliar” group collected the agreements from us.

Quickly after the meeting began, one of my industry colleagues (who shall remain nameless like everyone else) thanked us for attending. He then gave the floor to a man who only introduced himself by first name and gave no further details about his personal background...At this point I begin to feel slightly uncomfortable at the strangeness of this gathering...He explained that the companies we work for had invested millions into the building of privately owned prisons and that our positions of influence in the music industry would actually impact the profitability of these investments....We were told that these prisons were built by privately owned companies who received funding from the government based on the number of inmates. The more inmates, the more money the government would pay these prisons. It was also made clear to us that since these prisons are privately owned, as they become publicly traded, we’d be able to buy shares...

At this point, my industry colleague who had first opened the meeting took the floor again and answered our questions. He told us that since our employers had become silent investors in this prison business, it was now in their interest to make sure that these prisons remained filled. Our job would be to help make this happen by marketing music which promotes criminal behavior, rap being the music of choice...I remember looking around to make sure I wasn't dreaming and saw half of the people with dropped jaws. My daze was interrupted when someone shouted, “Is this a f****** joke?”...Two of the men who were part of the “unfamiliar” group grabbed the man who shouted out and attempted to remove him from the house. A few of us, myself included, tried to intervene. One of them pulled out a gun and we all backed off.

As the months passed, rap music had definitely changed direction...Rap acts that talked about politics or harmless fun were quickly fading away as gangster rap started dominating the airwaves. Only a few months had passed since the meeting but I suspect that the ideas presented that day had been successfully implemented. It was as if the order has been given to all major label executives. The music was climbing the charts and most companies when more than happy to capitalize on it. Each one was churning out their very own gangster rap acts on an assembly line. Everyone bought into it, consumers included. Violence and drug use became a central theme in most rap music...

...Now that I have a greater understanding of how private prisons operate, things make much more sense than they ever have. I see how the criminalization of rap music played a big part in promoting racial stereotypes and misguided so many impressionable young minds into adopting these glorified criminal behaviors which often lead to incarceration...Although I plan on remaining anonymous for obvious reasons, my goal now is to get this information out to as many people as possible. Please help me spread the word..

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Ok, deep breath.

I have no real interest in figuring out if this "secret meeting" actually happened. All this Illuminati talk sounds balls crazy to me, but lord knows some "crazy" conspiracy theories turned out to be true. I'm more interested in the central questions this story raises. Namely, how responsible is hip-hop for crime/violence/imprisonment/etc.?

I'll try to take this one point at a time.

First, this narrative that hip-hop before 1990 was happy, shiny and politically conscious music is used repeatedly, and is repeatedly a gross oversimplification. The truth is that hip-hop has had "gangster" elements in it since the beginning. Just take a look at the cover of even KRS-ONE's debut album in 1987, or anything Schooly D was doing in the mid '80s. And while gangster rap would reach the mainstream in the '90s, there's continued to be no shortage of "Rap acts that talked about politics or harmless fun."

Second, how responsible is rap music for filling our prisons? Not very, if at all. Music obviously has an affect on the listener, and rappers can influence lives for positive or negative, but are approximately 1 million black men currently incarcerated in the U.S. How many of those men would be in jail if their lives had been the exact same in every regard, except they only ever listened to pop music instead of rap? I have no idea, 7? 20? 100? Whatever the number, it's insignificant.

If you were to go into those prisons and ask those men why they were locked up approximately 0 of them would say, "I was going to go to college and get a job as a mortage broker, but then I heard the Clipse and decided fuck it, I'm gonna sell crack."

Poverty, education, job opportunities, parenting, law enforcement and judicial policies, these are the forces that truly push men into prison. And while rap can reflect those forces, and can in some ways magnify them, music is literally the least important part of that equation. In fact, off hand I can think of something else that was exponentially more responsible for the boom in incarceration in the early '90s than rap music. Men are in jail because of crack, not crack music.

So while it still sounds ball crazy to me, fine, let's say that meeting actually happened. And each of those music executives went back to their respective labels and decided to push "gangster" rap instead of other subgenres of hip-hop. Let's assume that's completely true - how much different would the world have been if that meeting had never happened? Not very.

Now I'm not saying we should give all rap music a free pass. We have a right, a right we don't use nearly often enough, to demand that the music we listen to reflects our values. But to focus on the music instead of the forces that are primarily responsible for actual crime is a huge mistake. Although it's an easy mistake, which is why rap is so often the scapegoat for many of societies ills.

More importantly, if we truly want to see our communities change for the better, it's a waste of time to focus on the "Illuminati" and record label execs. Conspiracy theories, even the true ones, can indirectly make us passive, make us feel like the power to change the world is in the hands of the powerful and not in ours. That's a more dangerous thought than any "secret meeting" could ever produce, and the reason why I just spent the last few hours of my life writing a detailed response to a balls crazy email.

In closing, I'd just like to say.....