OP is right. And there are other factors at play here too.
I refuse to have a back and forth with those who underestimate the power of music to influence culture. The CIA wasn’t following Aretha and other music artists for nothing.
But even beyond the music, there are key deficits in our community that extend the power of celebrities.
For one, the only way you reach acclaim in white owned media is by being as violent, sexual, ignorant and self-hating as possible. And these types of images are far more ubiquitous than positive uplifting ones. So we are trained to associate powerful people with ignorance and it’s sold to us without challenge. Nobody talks about how a good number of those artists are college grads and or married while they are promoting thug/hoe culture to their fans.
Next, our society did a great job of fukking with our communities and making it so that we are so busy working just to survive that we barely have time to attend to raising children and investing in our communities. Then schools dropped tremendously in quality and the provision of critical thinking skills and opportunities that give students alternatives to street life. So kids get raised by these hooligans without interference. There will always be fukkery in the media. It slides in the back door with free speech. But family leaders and role models and schools are supposed to have a buffering effect against its power. In the 90s I listened to plenty of shyt that was wildly inappropriate (word to Uncle Luke), but leadership in my family/schools/communities ensured that shyt stayed where it was supposed to stay: on the radio in the realm of fictional entertainment.
Then, the way a lot of harmful themes are packaged to the black community is through the lens of racial rebellion. That’s the root of hip hop culture. It was supposed to be an artful expression of the rejection of issues in our society. Namely racism. So we feel loyalty not just to the talent but to them as representatives of our race. But somewhere along the lines, it got infiltrated. Ya’ll are music heads so you probably know when and where. But it shifted from consciousness to hedonism. I remember Sean Paul saying in an interview that music execs told him to dead that conscious Bob Marley shyt and focus more on fukking hoes and more “light hearted themes”.
In short, the music changed and the community didn’t have the resources to temper youth against its influence. And all of this is by design. So while other cultures also consume toxic elements of entertainment, their cultural expectations keep them from thinking that being a k-pop idol is a viable career option or that twerking is a skill set.
What’s really frustrating about this is that people want to completely throw away hip hop because of its bad elements, but that’s an awful take. It’s powerful as an artform and there is room to reform
it. There’s some really good talent out there too.
