I agree with that. I'm saying though, their success had more to do with contract (label deal), than being independent. Master P had the money to push his underground stuff and 100,000k is good but it wasn't like he was going platinum in the streets before he was signed. Cash Money was on the scene and had a label deal before they really deserved to buzz wise.
Independence has become a code word more than a real thing. Nipsey is technically independent, but he has the same connects that major label artist have, so does he get full independent props? 'Hustle In The House' had mainstream push. Nipsey is just one example but there are a lot of situations like that.
All the time. The bay area is coined as extremely urban, as if the non-black population just appeared out of nowhere by magic.
And San Francisco is still pissed about it. San Francisco natives act like everybody in the city is broke and lives in Hell's Kitchen.
They do try to portray Oakland and Richmond like south side Chicago and Detroit. If you went to school in south side it's like an HBCU, if you went to school in the bay it's like a united nations convention. Detroit is weird though, because they try to portray Detroit as whiter than it really is, then they try to portray the SFBA as blacker than it really is.
It tries to be slick and portray it as an urban mecca, which is sort of the same thing.
Oakland had black plurality for a decade and a half, that's it. That time has long since passed. EPA has never had a large black ratio beyond the hype and crime at it's worst in Palo Alto has never been high. Palo Alto segregates EPA and it's residency is reduced to around 30,000 people so stats are exaggerated. The murder rate for EPA last year was 6...6! Six people dying all year is excellent news, nothing about those stats come across as dangerous. EPA at it's worst (a couple of years) was always per capita and never in general.
Oakland at it's peak was 43-45% Black. That's MORE than enough for there to be entire neighborhoods, districts, census tracts, and high-schools where Blacks make up far and away a majority of people you'll interact with on a daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly basis.
They try to portray The Bay as urban, because The Bay IS urban. Urban isn't ALWAYS synonymous with Black. Come down South to some rural areas and rural towns where Blacks make up 50% to 95% of the town's population.
There once was a time when there were alot of White homeless drug addicts, criminals, and poor Whites in certain working class
URBAN neighborhoods in SF like The Tenderloin, and The Castro. That portrayal was accurate. They never tried to tie-in what was going on in The Tenderloin with Black poverty. Hell, I didn't even know neighborhoods like Fillmore and Hunters-Point Bayview even existed until maybe 6-7yrs ago, because I thought SF was nothing but Whites and Asians, and that historically Black neighborhoods and projects didn't exist in The City. If anything they've under represented SF's Black community, as areas like Lakeview, Sunnydale, Hunters Point-Bayview, and Fillmore have been underrepresented in the media when talking about SF.
And METRO Detroit isn't THAT Black. The city it's self is pretty Black, but the metropolitan area of Detroit is majority White and Middle-Eastern. Black people only make up 22% of Metro Detroits population compared to 70% for White people. The way they portray Detroit, you'd think those stats were reverse.
