It’s Hard To Be A Rich Radical

Welcome to Listening Habits, a column where I share the music and musical topics I’ve been fixated on recently.

What could compel someone to spend four hours on a YouTube essay mostly about the rapper Killer Mike, a B-tier Dungeon Family affiliate who parlayed success as one-half of Run The Jewels to become a B-tier rap A-lister? In truth, it is no worse than sitting through six hours of self-assigned Super Bowl performer Jay-Z and Rick Ruben yap about rap and also therapy. Or watching a three-hour documentary on disgraced Silicon Valley fraudster Elizabeth Holmes in an hilariously, extremely sold out theater. Or watching four hours of Nick Saban coaching propaganda. Or one hour of an ESPN soft focus profile of Ben Simmons that tries to sidestep the questions of Simmons’ work ethic. I watch a lot of nonsense I guess it’s safe to say—and people are apparently greatly long-winded.

Maybe a better question is who would actually be compelled to make a four-hour YouTube video on Killer Mike? For that answer, we’d have to get into who FD Signifier is and who Jared Ball is, and the importance of the latter’s book The Myth And Propaganda of Black Buying Power. Then we would have to talk about Black leftist politics and anticapitalist critique and how exactly we got to a point where a bunch of people think Killer Mike is at war with black activist streamers and content creators and shooting at them in random freestyles.

Instead of that, let’s do this: last week, FD Signifier made a video about “Black Misleadership.” A well-done screed against powerful and famous black figures like Jay-Z, Oprah, and yes, Barack Obama, who have parlayed blackness and their proximity to black culture in order to enrich themselves monetarily and reputationally without returning anything to black people beyond useless symbols and tokenized gestures. This exposé of sorts eventually leads to a personal back and forth that he’s been having with Killer Mike for a year now.

Killer Mike, as mentioned before, is a protege of sorts of Big Boi from Outkast and a genuinely dope 2000s-era Atlanta rapper who brought energy and aggression to his tracks while wielding a thoughtful pen. In the beginning he was a guy that just sounded great and was quick with clever rhymes. The best way I can explain it is he had a prominent feature on Madden 2004 and that’s exactly the kind of place you wanted to find him.

The 2000s and it’s brand of big-budget rap did not always have the best use for him though, he eventually left his deal with Columbia Records and with Big Boi to become an independent artist. During this time he made some of the best rap projects of his life, often to little fanfare and very little money (ain’t that always how it goes). But he had finally taken that aggression and grizzly bear voice of his and used it to perfect effect: taking on the American fascist oligarchy of the time. He rapped about rich black sellouts, he rapped about black liberationist politics, he rapped about socialism and taking on the police and the CIA and the ultimate enemy of black progress (at the time at least) Ronald Reagan.

Suffice it to say, Mike was a political rapper, and a rapper that seemed well-versed in socialist black liberationist dogma. And then he met El-P and started Run The Jewels and eventually became really rich. Now, this might get me in trouble with some of Defector’s audience, which is full of older lawyers for some reason, but I am not the biggest Run The Jewels fan. It’s not my contention that RTJ changed Mike in any way but the combination of him and El-P and this big, avuncular production style tended to water them both down into something that feels created for action movie trailers or a Need For Speed soundtrack. It’s rap music for the Brooklyn dad Twitter account (is he still going?)

Anyways, Mike has parlayed his newfound post-RTJ success into not only wealth for himself but somewhat of a rebrand as a black businessman: a man who’s going to save the black community of Atlanta by doing what the Nation of Islam supposedly did in Chicago. Ignoring all the actual history of what went on there, I guess it’s a noble cause. But wouldn’t you know it, becoming a reputable business man puts you into rooms with a lot of powerful people that Mike the rapper once would have eviscerated, and now he has to play nice with people like Georgia’s republican Governor Brian Kemp and former Mayor of Atlanta Keisha Lance Bottoms. But Mike is doing more than playing nice. He’s actively defending or promoting them in public while disparaging seemingly better politicians like Stacey Abrams, who ran in opposition to Kemp, and replacing the rhetoric of Kwame Ture, Huey Newton, and Malcolm X with Thomas Sowell, which… are you fucking kidding me dude?

He’s also doing a lot of interviews. Interviews like the one he did with another socialist liberation-minded rapper in Vic Mensa. I like what Vic wants to do in this space, but like a lot of rappers that suddenly pivot into content creation, he’s ill-equipped to interview another rapper he respects and lets Mike dance around his questions easily and without pushback. Don’t worry about it Vic, you’ll get there. But it’s long been clear that Mike likes people who won’t challenge him to explain himself or explain anything about all those books he keeps claiming to have read.

And so we come again to the limitations of our famous artists, particularly for me within rap. As a kid that similarly grew up listening to a lot of politically-minded rap, revolutionary (seeming) rap, and frankly any kind of ‘stay woke’ raps, this is a tried and true tradition of finding out how limited some musicians are outside of a recording booth and a notebook. It all makes sense to me, now, that it’s easier to be righteous and passionate when you’re expressing feelings in your art than it is to put that passion into something actionable. It’s just as clear that succeeding in any industry requires artists to compromise themselves in some ways or be willfully exploited.

As a kid it was consistently disappointing every time rappers I liked sold their songs to a cheesy commercial or said something fucked up or defended fucked up things or got really weird about black women on Twitter. Or, they can be just plain lames. And it was disappointing how easily money turned a lot of them into sudden conservatives, full of right-wing doctrine about bootstraps and the fantasy of a black capitalist utopia, conveniently forgetting the part about how capitalism itself causes so much of what ails black people in America.

At best, you could say that Killer Mike’s politics are now libertarian, but really he is just another black conservative, like Jay-Z, like Kanye, or 50 Cent, or Oprah. Black conservatives are having quite the moment right now in the culture. And it would be a lot easier for him and others like him if they just came out and admitted it. Stop pretending you recently read The Autobiography of Malcolm X and admit you are really rich and you like not paying taxes and everyone else be damned. It would honestly get you a lot less hassle from actual black leftists than this whole routine, the necessity of lying about your beliefs or the various forms of sabotaging real black liberation or building of wealth. At least Kanye is making it obvious.

In truth, I don’t think that Killer Mike or Jay-Z have changed much politically since they made more money. Particularly in Mike’s case, I think you have a very typical story of a black man who went through the machinery of the music industry and got spit out with nothing to show for it, probably feeling a lot of shame and embarrassment and envy over how his early career went. Like a lot of young black men, Mike draped himself in the costume of black radical history and rebellion to give himself confidence and reinvent his failure as being “too real for this industry.” Why? Because what goes unsaid a lot of the time is that a good number of these dudes are not reading Revolutionary Suicide by Huey Newton but they really like that photo of him in the wicker chair, holding rifles in each hand. They have not sat with the words of Malcolm X or his willingness to take on his own movement over the mistreatment of black women in the Nation of Islam, but they really like that photo of him looking out the window with a rifle in his hand. The Black Panthers looked unbelievably cool. The Civil Rights era photo of Gloria Richardson pushing a bayonet away from her direction is cool. It’s all myth-making and illusion, and too many rappers love to embrace the imagery while divorcing it from context or knowledge. Some of them also loved the image of Donald Trump, and well, how did that work out for everybody?

But this is how you get Jay-Z, uber capitalist if there ever was one, comparing himself to Fred Hampton and Che Guevara in his raps about making a lot of money. To actually study and live with, and, more importantly, put these politics into action is not cool. It’s actually quite long, arduous, and serious work and does not have the sex appeal of “black business” and the fantasy of Norman Rockwell for black people that this new black conservatism is selling.

These are people that use the specter of real places like Black Wall Street in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and fake places like Wakanda, as a postcard to their fantasy of black business meccas that the community will support and benefit from through late-stage trickle down Reagonomics and recirculating their black dollars amongst the people. To paraphrase a movie about an out-of-touch capitalist with a savior complex that is a favorite to many rapper: I guess we really all do live long enough to see ourselves become the villain.