I must admit; hearing that Jay-Z is allegedly the first “person” to become a billionaire in Hip-Hop has a great ring to it. Sadly, no matter how much we want that statement to be true, the fact of the matter is that it is unequivocally NOT based on fact. People would be foolish to believe otherwise. This “foolishness’ is simply the residue of one of the many false narratives that have been thrust upon us in order to manipulate and molest our reality for the benefit of those who are outside of us. These narratives are crafted in order to draw our minds away from the fact that just like Africa and the Americas, Hip-Hop as a culture has been colonized and commercially hi-jacked. How can it not be when the people who created it are STILL colonized and commercially hi-jacked?
“COMMERCIALLY HI-JACKED? WHAT IS THIS GUY TALKING ABOUT?”
At the inception or birth of the Hip-Hop culture, all we (so-called African Americans and Hispanics) wanted to do was break dance, DJ, party, and rap. We, unfortunately, had no interest in the business portion of it. We were blind to how Hip-Hop had the potential to make us moguls of our own cultural expressions. Those outside of us, foreigners to our culture, were aware of how blind we were to our own potential. They could see that all we wanted to do was have fun. So what did they do? The colonized and commercialized our culture and created what we now know as the “Hip-Hop Industry”. So let’s not be naive to the fact of who the true beneficiaries of Hip-Hop are.
