Blog #7 - In Rap Industry, Rivalries as Marketing Tool

When we viewed the video in class of Kool Moe Dee and Busy Bee I found it really educational, understanding where one battle arose from (and even where the tradition of battling gets a lot of its roots). I haven’t gotten a good grip on where so many of the contemporary battles arise from. The Biggie / Tupac thing makes a bit of sense to me after half a dozen side-line conversations in class, but it still seems like there are so many producers and artists and they all have beef and form little cliques—it kind of reminds me of high school, which is a place I *don’t* like to revisit when I don’t have to!

These articles are pretty broken up and it’s hard to catch a theme. Ja Rule’s section is insightful and gives me some sense of his own fidelity. His comments about feeling more comfortable around white fans kind of surprised me and I don’t really know whether to think of that as stereotype or his experience or “common sense”—but the dangers of his job in general do command respect.

Mr. Padell said that performers who make a 500,000-copy

gold album, might end up with more money working for UPS.

Many of these costs apply to musicians working in any

genre, but the high costs of producers, the short careers,

the pressure to support family members, and the competitive

flaunting of wealth weigh heavily on hip-hop acts. As one

hip-hop executive explained, a rock band can show up at a

music event in a Honda.” I wonder if that is a superficial distinction, to claim that rap has more expenses because of the nature of the style. I would agree that producers may be more expensive and they are perceived to be more necessary, but I think that is a function more of the higher record sales that we’ve discussed variously in this class. It costs more to succeed in rap, but I think success in rap is on a bigger scale than success in rock over the past ten or fifteen years. In both cases, a lot of the money goes into expenses, but to claim that tithing and family support disproportionately effects rapper’s salaries seems to both glamorize the virtue of rappers and degrade that of rockers. I would *love* to see real data about the relative philanthropy of rappers and rockers in comparable degrees of success, and I imagine it doesn’t correlate at all to style or genre (but rather individual personality)

After reading this article, I find it’s a little repulsive to use violence and animosity so plainly to sell albums. What message does that pass on to the consumer? Using grudges decorated in threats to sell records seems so corrupt—it doesn’t seem to go for the artists well being except the petty cash flow and it doesn’t benefit the society to which those messages are circulated. I’m left thinking of Pink Floyd’s great commentary on the record business—“Welcome to the machine…”