EXTENDED COMMENTS & ARGUMENT: BALL, PART III

This post is in response to Diana’s blog post about Section IV and also functions as the author’s argument for section III.

Diana – You write that, “So when reading the article through the perspective of Ball I didn’t quite get it, until I realized how I was, and in some aspect still am, a part of the “Colonialism” of Hip-Hop.”

I think Ball would agree with that you are part of the “colonialism” of hip-hop. Ball writes about the colonization of Black America that is systemic not only within our country but is being perpetrated by our country throughout the world – even more so today than ever before because of the media’s use of technology. Because colonialism is systemic and wide-spread, all Americans perform their role within this colony: colonized and colonizer.

You also write, “…in the 80’s when…hip-hop started to become popular I really enjoyed it. It was the days of MC Hammer and The Sugar Hill Gang…I loved the beat and the lyrics…Then something happened, I am not sure what it was but I remember Rap and Hip- Hop getting a bad ‘rap’…I also felt like I didn’t want to listen to words about jail, and guns, and drugs, and poverty. Rappers were getting shot and I think this is when the ‘Colonialism’ may have started.”

I think Ball would disagree with you on when colonialism started. Ball is deliberate to use the word colonialism literally – in section 3 he helps to define his use of the word by quoting the French black philosopher/writer Frantz Fanon who wrote, “Colonialism is…the conquest of a national territory and the oppression of a people: that is all.” Throughout the four-part essay, Ball writes about colonialism in its most basic historical application – just as the citizens of India, Africa, the Caribbean, South America, North America, and the South Pacific were all colonists controlled and exploiated by their European or American colonizer – so too does contemporary Black America function as a colony within White America. He notes that Black America lives in spatially distinct neighborhoods and forms the basis of both America’s cheap labor and its raw materials (i.e. hip-hop! much of America’s raw materials today are cultural not natural).

Ball writes, “Black people must sell their labor cheaply and/or be willing to conform themselves to the needs and will of an elite in order to ‘succeed.’ Hip-hop, like every other cultural expression generated from this community, has over the last twenty years been grafted to this structural need to systematically produce what is conducive to this system’s survival” (AKA the powerful within white America).

Ball is not arguing that there is a lack of exposure to hip-hop. He in fact mentions the opposite – discussing hip-hop as a primary force within America’s popular culture. Ball argues that because of the colonial structure operating in America, the rich and powerful elite produce and disseminate hip-hop in a manner that benefits them. It is beneficial to the rich and powerful for Black America to make hip-hop about – as Diana succinctly wrote – “jail, and guns, and drugs, and poverty” because it perpetuates the colonial relationship of affluent white America to poverty-stricken Black America. In other words, the rich white men in charge of America’s media benefit from producing media that puts all other groups down and perpetuates their own authority. Black America and white America tune in to the message that being Black means growing up in urban projects, being raised by a single mother, doing and dealing drugs, with becoming a hip-hop celebrity the only means of escape.

Diana – Ball is very concerned with exposure to hip-hop, but he is concerned that there isn’t enough exposure to hip-hop that deviates from the above popular culture norm (that he considers 'fraudelent'). He notes two problems: smaller producers are unable to access the few conduits that are controlled by today’s high media conglomerates, but in the instances that they do produce hip-hop accessed by the public, the audience isn’t interested because it has been taught that hip-hop is about the impoverishment of Black America. Ball proceeds to cite eight examples demonstrating the ways in which American media (particularly in the D.C. area) adheres to the tenets of colonialism.