Meocha Belle 7/4
After attending the Paris Hip-Hop Summit last night and having hip-hop historian and legendary French rapper: Solo come and speak to our class yesterday, we spent the beginning of class time discussing Kevin Liles' talk in relation to what was taught earlier in the day.
Regardless of the optimism my cohort took from Kevin Liles' talk, his main point was that the goal of hip-hop is to build an empire. Masked by offering the idea that "we are Generation E", which stands for- "education, empowerment, and entrepreneurship," Liles got some of his audience members to but into his fairytale. I was not one of them.
He delivered the most basic, inaccurate message that, "faith and will are key" and by "telling your own truth and success will follow you." Sadly enough, some people were gullible enough to believe that those things were enough to become rich, his definition of success.
Although Kevin Liles claimed to be "working hard to give pure hip-hop," when questioned by Frenchmen and artists in the audience, Liles had no idea of anything going on in Paris or that happened in the past. How are you trying to enter a new market when you do not even know artists there or the social climate of the area? Audience members were schooling Liles on historical and cultural facts that anyone trying to break into a new business would already know. People called him out on this and the question & period got very heated!
Industry insiders and artists always preach the message of keeping it real, as did Liles last night, but how can they do so when they are manipulatively capitalizing off of the same people and places they grew up with and in? What ever happened to responsibility? Morality? Ethics? Hip-hop has undoubtedly done a lot for race relations, but it also has fallen into the capitalist trap and needs to be lead by heads that are interested in more than making fast cash.
~Paris Noir 2010
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