Yes, as far back as the late 1970s, Black America invented rap and hip-hop culture, and it set the world on fire.
One thing whites love to do as far as cultural attrition or cultural misappropriation is to take credit for something that isn’t theirs. They copycat and plagiarize the clothing styles and the language of love and the beats and turn it into something they think they own. And just like they ‘discovered’ America and braided hair, but didn’t know that ALL of it existed before they were born and before they even thought about it after the fact … they think that buying and appropriating the culture means they own it when they still really don’t.
The only difference now is how easily Black America went from singing and beating out the best things or the funniest things to the loveliest things about our Black culture to demanding that the United States of America kill us and all of our people and children. It went from love and honor and peace and respect to a hardcore mission of hatred and suicide and self-imploded destruction.
We Had Already Made Them Excessively Rich. What Else Did They Want from Us?
Answer: Everything. Even our Black-ass souls. After a while, and by and by, we weren’t good enough to eat at the same table we’d prepared for them.
We were misappropriated into another kind of slave, a cheap easy one hard up for our on-screen “representatives” to take the place of our highest and truest selves as humans and artists. Then we started praying for a day to come when we wouldn’t be killed for breathing while Black.
Oh yes, the racism is REAL. No doubt…
The world has ridden our backs like donkeys for centuries and never given our people credit where credit is past and long overdue. It’s long past time for Black America to own what is rightfully theirs, like the land in South Africa, this music does not belong to them either.
By the honor of invention, the first thing we need to do is unstop the OVERFLOWING WHITE SUPREMACIST TOILET that has been filling up our radios and music stations since the 1990s.
This is not theirs to claim on behalf of the world. It is ours, this credit BELONGS to Black America, not to Asia and anyone else. And yes, it IS important not to allow our place to be lost in the influence and impact we have had on the world, globally.
That’s why they can fake a history book now telling lies about beginnings of African foundations in Greece and Rome when we should know by know that it’s a lie.
But we need to clean our act up because what is going on in the rap and hip-hop culture and the Game amongst those whose ancestors invented and discovered it is nothing more than pure unmitigated filth. We truly need to go back to honor and respect and love and tell the truth about this country without asking for our own people to be murdered cold dead in the streets.
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We need to return to SPEAKING LIFE to our people and honoring our culture and elders that helped set the world on fire and made it FILTHY RICH to our own detriment:
This was US back when this stuff was invented from Day One:
There was a limit to the sexiness. The implication of it was quite enough, and somehow along the way, we got entirely lost:
What was once beautiful and smart and alive faded to deep Black and died shortly thereafter. Next thing we know, it was more popular to die than to live:
KRS-One tried to put an end to it, especially around the time Sister Souljah told asked us why it was so much easier to kill one another rather than our real enemies:
American Bandstanding
They didn’t have a clue about any of this.
Soul Training
Until we put some color and different styles and moves on that black and white mess, they thought they had the Holy Grail of musical influence, and they even thought at one time that ELVIS was a Black man — because who did he copy his style from?
Hint: His own race told him to get his “nigger” music off their country radio stations and TV.
Fast Forward Backward
By the mid-1970s, white folks thought their OWN dances and music was pretty boring…
Our disco, our lights, our colors, our clothing, our language and manner of speaking, our beats, our dances, our STYLE, and SWAG — something about it all was alluring to them and they started making their own stuff out of our leftovers. Even Netflix’s “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” is a little too Black of a Tina Fey-type character to be in denial about what they borrowed -or jacked- from us, dances, attitudes, colorfulness, and all.
It wasn’t even long before white people had to counteract the growing popularity of the Black Jackson Five by inventing for themselves The Osmond Family, but as you can well expect, the Osmonds never gained more than a fourth of the cultural talent and sophisticated of the originals. With their Elvis Presley outfits (Black culture) and Motown hit repeats, they gained some leverage out of the slow start that wasn’t as popular as when they changed their game to match the heat and thorough genius of being Black in America.
They had to tap us if they were going to stay relevant.
What would they have done without us?
Still been chewing on straws and calling hound dogs, more than likely.
Steal Kill Destroy
After a while, if we weren’t going to tear each other apart and do for ourselves what our elders worked to keep white supremacists from doing, it was all either “kill yourselves” or “starve to death.” What a choice.
As promised, we’re the only ones who will sell our own Mama’s and our futures and home and lands for a pack of weed and a piece of ass; which makes it much clearer to see how Black folks were so easily enslaved back in Africa.
Spell it: S- E- L- L- O- U- T.
Let’s see how long it takes white and Asian and even Indian and South African “rappers” and/or beat-boxers to start making money by speaking death to their land and their women, children, and people.
Folks who can’t afford instruments figured out how to make their own with their lips, tongue, and teeth.
Yeah, we started that shit, too…
Let’s get it straight, Black Americans are the only people on the planet CAPABLE of global racial reconciliation.
No one else CAN do it, and we always have. We’ve never failed on that missive,
so racism actually is a white man’s burden.
They NEED the “niggers” that some of us have chosen to become. Without it, they will die.
WE NEVER DID, and we don’t die once their ‘nigger/nigga/niggaz’ is dead. The minute their need for the nigger is gone, so are they. It was never our problem and it needs to get put back where it belongs – out of our lives and music and into theirs.
As a matter of reference, James Baldwin once said, paraphrased “The nigger has always been a white man’s issue. It was never our problem in the first place.”
To imitate someone is to pay the person a genuine compliment — often an unintended compliment.
The imitation isn’t the problem. All are imitators and copiers. Even Elvis Presley was a carbon copy of the inspiration he got from Black musicians and the Black American culture. To Elvis’ credit, there was a video available of him giving credit where it was due, if his estate has not destroyed it by now.
The problem is when someone does not give credit when and where it is due and attempts to pretend that they discovered something that they obviously did not discover.
K-pop did not ‘take the world by storm’, rap and hip-hop music born and bred and inspired by and in Black America did…and even provided the basis for K-pop itself.
Give people their due when you’ve copied their culture, that is an even higher “unintended” compliment.
Be sure the cultural appropriation started way before the 70’s as during the 40’s/50’s jazz was being appropriated by then with the likes of Benny Goodman and gene kruper the Gershwin brothers and others in the jazz circuit
To be sure, it’s been going on much longer — but this piece was focused on K-pop/Hip-Hop, not the other musical genres … the EXACT same goes for blues, jazz, funk, pop, and rock’n’roll, also invented by Black America out of a meager hungry almost-starved slave history, such music as was never known in the history of the world prior to these times.