The Rap Musicverse II: Industry Blackballing and the rise of the Hip-Hop Supervillain

black·ball
/ˈblakˌbôl/

verb
past tense: blackballed; past participle: blackballed
1. reject (someone, usually a candidate applying to become a member of a private club), typically by means of a secret ballot.” her husband was blackballed when he tried to join the Country Club”

In Part 1, I hypothesized that “The Rap Musicverse” was experiencing its first-ever supervillain (Hip-Hop has had bad guys & villains before, but not a SUPER villain) crisis with 6ix9ine. 6ix9ine, as any supervillain, was attempting to rewrite reality. He was attempting to redefine the laws of ‘moral gravity’ in his own alternate universe where he survives & thrives outside of the scrutiny of the music industry ecosystem & the vanguards of street culture, I called this alternate universe, “Game B”. This theoretical destination is where super villains go to carve out their own distinct reality outside the clenches of the music industry. A place where radio spins are not essential, DJ’s won’t play your music & media outlets will eschew at the idea of featuring you. Game B is a manifestation of the hubris of digital independence, an attempted decoupling from the status quo. The internet (social media) disrupts those rules and 6ix9ine bet the house that his energy, clout, and his 24 million followers are all he needed to win. When Nicki Minaj collaborated with 6ix9ine, they achieved a #1 song together. With that win, he became an existential crisis for Hip-Hop street culture, and the sacred industry narrative that it, and it only it, will be the sole proprietor of the “Hip-Hop dream” narrative — “You need the record label to make it in rap music, to be rich and famous”. With that narrative being threatened, something happened. The invisible powerful men & women behind the scenes took an atomic action when the time came for 6ix9ine to release his subsequent album. In a multi-channel, coordinated move, he was blackballed. His album was essentially shadowbanned off the streaming sites and Billboard preemptively observed their bundles policy earlier than listed, but then claimed that they did count the bundles, it got messy, and we can’t see under the hood. 6ix9ine’s album came short of his projected numbers and since numbers are his & his fan's key metric of success, he suffered severe brand erosion as a result. He lost the narrative war and his Game B was neutralized (for now). The aftermath from the Hip-Hop community was indifference, they had no problems with this since 6ix9ine was a pariah and no one wanted him to win. But I saw something worrisome. If the industry can launch a sophisticated, universal, attack to blackball someone, it disambiguates the opaque mystery, that they are also king makers based on desire and not on meritocracy. The classic cynical narrative is that the industry is “rigged”, and this action exposes its possibility further, which isn’t healthy for the music industry in the long term.

So with the recession of 6ix9ine, (at least for the time being) another supervillain has emerged, Tory Lanez. Now, how did Tory Lanez become a supervillain? There are some baseline requirements to become a Hip-Hop supervillain, in my opinion, to the record label system. Let’s unpack the main 3 points.

1. Tory became a record label-free agent at the beginning of the quarantine.
2. Tory Lanez was the first to successfully traverse the uncertain effects of the pandemic by creating alternate methods of artist value creation and revenue streams with Quarantine Radio & YouTube live performances.
3. Tory Lanez became a model artist to mirror to go independent and thrive with the presence of “A-lister”. (Remember the narrative implication is that you will never resemble an A-lister without the record label system)

So he became independent, innovated novel revenue models to follow, and thrived under the rough seas of the pandemic, but most importantly, became an exponent of not needing the record label system anymore.

Tory lanez had the DNA markings of being a supervillain to the industry if the got more successful and ambitious.

So this brings us to his unfortunate incident with Megan the stallion. Here is where things get dicey for the music industry. The industry, in concert, made another moral stance injunction. Another coordinated shadow banning on streaming sites was exorcised based upon moral grounds (in this situation, the case is in progress, unlike 6ix9ine, which was already decided in the court of law, but later he faced the court of public opinion). Both of these shadow bannings were done on artists who were renegades to the music industry narrative, in their own ways. Prime targets, one you can say was, deserved, the other, it’s a debate.

Either way, it brings us to the main questions of this post.

1. What are the moral grounds for coordinated blackballing within the Hip-hop genre of the music industry?
2. Are we fine as a culture, with unknown people, with invisible hands, making iron fist decisions, at will based on moral grounds and not based on the results of a legal decision?
3. How can we dispute that those same blackballers are not also kingmakers? (Remember the narrative is talent wins, and meritocracy is king — this casts a shadow on that)

This is my most principal question as we close this topic. I am not saying that they are or not, but if you can take down someone, you can also build in the same, coordinated, multichannel fashion. The industry’s current vigilante justice behavior helps to disambiguate the claim that there are preferred artists if you flip this blackballing coin over, from newcomers to veteran acts. This is a slippery slope and requires all of us to remain vigilant in every sector of the community.