a connoisseur of precious things

- Nipsey on a racist, capitalist music industry in Complex

it’s because the corporate structure of their companies would not allow ownership….i felt like it was racist… you think I don’t know what the asset is? you think I don’t understand where the real value is?

This has been in my drafts for months, but as I institute some welcome changes in my life, and listen to Beyonce’s “Ghost” thinking how comes? I’m remembering what a relief this interview with Nipsey was this year.

Nipsey talks about white owners of entertainment companies who are the gatekeepers and arbiters of mainstream culture, and who trade off the cultural and financial capital that being associated with blackness affords. He then draws a deft parallel between how major labels use black rappers as frontmen for their white-owned companies, and how hip hop/black culture publications might have precariously employed black/latin@ writers/freelancers/interns but not black/latin@ editors/partners: “They’re using you like these labels use these rappers. Listen to me real quick.”

Within and against this economy in which black people are native informants but not consultants; freelancers but not editors; fixers for foreign correspondents but not journalists, Nipsey rearranges value systems. Artists and producers get paid for their creative work. He’s also alive to what it means to be poor and black in America, and resists a prison industrial complex that would shit on the lives of formerly incarcerated people: “I got employees that have felonies and they can’t get jobs. They work for me”. Why equate all of this with manliness (“I would be less of a man…”) I don’t know, but small signs and wonders…

At the end of the year, as at the beginning, Carrie Mae Weems in my head like “I knew, not from memory but from hope, that there were other models by which to live”