The Realness On Chuck D Vs. Peter Rosenberg, Culture Vultures and Hot 97
Why everyone is at each other’s throats all of a sudden
Hot 97 doesn’t exist for any reason other than to exploit hip-hop culture.
While Hot 97 calls itself a hip-hop station — its slogan is “Where Hip-Hop Lives” — it’s really just a black pop station that calls itself a hip-hop. It says so right there in the world’s most accurate encyclopedia. Hot 97 is listed in both Mediabase and Neilsen BDS as a rhythmic contemporary station, i.e. essentially a black top 40 station. It plays a mix of rap, R&B, pop, EDM and some Caribbean music. Hot 97 calls itself a hip-hop station because the term hip-hop has a positive connotation, whereas whatever brand value those other genres once had has long since gone out of them. They’ve long since arrived at the destination hip-hop is headed to, thanks in part to Hot 97.
Hot 97 plays vaguely hip-hop-scented R&B, pop and EDM because that’s the kind of music that most appeals to the lowest common denominator, and Hot 97's business model is based on doing whatever they have to do to get as many people to tune in as they possibly can. They could give a rat’s ass about preserving the culture from which they profit. The only authority they acknowledge is the FCC. Hot 97 is counting on black people not being sophisticated enough to read its Wikipedia entry, let alone understand the machinations of the scam it’s trying to pull.
This would never happen to white people. You would never turn on an alt rock station and hear a Katy Perry song. Where is the black equivalent of an alt rock station? White people get radio stations that play the kind of music that’s in the title of the damn station. Black people get Hot 97, a station that uses one kind of music to try to trick people into listening to seemingly anything and everything other than that particular kind of music. They must think we’re dumb.
Chuck D took to Twitter to put Hot 97 on notice after this year’s Summer Jam, the other day, which the Public Enemy rapper called “a sloppy fiasco.”
This year’s event was most famous for an incident in which one of 50 Cent’s weed carriers actually robbed some guy named Slowbucks on stage. Slowbucks has since hired a patent attorney to sue 50 Cent and held a press conference in what looks like the break room of a Kmart. This incident was either an embarrassment to the hip-hop community, and to the black community in general, or a more amazing show than anyone could have imagined or even dreamed of, depending on how you look at it.
G-Unit reuniting was this year’s main draw for people who have fond memories of mid 2000s-era rap music, so literally no one. (50 Cent’s Animal Ambition later went on to sell a dismal 47,000 copies its first week out, less than one per Summer Jam attendee.) Otherwise, this year’s lineup mostly consisted of hip-pop acts like Iggy Azalea, Nicki Minaj and Childish Gambino.
Chuck D was critical of the fact that the lineup wasn’t as representative of the overall hip-hop community as he thought it should be. He complained that there weren’t enough local New York acts. He was also upset about how frequently the dreaded n-word was used. Would artists have been allowed to use as many anti-Semitic slurs? Chuck D would like some answers. And I’m sure Professor Griff has an opinion, wherever he is.
Peter Rosenberg responded to Chuck D by going on the radio the next day, calling him a troll and irrelevant, questioning his contribution to the hip-hop community and basically telling him to shut the fuck up. If Rosenberg ran this rant by Ebro beforehand, it just goes to show how out of touch Ebro is with the hip-hop community. But Ebro isn’t Peter Rosenberg’s boss anymore, so there was no need to consult with Ebro beforehand, now was there?
Ebro had been the program director for maybe 10 years, until earlier this year. He stepped down to focus on co-hosting Hot 97's morning show full time and appearing on a VH-1 reality series set at the station, this after coming under fire from New York rappers, underground rappers and seemingly everyone on the hip-hop Internets. But supposedly his demotion, which may or may not have come with a pay cut, was simply due to him not having the time to both repeat old jokes from Black People Twitter in the morning and then come up with excuses for why Hot 97 won’t play any real hip-hop in the afternoon. If he’d focused on the latter all day long, perhaps he wouldn’t have been criticized as much.
I’m not sure what Peter Rosenberg’s goal was in going off on Chuck D on the radio, but whatever it was it ended up having the effect of causing the story to go way more viral than it would have otherwise. It went from being a story about Chuck D complaining about the state of modern hip-hop, which is the only thing Chuck D ever does, to being a story about how Peter Rosenberg had the sheer balls to so blatantly disrespect a legend. All of a sudden Peter Rosenberg had a potential PR nightmare on his hands. His comments, with their tone of wounded white privilege, didn’t sit quite right even with people who are otherwise apt to agree that Chuck D is an oftentimes almost completely inscrutable aging blowhard. Lest we forget, this is the same guy who filed a lawsuit against Biggie Smalls for sampling his voice on “10 Crack Commandments” before Biggie’s body was even cold in the ground, knowing good and well that Diddy had already robbed Biggie — and thus Biggie’s progeny, in perpetuity — of his publishing.
Next thing you know, Peter Rosenberg was on Twitter copping a plea, talking about how he’d never dis Chuck D. How could people even think that he’d dissed Chuck D? Was it the part where he asked Chuck D who elected him mayor of hip-hop and said that he didn’t contribute anything to hip-hop other than throwing a bitchfit on Twitter? Peter Rosenberg said that he would never compare the work that he does to the work Chuck D has done. This is the very definition of a Jedi mind trick, in that Rosenberg spoke of the time he spends booking artists for shows and compared that to Chuck D sitting around complaining on Twitter, and it’s part and parcel of the same mentality that led Hot 97 to coin itself the station where hip-hop lives, when Hot 97 doesn’t even play real hip-hop. Peter Rosenberg is counting on black people not being able to see the difference between what he said on the radio and what he said on Twitter. He doesn’t find black people to be very smart. People are picking up on this, and that’s why the Internets are starting to turn on him.
It’s obvious that Peter Rosenberg can’t stand Chuck D, but he can’t say how he really feels because the Internets already jumped down his throat for calling Chuck D a troll. This is eating him up on the inside, and you know a lot of Jews don’t have very good stomachs. They’re too closely related, as a people. Peter Rosenberg lives to inflict his will on the hip-hop community.
When Rosenberg got into it with Combat Jack, about five years ago, there wasn’t any of this showing pretend deference on Twitter the next day — the difference being, Chuck D is the guy who wrote “Fight the Power.” Combat Jack is just some guy who worked in the legal department at Def Jam back during the “Fight the Power” era. Peter Rosenberg may not have even known that. He’s more familiar with the major players in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, having grown up a scion of the Israel lobby. Peter Rosenberg’s father has worked for at least two of the handful of groups identified in the book by Mearsheimer and Walt.
I pointed this out, years ago in a blog post I wrote for XXL about a roundtable discussion with Busta Rhymes, DJ Khaled and maybe a few other people in which Peter Rosenberg seemed to make light of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, during Operation Cast Lead, the brutal Israeli military assault on the Gaza Strip, with which President Obama tacitly agreed to not intervene, supposedly because it took place in the few-week span in between when he was elected in late 2008 and when he took office in early 2009. Later, Lupe Fiasco famously claimed that he didn’t vote for Obama because of Operation Cast Lead, even though it took place subsequent to the presidential election, in the song “Words I Never Said.” His heart was in the right place, but his facts were all mixed up. He gets a lot of his opinions on politics from my blog.
Fast forward maybe six months. Muammar Gaddafi was invited to speak to the UN in New York, but he couldn’t find a hotel to stay in, because this is Murica and we don’t rent hotel rooms to just anyone. He ended up having to sleep in a tent in a park. He was occupying Wall Street before it was all trendy. Peter Rosenberg went on Hot 97 and launched into a rant about how Gaddafi shouldn’t have been invited to speak to the UN in the first place because he’s a terrorist and a killer of children. Combat Jack just so happened to be listening in the car with his kids, and he was taken aback by this. He took to Twitter to air his grievances. Combat was concerned with both the fact that Rosenberg had somehow been allowed to turn Hot 97's morning show into a bully pulpit for his right wing political views and with the hypocrisy of calling Gaddafi a killer of children, while kids in Gaza were still shitting spent uranium, the ones who hadn’t been blown to pieces. I was able to dig up a couple of the tweets just now. Combat tweeted at Peter Rosenberg, “Khadafy is a human being and a head of state. All humans need to be respected. Stop tryna push ur Pudge Nubby-ish agendas.” To which Peter Rosenberg responded, “I’ll slap the shit out of you in front of your kids.”
You’ll recall that Star, one of Rosenberg’s predecessors at Hot 97, was fired from Power 105 and later arrested for threatening to pull an R. Kelly on DJ Envy’s daughter. Star did more time for threatening to pull an R. Kelly than R. Kelly did for actually pulling an R. Kelly — which just goes to show where this country’s priorities are. America is much more concerned with controlling what a black man says than it is with keeping piss from dripping from a black child’s chin. Peter Rosenberg threatening both Combat Jack and his children wasn’t addressed one way or the other, because white privilege.
As the least black, least credible, most obnoxious member of the Hot 97 morning show, it doesn’t make sense to me why Peter Rosenberg became the point person on this issue. Cipha Sounds is Puerto Rican, which is kinda like being black. Funkmaster Flex has spent the past couple of weeks going back and forth with Damon Dash about posts on Dash’s Instagram criticizing not people who work at Hot 97, but rather record label execs like Lyor Cohen, Joie Manda and Steve Stoute. What sense does it make for Flex to be so adamant about jumping to the defense of those three, but not seem to have much, if anything to say now that his coworkers are being attacked? Could it be that Funkmaster Flex agrees with Chuck D? Or maybe he just doesn’t like Peter Rosenberg, Cipha Sounds and Ebro. I imagine that would be an awkward situation, though less so now that Ebro is no longer his boss.
Maybe this is more a reflection of the kind of places where I’ve spent my adult life working, but if I ever worked with someone who used to be my boss and then they got busted down to the same level as me, that MF would never hear the end of it.
While Ebro is coded as a black man for the purposes of the Hot 97 morning show, the Freddie “Boom Boom” Washington to Cipha Sounds and Peter Rosenberg’s Juan Epstein (“a Puerto Rican Jew”), the fact of the matter is that he’s both half-Jewish and a Bay Area native. His real name is probably Ibrahim, and he goes by Ebro both because it sounds less Jewish and it’s got the word “bro” in it, as part of a strategy not unlike the one in which The Source’s famous review of Nas’ Illmatic — written by Hot 97's own Miss Info — was presented as if it had been written by a black man rather than an Asian woman. This was discussed at length both in the chapter on cultural tourism in my second book Infinite Crab Meats, and in the chapter on Illmatic’s five mic review in The Source in my third book NaS Lost. It was glossed over in the article on NPR’s website on how it was Miss Info who reviewed Illmatic, which ran as part of that album’s 20th anniversary celebration a few months ago, and the recent lengthy, fawning Miss Info profile on Buzzfeed, because those aren’t publications for serious people.
I would never suggest that being half-Jewish would preclude someone from being considered a black person, to the extent that those two things are mutually exclusive . . . except that I’m pretty sure it says in the Old Testament — which I’ve studied — that if your mom is a Jew, that makes you a Jew as well. I’d be willing to bet, based on stereotypes, that Ebro is half-Jewish on his mother’s side, and therefore to say that he’s not a Jew would be disrespectful to Jews. Peter Rosenberg would never stand for it: It’s one thing, if you want to degrade hip-hop, but we gotta draw the line somewhere.
Ebro seems most Jewish in his seemingly reflexive tendency to jump to his employer’s defense. I’d hardly even heard of the guy until people on Twitter started complaining about how Hot 97's playlist is garbage and they don’t support local and up and coming artists — some of the same complaints leveled at the station by Chuck D. Next thing you know, Ebro was all over Twitter, on multiple episodes of the Combat Jack Show and in YouTube videos, including the one in which he and B.Dot got into it, copping a plea with regard to the system that Emmis Communications, out in Indiana, uses to decide what songs are played on Hot 97. That’s just not in a black man’s nature. I wouldn’t have anything nice to say about a company I worked for even if they treated me well and paid me a decent salary, just on GP. I’m pretty sure I was once purposely scheduled off on a day when the local TV news here in St. Louis did a story about how the place where I worked didn’t have any air condition, as were the other two black people who worked there. They didn’t want to run that risk. You best believe I was about to draw some analogies to slavery.
Ebro seems most black in his exaggerated blaccent, which would be even more impressive if weren’t presented alongside Miss Info’s blaccent (thousands of words in that Buzzfeed story, no mention of the blaccent), which is not in the least bit convincing and makes me feel weird every time I hear it but still has to be considered fairly impressive if we account for degree of difficulty. It’s more or less as strong as my own blaccent, and I’m only like three and a half generations removed from slavery. I could never get a job in black radio. That I could never get a job in white radio goes without saying. I’ll never work anywhere.
Puerto Ricans, from what I understand, have at least some African ancestry. How much I’m not sure. Cipha Sounds is a Puerto Rican. He’s also a five percenter. Why is it that Cipha Sounds always seems mysteriously quiet when the conversation turns to anything other than the probability of acquiring HIV from having sex with a Haitian woman? Is it because he learned his lesson the last time he was sent to time out. It seems like even before then he didn’t have as much to offer to a serious discussion. This doesn’t make sense to me, because I thought five percenters were known for their ability to break things down. I was under the impression that a five percenter liked nothing more than to expound on contentious race issues and look for random, asinine coincidences between words and numbers. You see, there’s four chambers in the heart, and there’s nine members of the Wu-Tang Clan. 4 x 9 = 36.
I’ll give you a minute to regain composure before we continue.
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You get the sense that Cipha Sounds is just a genial, non-confrontational kind of person, that he doesn’t have it in him to carry on an argument with someone the way Ebro and Peter Rosenberg do. That would help explain why his career as a record label exec flamed out. He didn’t have the cold, ruthless nature of a Lyor Cohen. He wouldn’t be considered a culture vulture by Damon Dash regardless of whether or not he’s black — he doesn’t meet the qualifications. One of his most famous “drops” is of him being screamed on by Funkmaster Flex. There’s no special emergency episode of the Combat Jack Show when Funkmaster Flex screams on Cipha Sounds. He just brings Funkmaster Flex his scarves and water — for when his brow is sweaty and his throat is parched — and hopes for the best. Cipha Sounds is the Charlie Hodge of hip-hop radio.
Between the three of these bozos, there isn’t a single individual who can speak credibly in defense of what Hot 97 does, but the fact of the matter is that it wouldn’t matter if there was. There isn’t anyone Hot 97 could pay to function as a black public cosigner that would change the fundamentally exploitative nature of the operation they’re running. You can’t train a culture vulture, you can only try to kill it.