#BlackBeatsMatter

In addition to our lives, the creativity of African Americans must begin to matter and monetize us more. While the distinctly American forms of music; Jazz, the Blues, & Rock n’ Roll, came from a time when African Americans largely could not profit from our work, joyfully, we are no longer the property of others. Like everyone else, we simply need to recoup the fair-value from our own labor, be it in Big Music, Silicon Valley, John Hopkins, collegiate playing fields, the few remaining factory-floors, and yes, even from ‘silly’ social-media clickbait we create in the Digital economy.

Several months ago, the highly profitable “Dancing with the Stars” plucked from VINE a 15 year old sensation by the name of Hayes Grier. This handsome, talented, and white, all-American performed, much to his gain, a dance he called “T-Rex”. Who was not plucked to perform by ABC-Disney Entertainment however were the actual creators and original performers of this dance, the underground Atlanta hip-hop duo of Freco (21) & Merlo (20). The “Drop” was built by them and featured on several sites such as BET.com, a year before it re-appeared on DWTS. The same moves and backbeat, but under an entirely new name, by this artist of an entirely different hue.

Good for young Master Grier for getting his…place in the corporate media sun, and consequential lift back in social media from whence he came. Artists, most especially, musicians & dancers, have been stealing from each other since the beginning of time. Now apparently, to add to this mix, digital amateur scabs with more marketable shade. Not so good for Freco & Merlo though. Despite their enormous investment of time in the day-in-day-out real work of making a creative product in the neighborhoods of Atlanta; their labor was lifted without compensation or concurrent attribution. These young workers of color were denied their platform-to-profit opportunity through a fairly transparent but still dirty process of corporate appropriation.

Appropriately enough by big corporations. Certainly, Freco & Merlo cannot now afford the high-priced lawyers and experts required to adjudicate their property rights over “Drop”. Or it’s subsequent repackaging into something a little ‘other’ by ‘others’ en-route to profit still ’others’. Sadly, this young act likewise cannot afford campaign contributions to Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn & Big Music).

Ironically, when not intimidating content creators (often of color) from claiming their earned shares, Big Entertainment’s rickety, ratchety wall of law is hoarding copy write protection over archaic works that have long entered the public domain in the rest of the world. Absurdly, “Happy Birthday to You” finally, just recently, became legal-to-play without passing coin to Warner Music Group. Happily, a great loss to them. Unhappily, a too uncommon loss, as Big Entertainment’s thirst for unearned profit, is real, relentless, unquenchable and entrenched in ‘the system’.

What’s to be done? A burning question for our equity movement of fair-value within the Music & Entertainment economies.

The issue however is not ‘general’ it is specific to specific artists of color who are systematically denied their earned opportunity through frequent and shameless avoidance of payment. Or even, access to opportunity platforms en-route to potential payment.

This corporate appropriation, while not new, is actually getting worse via digital music. Especially for aspiring artists of color who typically don’t have the resources to claw back revenue from increasingly-integrated global media behemoths. Right now, Big Entertainment scours the world for uniformly-hot, almost always-male and mainly-European, Apple specialists who gain great purchase as DJ’s through licit and illicit uses of other people’s music.

That is, the Electronic Dance Music (EDM) phenomena which began as a bunch of outcasts partying in abandoned warehouses downtown has become the domain of pretty people with plenty of privileged profit. Running out of existing intra-Electronic tracks, Corporate EDM has it’s sights and MAC keyboards squarely set on appropriating hip-hop/urban music. Both the canon and the new.

So now these uncompensated young artists of color in inner-Atlanta somehow need to watch and reclaim their product-value from a Big Entertainment-owned-rave outside Copenhagen. As well as domestic Network television. As well as third-party Sponsors who largely fund/enable this appropriation. As well as digital platforms which monetize unearned clicks. Our urgency is obviously warranted.

Not content to having stolen for generations the fruits of our peoples’ economic activity, Big Entertainment is busy building its theft of our work tomorrow. One unattributed, appropriated analytic at a time.

With great joy, we support, rightfully respect, and fully attribute the work of eliminating the root inequality of this country, to our brothers, sisters, and transgendered siblings of and in the #BlackLivesMatter vanguard. #BlackBeatsMatter is a more parochial but no less profane branch of this shared, fruitful play in the sun.

Happily, our tasks now center on disrupting the marketing maneuvers of Big Entertainment. They are not on our side. Hopefully, they can be. Until and unless they cease to place artists of color; our songs, our dances, our beats, in their box of irregular and infrequent payment, we will shatter the ‘one nation’ they shackle our work under. Even if just by replanting an archaic seed of doubt that whispers in every millennial’s earbud, “I wonder which black kid they stole that from?”

Remember that beat?