Prison Radio
Jason Goudlock

Hip Hop Radio’s Profiteers and Enablers,” by Ohio political prisoner, Jason Goudlock.

During rap music’s infancy in the early 1980s, nearly all the poetic rap songs, the boom bap music, played on hip hop radio stations, have lyrics about social struggles within communities of color, or events like basketball games and neighborhood parties. But not today.

Now, most rap songs on the FCC-regulated airways of urban radio glorify the criminal lifestyle, the drug dealers, pimps, robbers, and murderers. Gangsta rappers, hip hop radio stations, large corporations, and even small businesses, are all guilty of promoting these invitations and justifications for mass incarceration.

The gangsta rappers, and the audience of hip-hop radio, being overwhelmingly African-American, it’s ironic that African-American leaders are silent about rap songs that glorify the violence often tearing our Black neighborhoods apart.

When unarmed teenager Michael Brown was shot by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, African Americans nationwide mobilized to proclaim Black Lives Matter. The leaders who spoke out against Brown’s murder in 2014 have nothing to say about the commercial promotion of the criminal lifestyle. Shouldn’t the lives of young African-Americans [inaudible] by crime friendly lyrics matter, too?

If affluent white communities were being decimated by crime, the FCC surely wouldn’t be being quiet about crime glorifying rap songs being played by these day on radio stations. It would be considered akin to allowing television stations to air nonstop pornography. And the FCC’s response to Jenny Jackson’s partially exposed breast, during CBS’ broadcast The Super Bowl 38, we do know how that would go. Just a hint of nudity at the Super Bowl with 2004 quickly cost CBS $550,000 for its airing of indecency.

Because the FCC is not willing to even try to protect their African-American communities from the around the clock brainwashing of songs that praise selling drugs, committing murders, robbing, and pimping, it’s absolutely imperative Black leaders and community activists speak out in opposition to this destructive influence and antisocial socioeconomic decimating other communities.

[Inaudible] all of humanity, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King dedicated their lives to speaking out against injustice. They were the antithesis of the enabling leaders of today. And if they were alive, they would surely not be being quiet, while their fellow brothers and sisters are being socially eradicated by way of a methodical and commercialized act of genocide, delivered through the vehicle of the hijack culture of hip-hop.

Learn more about this Ohio political prisoner, who is the subject of the feature length documentary film, Invisible Chess: The Jason Goudlock Story. As well as the author of the novel, Brother of the Struggle, by logging onto freeJasonGoudlock.org. That’s free Jason, G-o-u-d-l-o-c-k dot org.

(Sound of a cell door closing.) These commentaries are recorded by Noelle Hanrahan of Prison Radio.