and his label, Murder Inc., were acknowledging what many of hip
hop’s most devoted followers had maintained for years: Something
had been lost in hip hop’s journey from the feisty subcultures of
ghetto America to the lavish corridors of media conglomeration.

During the broadcast Ja Rule told Farrakhan, “They [the hip hop

audience] want you to stay ‘hood.’ ” But the pressure to stay hood had
severe costs; namely, the devotion to the thug life that ran counter to
hip hop’s claim that it represents the voices and experiences of a gen-
eration of marginal youths. It was yet another indication of how
market forces rather than commitment to some essential truth drove
corporate hip hop. Talking to both Ja and the wider hip-hop world,
Farrakhan, playing the role of ghetto oracle with his usual flair and
intensity, got real, “See, if you let the public dictate and you continue
to follow that, the end result will be death, destruction.” That Far-
rakhan was called in to try to mediate the potentially calamitous
clash between Ja and 50 revealed the telling links between America’s
racial and political past and a pop culture phenomenon that, at its
core, has always embodied the nation’s historic racial struggle.

Drawing a connection between his own past with the Nation of

Islam, the 1960s struggle for civil rights, and the state of hip hop, Far-
rakhan explained, “When Malcolm [X] went down, Elijah Mo-
hammed was the one that they really wanted so they killed two birds
with one stone and darn near destroyed the nation.” Farrakhan knew
firsthand how violent speech, racial infighting, jealousy, and bitter-
ness could lead to true tragedy and real bloodshed. Now, here he was,
blemishes and all, perhaps the only figure from black America’s old
guard who held any real “juice,” that is to say, influence in the new
world hip hop was creating. He praised Ja and his contemporaries:
“God has given you a gift, the opportunity to touch so many young
people when others can’t.” But he also reprimanded them for wasting
that gift and offered what amounted to a spiritual caution and cul-
tural challenge, “May God bless hip-hop to rise to its full potential, to
take the youth of the world and instead of making them instruments
of death, make them instruments of peace.”

P R O L O G U E

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