what isn't generally known about which rappers get heard

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http://www.counterpunch.org/moore07132009.html


Rap in the Streets, Rap in the Suites

In Memoriam for Anthony and Michelle


-snip-

Sumner Redstone recently paid a visit to Miami. He was just across the causeway from Booker T. Washington High at Jungle Island. He came as the featured speaker at the scholarship fundraiser for the Rabbi Alexander S. Gross Hebrew Academy. It was the school's 60th anniversary dinner celebration. Tickets were $136.00 per person. The private school's annual tuition is quite steep, from $8,000 for the early childhood program up to $16,000 for the high school, and so nearly half their 600 students are helped with financial aid.

Redstone is 85-years-old and a multi-billionaire but still working. He is the executive chairman or CEO of the Viacom Corporation. Viacom is a media giant and the company owns both Black Entertainment Television (B.E.T.) and Music Television (MTV).

Redstone's B.E.T. and MTV networks have not deemed Eady's Dope Pusher worthy of airtime yet. But the young self-described "voice of the hood" has not given up on that possibility because he knows the story of Carol City High's William Roberts b.k.a. Rick Ross.

Eady has tweaked the title of his seminal work. He now calls it The Pusher. Eady and many young African-American men know that you can rap about and glorify the drug trade and the accompanying gun play and mayhem and violent massacres and birthday parties sprayed with assault weapons fire. And if you do it at just the right pitch and in the right tenor. And if you aim it at the young people like Anthony Smith late of Booker T. Washington High and Michelle Coleman late of Florida A&M University and away from the young people at Rabbi Alexander S. Gross Hebrew Academy. Then Sumner Redstone will push your rhymes like weight on his B.E.T. and his MTV and make you the new Big Boss.

R.I.P Anthony Smith, you were a fine young man who deserved a better United States to grow up in. R.I.P. Michelle Coleman, in a better nation we would have known you as a nurse and mother and gotten to hold your baby in our arms. You were our son and our daughter and we failed you. All of us grown folks who sit and watch you die one after another failed you. But we pledge to both of you that this time we will find the courage to straighten our backs up and go after and stop those people who profit, who make huge fortunes, who count the blood money after your deaths.
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Paul A. Moore is a teacher at Miami Carol City High School. He can be reached at [e-mail]


the article is worth a full read

Paul, a teacher who cares

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1. kicking back to pg. 1 - this is important subject

nt

[scheming daemons]

2. I think the rappers that get heard are the ones with the least unrecs