I found our topic on sport sport-industrial complex and its effects on black people to be interesting because I see the same thing in music. I talked about it in my response paper but I wanna go into more depth here
Many African Americans have had music stolen from them by white people. Things such as rock, blues, and country were stolen from African Americans and many white people succeeded in the pain expressed through these songs. Rap music differed heavily though because it was thought of as not music. It was heavily scrutinized by not only white people but even some black people. This would later make it harder for white people to assimilate themselves into rap music.
Rap also eventually took a turn with its lyrics becoming more violent and that was due to people expressing the lifestyle they were surrounded by. This furthered the demonization of rap music especially by white people because they didn’t fully understand that the music was real life for African Americans. Even now there are very few popular white rappers compared to black people. It was a lot harder for white people to break into rap because white people generally had a different experience of life than black people. It’s a lot harder to relate to something you’ve never experienced and you can’t really connect.
With the failure of white people to get into rap and the popularity of rap, music labels really tried to capitalize on them. Many rappers come from impoverished areas and are rapping to get out of their situation. Music labels feed on this and offer this money to these rappers (generally African Americans) take the majorithy of their revenue and extort them. Rappers are presented with money they’ve never had access to and they don’t know how to effectively use it and that’s what the music labels want. It gives them absolute control over the rapper and at any moment they aren’t making enough money they could be dropped just like that. To make it worse the same people who claim that rap music is “vulgar” is also the same people who are heads of these labels and only want to use them to get money. Many rappers call rap a modern day slavery.
Unruly Bodies 
This is something I harped on in class. For African Americans, specifically men, the main “Controlling Images” are usually the gifted athlete or the suave rapper. These two uses of these personas manipulated by white supremacist theories have allowed white people to indulge in it “to get rich” and control, but then reduce these images as less than demeanors that create this false standard in the black community. People aren’t aware that micro-agressions take a fascade of some sorts.
THANK YOU for talking about this, music is so exploitative to black artists. Many rappers were in 180 (or 360 I can’t remember) deals which means they got screwed over when they made it big. My biggest pet peeve about society and slavery (besides the obvious) is how slavery was able to be rebranded into different industries and made more palatable for the white masses so it can be continued. I truly do not know how someone can look at how black artists are treated and not make the parallels.
I agree with you wholeheartedly, america is the only country that describes Great Britain that is built on the appropriation and theft of culture in such an extreme way weve just incorporated it into society. Music as an art form and as a means of storytelling is so important to the culture of origin that taking bits and pieces of it and relabeling them to make money is killing the purpose of the craft. Rap in particular like you mentioned was a means of storytelling at its most basic level. However this didnt stop record labels from trying to mass produce the same story stripping it of its individualization for the goal of making money. Money that would be shared unequally with the people who wrote the songs. So many examples of modern-day slavery exist and it actually vile how our system continues to let them get away with it.