Rap music because of its “potential” to harm, like other mediums, has battled with censorship. A battle for its right to exist. The larger installation of this project is a set of images of rappers, juxtaposed against censored versions of those same images. Compiling these images I couldn’t help but think of how some of these rappers have reputations of being genuinely terrible people, that are complicit in the reproduction of harmful elements of our culture. But does just covering them up, and blurring them out, make consuming their work ok? Can we condemn the actions of the producer while still supporting their production?”
An alternative title I had played with for this piece was “who owns your masters?”, for those who don’t know, “masters” are the original recording from which all copies of the artists music are made, and are a prime point of leverage for control over an artists career. And also a particular point of contention in the Rap genre, due to many artists getting trapped in predatory record contracts often due to lack of legal literacy. Touching a historical precedent of exploitation of black artists. The word master also brings to mind the master-servant/slave dynamic. But due to the internet era many of these music artists have been able to find significant success independently. Upending the age old power dynamic and reframing who the “master” is allowed to be
Interestingly enough rap has a phenomenon of artist run labels, where artists now have the power to inflict the harm of a master onto other artists, when in all likelihood the artist that owns their own label is likely signed to a larger label, or even yet another artist. Creating and reproducing this hierarchical harm structure
The question remains, who owns your masters? Who is your master? Who owns them?