Rap

Rap  (music)
Interest of	• Glenn Altschuler • Zuby

Rap is a musical style often associated with US black ghetto culture.

“Speaking to Bill Maher, the rapper Ice Cube said "Follow the money, You go high enough you start to see literally the same people who own the labels own the private prisons, so you know it seems really kind of suspicious, if you want to say that word, that you know the records that come out are really geared to push people towards that prison industry." Maher commented "But they didn't make you write those lyrics". Ice Cube answered: "it's not about making somebody write the lyrics, it's about being there as guard rails to make sure certain songs make it through and certain songs don't. Certain flavors are exposed. You know, some records are made by committee"”
Ice Cube,  Bill Maher (July 2023) 

Hip-hop for regime change

In the 2010s, two CIA fronts, USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) secretly spent millions of dollars trying to infiltrate Cuba's underground hip-hop movement. The idea was to use Cuba’s rappers "to break the information blockade" and build a network of "desocialized and marginalized youth" to spark a youth movement against the government.

Center stage in this effort was a collection of artists, musicians and writers called the San Isidro Movement, working through mediums like hip-hop. Members of the San Isidro Movement received large amounts from regime change outfits like the NED and USAID while meeting with State Department officials, US embassy staff in Havana, right-wing European parliamentarians and Latin American coup leaders from Venezuela’s Guaidó to OAS Secretary General Luis Almagro.

Max Blumenthal wrote in a 2021 article that "because of its long history as a CIA front, USAID outsourced the operation to Creative Associates International, a Washington DC-based firm with its own track record of covert actions." Creative Associates found its point man in Rajko Bozic, a veteran of the CIA-backed Otpor! regime change specialists. Posing as a music promoter, Bozic approached a Cuban rap group called Los Aldeanos that was known for its ferociously anti-government anthem, Rap is War. The Serbian operative never told Los Aldeanos he was a US intelligence asset; instead, he claimed he was a marketing professional and promised to turn the group's frontman into an international star.

To further the plan, Creative Associates rolled out ZunZuneo, a Twitter-style social media platform that blasted out thousands of automated messages promoting Los Aldeanos to Cuban youth without the rap group's knowledge.

Lyor Cohen

Behind the scenes, Lyor Cohen has long been one of the most powerful men in the rap business. Cohen was born in New York City to Israeli parents with deep ties to the Zionist paramilitary group, the Haganah. He got his start in hip hop in the 1980s at Russell Simmons' Rush Management, working with the likes of Run-DMC and the Beastie Boys before becoming president of Def Jam Records, an iconic label associated with many of the industry’s biggest names. He began working with Public Enemy in the 1980s. While at Warner Music, he reportedly obstructed the promotion and release of an album by Lupe Fiasco, an artist known for his radical politics and committed support for Palestinian liberation.

In 2016, when he was appointed as global head of music at YouTube, Cohen became arguably the most important person in the music industry..

 

Examples

Page name	Description
Jonathan Azaziah
P. Diddy	American rapper who might be involved in sexual blackmail operation.
Pablo Hasél
Wyclef Jean	Haitian rapper, YGL/2010
Lowkey
Tupac Shakur	Internationally known rap musician. Assassinated

 

Related Document

Title	Type	Publication date	Author(s)	Description
Document:Private Prisons Criminalized Rap	Letter, E-Mail	24 April 2012	Unknown

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