'The Rejected Stone' book excerpt: Rev. Al Sharpton on the advice he gave Diddy
theGRIO VIDEO - An excerpt from the book 'The Rejected Stone,' by MSNBC host and National Action Network president Rev. Al Sharpton...
“You got to remember, you can’t be getting into fights at hip-hop parties,” I said to him. “You’re not just going to be an artist, you’re going to be an owner. You’re going to have to sit in front of federal regulators. You’re not just going to be on TV now, you’re going to own the station. That will require a different mentality, a different thought pattern. You got to be this.” I said to him, “You can do this, you can do that, but you can’t do this and that. So you gotta choose. Do you want to be the slickest, hippest, butt-whuppingest dude in the hood, or do you want to be the mogul who has a network that can help transform the hood and make mogul kind of money? You can do both; you got the mentality, the heart, and the courage to do both, but you can’t do both of them at the same time. You have to be one or the other. It’s your choice—the same choice I had to make.”
I told him I wasn’t preaching to him, I was sharing with him.
“I had to decide whether I was going to be the caricature, just standing up at the front of every march, or was I going to continue marching but use it to transform, to really make solid change? It may mean I have to be more careful with what I say. It may mean I have to discipline my lifestyle.”
“Yeah, you’re right, Pops,” he said. “But I’m ready. I’m ready.” And that’s been our relationship. Now he has the television station, he hired a professional team, and I’m sure he’s putting together something that will be fabulous. We talk all the time, and I’m proud of how he has transformed. I’ve seen situations over the last few years where people tried to provoke him and he wouldn’t respond. Not because he’s turned soft but because he’s really gotten hard. He’s determined now to go to the next level, and he’s not letting foolishness get in his way. Sometimes in counterculture—and that’s what ghetto life is; if the mainstream culture won’t let you in, you create an alternative culture—the reverse of the truth starts becoming your reality. So what you call soft in the streets is really hard. It takes a lot more strength to walk away from conflict than it does to indulge the emotions and trade the insults or beat somebody’s behind.
But I still have the need, the desire, to try to drive this generation toward a greater understanding, to understand the roots of what it is they call their art form. They need to know the historical antecedents and the moral dynamic from which this all sprang. The contradiction, the soullessness of modern hip-hop, was laid bare by the whole Occupy movement. Artists such as Jay-Z and others were caught out there, ostensibly sitting on the wrong side of the movement, on the wrong side of history.
Here was a movement telling the world that it represented the 99 percent who were being economically oppressed by the richest 1 percent, and the modern incarnation of hip-hop is doing everything it can to be in the 1 percent. Flashing the bling, bragging about your opulence, and conspicuous consumption while your people are suffering. So what the growth of this movement—and the statements made by rappers saying they didn’t understand the movement—revealed was that modern hip-hop is not reflecting the times. There’s a tragic tension that was uncovered. And if they’re not careful, these artists are going to become victimized by that. The people who are buying their music are the ones who are being economically exploited.
The artists can’t begin to look like the exploiters. Creating a fantasy world in the music is one thing, but they can’t also look as if they are trying to embody the exploiters in their real lives. And most important of all, they can’t look as if they are oblivious to the exploitation. That is not black music. And it has never been.
The key is not to get too sucked in by the fabulousness that’s being offered—in the entertainment business or any other career that might be beckoning to you. Once you let in the bling, get seduced by the opulence or the grand lifestyle, it becomes so easy for you to get lost. The big picture is a distant memory, and pretty soon you don’t even remember why you got into the business in the first place. When that happens, you’re vulnerable to any dude with a hefty checkbook, asking you to sell your soul.
Rev. Al Sharpton is the author of ‘The Rejected Stone‘ and the host of “Politics Nation” on MSNBC. Follow him on Twitter at @TheRevAl.
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