The following is an excerpt from “The Rejected Stone,” the new book by MSNBC host and National Action Network president Rev. Al Sharpton.
Sean “P. Diddy” Combs, another music mogul I’ve grown close to, is a prime example of the capacity of black artists and music industry professionals to grow and change. I first met Diddy when he was in his early twenties, and he was under fire for his connection to a basketball game at City College in Harlem where nine people had died in a stampede. He had promoted the celebrity game, which was supposed to feature several rap stars playing ball. They tried to scapegoat Diddy, when it was really the irresponsibility of the college and the police that caused the tragedy. So I got other community activists to join me in standing up for him.
He was always ambitious, kind of hot-tempered but smart. He was the most natural brand marketer I ever met. He just knew instinctively how to promote, how to set trends. I saw things in him that reminded me of James and Michael. He was a real innovator. As he got older, we would talk more and more.
When he got into trouble with gun charges after he and Jennifer Lopez left a party, and Johnnie Cochran was representing him, Johnnie talked to me about supporting him, which I did. He came to church when I invited him. Over the years, he would always invite me to events such as his famous “White Party” in the Hamptons. What I liked about him was that he always had a sense of community. And the older he got, the more he talked to me, asking my advice about people, about deals he was working on, but it was mostly in passing when we saw each other. He told me he wanted to do something around voting and started the “Vote or Die” campaign in 2004, the year I ran for president, which registered a huge number of young people.
But, more important, it created a spirit in the younger generation that made it cool to vote. I think it changed the attitude of young folks in such a way that it helped Obama win in 2008. That wasn’t a venture to add to his riches; it was just his heart, doing what he believed in.
One day in early 2005, much to my dismay, Johnnie Cochran died of a brain tumor. As I was sitting on a platform at Johnnie’s funeral at the West Angeles Church of God in Christ in Los Angeles, Diddy looked at me and said, “You know, Johnnie was like my pops. Now he’s gone. So you’re gonna have to be my pops now.”
I joked about being just thirteen or fourteen years older than he was but it still being biologically possible for a man my age to be his father.
“I’m serious,” he said.
I looked at him closely. He was serious. “All right. Well, when you need me, call me.”
When we were leaving the church, he asked me how I was getting back to New York. I told him I was riding with Earl Graves, the publisher of Black Enterprise, on Pepsi’s corporate plane. Johnnie and I were both on Pepsi’s minority advisory board.
“Y’all got another seat?” he asked me.
“But you got your entourage,” I said.
“They can fly commercial,” he responded.
So he flew back with us, and we talked all the way back across the country. He said, “Tell me about how James Brown did what he did. How did he own radio stations when black folks didn’t have anything?” I told him about courage, about standing up and going to the next level. I told him that James Brown went to jail as a kid, but he had to get over his street mentality. I told him about Michael, about the ways he changed the game. And it led to a lot more conversations over the years.
Sometimes we won’t talk for a month or two, but then, out of nowhere, I’ll get a text. It’ll say simply, “Pops, call me.” He’ll want to pick my brain about something.
These conversations with Diddy paid off a few years ago, when the activist community got commitments from NBC, General Electric, and Comcast to make investments in the black and Latino communities as they were trying to get government approval for a merger. In addition to adding blacks and Latinos to their boards and agreeing to use black and Latino companies for services such as advertising and legal, they agreed to grant two TV stations to the black community and two to the Latino community. There were at least twenty African-American groups that wanted those stations. So Puffy came to my office and told me he really wanted to do this, to own one of the stations. It was clear he would be a very strong owner, with his business and marketing acumen and all his connections—he was and is hip-hop. But I felt I needed to get real with him for a minute.
“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.