Contaminated Scene: The Hate Music Industry

I was shocked by a story I heard on NPR last week.

In 2004, a white supremacist record label began a program they called “Project Schoolyard USA” that aimed to get 100,000 of their CDs in to the hands of 13-19 year-old kids across the country. The label’s motto? “We don’t just entertain racist kids, we create them.”

These racists used the same internet distribution model for promoting their music that the rest of us do – by selling downloads, spreading their songs across Myspace profiles, selling through mail-order and finding record stores to distribute to.

In response the Anti-Defamation League, the Center for a New Community and other groups notified schools and organized counter-initiatives to the project.  Thankfully, by the end of 2004 the leader of the racist record label was convicted of unrelated drug charges and sent to prison.

Unfortunately, the white power music industry still seems to be gaining traction and effectively recruiting young kids into the white power movement. For example, in Southern California the number of hate crimes rose by 28% between 2006-2007 and experts attribute the rise in crime to the resurgence of the white power movement – fueled in no small part by the growing white power music industry.

That alone is enough to keep me up at night. I’m horrified that there are people out there in this day and age that are using Music as a vehicle for racist and hateful propaganda. To think that the distribution channels that we often talk about on this website are being used to disseminate that kind of pollutant to young kids – and furthermore that it’s working – is a nightmare.

But that’s not the only kind of racism being spread through music, and the U.S. is not the only country that it’s happening in.

An article came through from Reuters last week that Simon Bikindi, one of Rwanda’s most famous musicians, had been sentenced to 15 years by a United Nations genocide court. The musician was accused of using his music, local radio and public address systems to encourage the killing of ethnic Tutsis during the 1994 Rwandan genocide that left 800,000 dead after only 100 days.  According to the New York Times, Bikindi’s prosecutors “singled out three of Mr. Bikindi’s popular rap lyrics promoting ethnic hatred, which they said had been widely broadcast and were sung by mobs as they killed their victims.”

In a historical context, these two stories are – unfortunately – not unprecedented. Music has always been used as a conduit for propaganda, and the music written by noted racists is still sometimes performed – the music of noted anti-semite Richard Wagner comes to mind most readily.

But get real. This is 2008. We just elected the first African-American President of the United States with the largest voter turnout ever recorded. While a racist backlash to the election results shows that we still have work to do with race relations, it’s also clear that we as a society are to the point where hate crimes in Los Angeles should not rise 28% in one year.

To the extent that musicians are responsible for the production of this hate music, I feel disgusted. Writing music to propagate hate is an irresponsible use of the art form.

It’s not an illegal use of the art form, of course. The 1st Amendment ensures that. But while I’m strongly for free speech, and am also strongly against any jackass band that wants to write a white power song to recruit young kids into the KKK. The rights ensured in the 1st Amendment should not be used to sabotage the rights ensured by every other article in the Constitution.

That’s also not to encourage censorship – my point is that if you are a musician, you are an emissary of our society and our humanity and you should make sure that the content you produce does not leave this world worse off than when you found it.

If you want to take a stand against the hate music industry, visit the Southern Poverty Law Center website, the Anti-Defamation League, the MySpace page of “Turn It Down: a campaign against white power music,” add your name to the SPLC “Stand Strong Against Hate” map, and speak out against any racism and bigotry that you see in your own music scene.