The BET Hip Hop Awards could also be over. What ought to be constructed as an alternative? : NPR

Dying is so frequent in hip-hop now that we do not even take time to mourn the deceased. The sudden departure of the BET Hip Hop Awards (HHA) from cable tv was introduced final month and it garnered nary a hashtag nor R.I.P trending subject anyplace on Elon Musk’s web. Possibly rap is feeling so revitalized, with the likes of the Clipse, Freddie Gibbs, JID and Likelihood the Rapper competing this yr for prime billing, that we not want awards and trade accolades to measure the tradition’s price?

Or possibly rap is not pop sufficient to pay the payments?

Apparently, the present’s TV scores had been on the decline. The yr after celebrating hip-hop’s golden anniversary in 2023, the present’s annual viewership fell off a steep cliff — down almost 50% in 2024. The community hasn’t pulled the plug outright; “suspended” is how BET’s CEO Scott Mills described the present state of each its hip-hop and Soul Prepare award present franchises in an interview with Billboard. But, the announcement could not have come at a extra precarious time. The shelving of the present simply so occurs to coincide with the sale of Paramount World, BET’s father or mother firm, to Skydance Media — a merger cleared by the Federal Communications Fee after Paramount agreed to pony up $16 million to settle President Trump’s lawsuit towards CBS’ 60 Minutes. Skydance additionally made a number of concessions within the run-up to sealing that FCC deal, together with a pledge to remove all of Paramount’s DEI (range, fairness and inclusion) initiatives: No extra Workplace of World Inclusion. No extra aspirational targets “associated to hiring feminine workers and workers of colour.” No extra annual bonus incentives for assembly stated DEI targets.

Now, Black Leisure Tv existed lengthy earlier than range, fairness and inclusion grew to become, or impressed, all the fad. However I am not even certain how Paramount plans to spell BET — not to mention program for it — with out DEI. That is greater than the BET HHAs, to be trustworthy. Nonetheless, I’ve discovered myself mulling, if not totally in mourning, over this award present’s indefinite fade to black. Hell, Greg Tate been instructed us hip-hop was useless. Nobody’s shedding sleep over our business exploits at this stage within the sport. No matter post-radical pulse there may be left sustaining us within the final 20 years is much less about our vitality as a neighborhood and extra about our profitable rebrand into America’s hottest commodity. However when your tradition turns into product, it may be shelved indefinitely. When your tradition exists solely to assist company bottom-lines, it may be recalled or discontinued when it not does.

I nonetheless bear in mind attending the primary BET Hip Hop Awards again in 2006. The manufacturing funds should have been flush, as a result of the community taped that inaugural joint at Atlanta’s prestigious Fox Theatre, shutting down the bougiest part of Peachtree Avenue to roll out the purple carpet in the course of Midtown. Coming simply 5 years after the community debuted its annual, flagship BET Awards, the rap-centric spinoff marked hip-hop’s indeniable dominance in an period when it was frequently ranked among the many hottest genres regardless of the double-whammy bodily bootlegging and digital piracy was placing on rap’s recorded income. The award present was additionally a serious coronation of the South’s rise in rap, after years of being dismissed by hip-hop’s East Coast-focused media elite.

The purists have been busy splitting hella hairs over the excellence between rap and actual hip-hop. However the HHAs made the convergence between the style’s company ambitions and cultural traditions appear much less contradictory. We received the perfect of each worlds when BET made cyphers a present staple, taking mainstream artists again to the roots of MCing. Surprises, like Erykah Badu freestyling, drew us in. And regardless of being pre-recorded, they magically paired the texture of improvisation with dream collaborations — from Eminem and his Shady cohort Slaughterhouse and Yelawolf in 2009 to TDE with Kendrick throwing down the gauntlet on Drake a full decade earlier than their slow-building beef would go pop. But the perfect factor concerning the BET HHAs was nearly by no means having to second-guess the winner in any given class: No controversial snubs. No overtly racist omissions. No Macklemore profitable finest rap album over good child, m.A.A.d Metropolis. It was proof that award-show predictability could be a crowd-pleaser the place it counts. 

BET had a foothold on an underserved viewers. Till it did not.

The broader trade ignored its first wake-up name, when hip-hop/R&B grew to become the most-consumed style within the nation in 2017, in response to Luminate (previously Nielsen). Then, within the wake of George Floyd’s viral homicide and the nationwide reckoning over Black lives, establishments just like the Recording Academy started redressing their historic function in Black artists being criminally missed. Since his appointment in 2021, the Academy’s first Black president/CEO, Harvey Mason Jr., has made it his enterprise to increase the variety of the voting membership. When Kendrick Lamar took house 5 Grammys earlier this yr, together with the coveted tune and report of the yr for “Not Like Us,” hip-hop was stunned that, for as soon as, the Academy received it proper. Whereas mainstream establishments expanded their inclusivity, BET’s music choices shrank. After the community ended its widespread music video countdown collection 106 & Park in 2014, the Hip Hop Awards felt like BET’s odd stepchild slightly than the end result of a long time of Black music programming.

The final time I attended a taping of the BET HHAs, the trade was busy forecasting rap’s funeral. The yr was 2023, hip-hop’s fiftieth anniversary, so a celebration of life appeared so as. We paid homage to the dearly beloved in attendance, from Marley Marl to Crimson Alert. I even spied former BET exec Stephen Hill, who kicked off the community’s awards franchise close to the flip of the millennium, skipping the red-carpet rigamarole for an incognito aspect entrance. Now not recorded within the coronary heart of Atlanta, BET had lengthy since moved the present’s taping to a suburban outpost. The principle occasion, downsized to a sideshow. The veritable graffiti was on the wall, however rap was nonetheless alive. This once-passing fad, by no means projected by the originators or detractors to make it this far, had smashed each measurable and monetizable metric during the last half century. But, within the midst of an in any other case golden anniversary, the trade appeared hellbent on spinning one woeful narrative: For the primary yr in three a long time, no rap songs or albums had hit the primary spot on the Billboard 200 or Sizzling 100 charts. Alas, hip-hop had misplaced its former glory, learn the untimely obits.

It is the sort of commemoration you’d count on when outsiders assume accountability for telling your story.

In truth, the BET HHAs have been by no means hip-hop’s holy grail. The Supply Awards had a legendary crack at that within the ’90s; the Vibe Awards additionally gave it a decent go. Each in the end met the in poor health destiny of print media. However BET’s 18-year run is deserving of some kind of recognition. It constantly beat all of the so-called trade arbiters when it got here to crowning rap’s up-and-coming. Now that it is shelved, there is a dialog price having about why hip-hop has not been capable of maintain a longer-running award present and why extra public establishments have not flourished in its honor.

The lasting power of an award present is not present in its in a single day scores. It is within the energy it has to form cultural reminiscence lengthy after it airs. A TV award present is simply one other reputation contest outlined by a slim slice of the zeitgeist. However what it turns into within the aftermath is a public archive that may form, and even warp, our cultural reminiscence. There’s energy in that, the facility to personal the narrative. The ability to write down, and in some circumstances rewrite, historical past. We’re witnessing, in actual time, the acute lengths these in energy will go to wrest away management of the historic narrative. The Smithsonian museums, together with the Nationwide Museum of African-American Historical past and Tradition, have come underneath assault for focusing an excessive amount of on “how unhealthy slavery was,” in response to President Trump. The Kennedy Middle’s programming and board received taken over for programming “woke tradition.”

Apparently, President Trump took a fast tour of the Nationwide Museum of African-American Historical past and Tradition shortly after taking workplace in his first time period. I bear in mind attending across the similar time in 2017, and feeling a way of satisfaction over my tradition being given the grand exhibition it deserves. It was my first time seeing, in real-life, the black paramilitary uniform and duplicate Uzi gun that Public Enemy’s S1W safety element used to tote whereas marching onstage. Ditto for the primary vinyl album cowl from hip-hop godfathers The Final Poets, with the incendiary lyrics from their epic single “When the Revolution Comes” printed on the again. On the time of his go to, Trump celebrated the “unbreakable American spirit” on show, however in his second time period he is turn out to be hypercritical of “a divisive, race-centered ideology” undergirding all the Smithsonian museums.

I actually do not know the way anxious we ought to be concerning the huge hip-hop assortment on the NMAAHC — nonetheless lovingly referred to as the Black Smithsonian by many — the place Dilla’s MPC beat machine additionally lives. It does not look like the kind of factor that will wind up on a presidential hitlist. Then once more, paper straws appeared fairly innocuous, too, till a number of months in the past. If a portrait of Black persecution like “The Scourged Again,” the historic picture of escaped slave “Peter,” drew the federal authorities’s ire, it isn’t a stretch to think about an outline of Black retaliation eliciting the same response. Has Trump seen the album cowl of To Pimp A Butterfly with Kendrick Lamar and his shirtless homies imply mugging on the White Home garden whereas a useless decide lies at their toes? Or Ice Dice’s Dying Certificates, with the corpse of Uncle Sam toe-tagged on a gurney? Or the unique cowl for The Coup’s 2001 album Social gathering Music, with Boots Riley urgent buttons because the Twin Towers explode within the background?

How a lot hip-hop iconography can be thought-about anti-American underneath this new regime of revisionist historical past? The place would our legacy reside, if banned from the Web, in addition to our heads and our hearts? How would we protect it for future generations?

It has been a very long time since anybody blamed hip-hop for being too woke. Simply peep the Venn diagram of artists who’ve received BET HHA accolades and caught current warmth for supporting Trump; it runs the gamut from Snoop Dogg to Sexxy Crimson. The fraught nature of this political second might get dismissed as faux information, however this a lot is true: Each time Black historical past comes underneath siege, our tradition turns into susceptible. Rap/R&B are nonetheless the most-consumed style, however the dip in dominance in recent times has given main labels the inexperienced gentle to start a mass deprioritization. A close to exodus of Black executives has adopted that downward development. With out sustained trade funding or any widespread establishment constructing, rap faces the specter of having its outsized contributions overwritten, its tales missed. The impermanence of our digital footprint, particularly on this age of AI scraping and incomplete catalog streaming, is distorting our story. Who is aware of what number of entries, histories, total discographies have been misplaced to the ether?

Rap’s ephemerality, particularly in a digital age, has made it priceless but in addition seemingly nugatory, ubiquitous however homeless. In Black Ephemerality: The Disaster and Problem of the Musical Archive, scholar Mark Anthony Neal notes the unprecedented “accessibility of the archive of latest and historic Blackness” — or “large Black knowledge,” as he calls it. However he additionally laments how digital accessibility has decreased our music to “the ambient background of the continued exploitation and commodification of Black tradition.”

At a time like this, when the report of America’s sordid historical past is actively being deleted by people in energy, shedding the BET Hip Hop Awards feels trite as compared. It could even come as a aid to these of us who’ve typically questioned or criticized how nicely — or unwell — any such award present represented us. However it’s additionally a reminder that our tradition is rarely secure from cancellation — not by so-called woke mobs, haters or trollers, however by the station house owners and license holders and energy brokers. Hip-hop by no means ought to’ve relied on a TV community to canonize the tradition. It left us too beholden to waxing and waning business pursuits, too indebted to chart efficiency as the ultimate metric of success. However there was a utility in having one thing resembling a monument — erected for us, if not solely by us — that we might return to year-after-year as a sort of historic report. An annual spectacle to refute our fixed erasure, whether or not supposed or dedicated in ignorance, from the zeitgeist.

What we want are extra public archives, democratically compiled and accessible to the lots. Extra multicasts of our sonic uprisings to compete with America’s myopic narrowcasting. It is a part of the rationale why I am hopeful concerning the projected grand opening of The Hip Hop Museum within the Bronx, the cultural birthplace. Funded via a mixture of private and non-private {dollars}, the design of the 50,000 square-foot museum was led by “hip-hop architect” Michael Ford, who insisted on beginning the method with a cypher. “Our communities typically are disregarded of what occurs,” he instructed Rebellion publication in 2024. Alongside “a few of the prime younger Black architects from all throughout the nation,” he and co-founders Rocky Bucano and Kurtis Blow invited MCs, breakdancers and different icons like Roxanne Shante to sketch and plot out concepts earlier than the final word designs have been drawn up. “It actually was working with the tradition.”

The way it will get up towards the ever-churning equipment of American popaganda stays to be seen, however not less than a brick and mortar constructing, as soon as full, cannot be suspended or shelved indefinitely.