Mele Mel - Today's Message

14 July 2007

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Mele Mel, the first rapper to call himself an MC truly deserves to be recognized as ‘one of the first to ever do it’ because he really was. Hip-Hop was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame this year for the first time ever thanks to Mele Mel and those who paved the way for the legions of artists present within the genre today. But today is a new day and people apparently are just gravitating towards the monetary gain of being affiliated to the genre. Mele Mel breaks down his aversion to Gangster rap and just how monumental their induction into the Hall of Fame was for our thirty year old friend.

As a music fan and a purveyor do you think your induction to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame was a long time coming for Hip-Hop

I never really gave it no thought, two years prior we were on the nominations be we didn’t make it. I thought it was a matter of time, where it just came down to politics and they didn’t really want us to be the first group.

Why would you think they didn’t want you to be the first group

Because when you look at how they present Hip-Hop nowadays and how everyone is trying to put it out that real Hip-Hop didn’t really get started until Run and them was doing it. We were in the streets doing it before anyone even called it Hip-Hop; we were just doing our thing. So to look at the convention of wisdom of how the writers and industry people put it out there, we came so far ahead of everything, but we were the guys that did it. If anyone was going to be first then it was going to be us. The fact that we made records so early, the only group that is eligible with us would be Kurtis Blow and Sugar Hill.

If you look back to when you started, did you see it becoming the commodity it has today, where it is so money based

Not the exact way that it did. I thought it would be a big thing and it would be popular, but I didn’t think it would be ghettoized. I didn’t think it would be like that and worth the money; I thought it would have more of an entertainment value. It is like the corporate people took hold of it and more or less promoted mostly the image of the people that are involved in Hip-Hop instead of promoting Hip-Hop itself. I think they kind of over-promoted it from my point of view.

Does that bother you then the way it has been promoted

Yeah because it is not promoted on talent; there are a lot of people with no talent being rewarded for all the work that the talented people did and weren’t paid for.

Where do you think the blame lies then

I think the blame lies with the record industry and the video people. They all try to promote the same type of image and they never put it out there where people are rewarded for what they did in their careers. They reward people on how they look and how ghetto they sound, or even on who they know. Basically it is like a popularity contest. If you know someone who is running a record company, you will get a record deal. If you have talent, you might not get a record deal as that isn’t what it is about. Everybody took the ball and ran with it and no one wants to take responsibility for what the music is doing to society or for what the music is doing to kids. They just want to make the money, corporations get involved and people don’t care how the little kids who look at this are affected by it all. There is way too much violence when kids are listening to this.

There was a spate of shootings here in the UK that the media linked to Hip-Hop coming out of the USA

Well you have to ask yourself, is it or isn’t it? Is it just that those young kids in London want to be violent just because they want to be violent or do they want to be violent because they think it is cool to be violent? When they watch the videos and listen to the records, all they hear and see is violence. Maybe that is not the truth, but if it is then people need to be responsible as far as the images they are putting out there. Whether someone wants to be a role model or not, if you look out of the corner of your eye, some kid is watching you do it and they are going to be influenced by it. People say ‘oh you can’t blame it on Hip-Hop’ but you can blame it on Hip-Hop as you are a by product of your environment by way of whatever music you listen to. If you are listening to violent music all day that would make you a little more violent than a person that isn’t listening to that type of music.

Do you words like ‘integrity’ and ‘original’ are missing in Hip-Hop right now

Without a doubt, everyone is in it for the money like I just said. They are not bothered about what is going on. The fact of the matter is, they come into the game without having integrity because they are not really record people. That is why the sales of the records are going down because people would let some young dude run a label who is not necessarily a record person; the guy is a street person. They are not used to selling records, they don’t come in ‘thinking we are going to make good music and sell records.’ They come in thinking ‘we are going to make money and sell this product’ which is how they would have done it on the streets. It doesn’t help anyone who is trying to be in the game as far as to do good work. This doesn’t help the creative person, will help the business person.

When you came into the game did you envision making money out of this

The first time I did a party I got $5. A good payday for a show was $175 and that was decent money for a guy who was 17, you know doing two shows a night. Now that is chump change. We were in it just to be doing it and we were in it so early that the money part didn’t come into play because the money wasn’t there. You were just about being good at what you were doing. Eric B and Rakim were doing it, they got big budgets. We never got a budget for doing a record.

Did that bother you, that you weren’t of that era where you were getting paid like that

No, that doesn’t bother me, but what does bother me, guys like us, who put in our work to make the industry what it is are not given the opportunity to do it if we still want to do it because we did it back in the day. We are not given the same opportunity. Any young guy who doesn’t know anything about music or rap can make a record, you see that everyday. So you mean to tell me that Grandmaster Mele Mel, the first MC, the most decorated in the game, three Grammies, Best Record in 1984, a record in the Library of Congress, in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, if I was to go to any company right now and say I wanted to do an album, they would not to an album with me. The same opportunity isn’t there.

How do you feel about the age old question about there being a cut off point in Hip-Hop

Basically the whole Hip-Hop thing has been pushed like it is only something for the young. True Hip-Hop is definitely an older person’s game. Right now for kids the music is gangster rap, Hip-Hop is for your father. Me being older, what hurts rap the most is there is no pioneer influence in Hip-Hop and that is why a lot of people shy away as they are not into it as it is now. None of us are making music; you just have a bunch of young guys who don’t know much about music or about Hip-Hop. These are the guys that are controlling Hip-Hop and they put all of us to the side. They make out that music is only something a young person can understand and only young people should be involved with. It has been dumbed down for a number of years, but that isn’t working anymore. People don’t know what to do to reverse the process. Hip-Hop is 30 years old and if people could understand that then maybe they would be able to move forward.

You made comments about 50 Cent being inducted into the Hall of Fame, were they misconstrued

Well what has 50 done to get into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame? You can see what we did as we have been doing it for 25 years, we were the innovators of rap, and still to this day have the most influential record in rap to this day, The Message, what has 50 done? You have to be in there for doing something. Evidently he will be in there solely for making a record as all the milestones in rap have been made many years ago.

There are no milestones to be made. There are some being made AFTER rap; Jay Z got a clothing line that he just sold, he is part of the NJ Nets and they are building a new stadium. But that is nothing to do with music. If you are going to judge these guys by their music and what it is worth, they make gangsta music. Now my understanding, not being a hater, but that is me understanding what real music is and then understanding what Hip-Hop is seeing as I am one of the first to ever do it; with that understanding what did they do? They made records and that is that.

The simple truth is you have to put it where it is; 50 Cent, Jay Z, all these new cats, you can call it Hip-Hop, but it is gangster rap, but is it, gangster rap worthy of being in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame? My answer would be no as it doesn’t add up to nothing. It is just guys filling people’s heads up with a ridiculous image of a person who in the true reality of society does not exist. There is no such thing as a black gangster and it will never be. The best you can be is a thug and that is all you will ever be. If you follow that lifestyle you will either go to jail or get killed; there is no upside to it.

There is an upside for the Jay Z’s and the 50 Cents who promote that. But there isn’t an upside for the guys on the streets. A true gangster would have to have roots that go back to another country. Sri Lankans have gangsters, Africans, Italians and Jews have gangsters. Any black man saying that he is a gangster is just following the dream of something that is never going to happen.

FemaleFirst Melanie J Cornish

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