Mele Mel - Today's Message

14-07-2007 13:31

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.