Tweet
Fox News’ war with Jay Z: Why it picked the wrong fight this time
Jay embodies Fox's American Dream -- millionaire businessman, “job creator,” family man. Except for maybe one thing
MATTHEW PULVER
Fox News picked the wrong fight, once again, when Sean Hannity attacked Jay Z last month for meeting with New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo to push for reform to the state’s justice system in the wake of the killing of Eric Garner. Hannity contended that Jay’s former days as a crack dealer disqualified him from advising the governor on such matters. It is the latest in a long series of attacks on the Brooklyn rapper, and if the past is any indication, we can expect return fire from Hov sometime soon.
Jay Z has had beef with a number of fellow rappers, but it’s his more than 10-year beef with Fox News that’s gone on longest. The feud can be traced all the way back to 2003, when Bill O’Reilly invited Dame Dash, co-founder of Jay Z’s Roc-a-Fella Records, and then-Roc artist Cam’ron to defend rap music against the host’s charge that it’s hurting black children and black America generally. Jay Z would clap back later that year on the Black Album’s “Threat,” calling out O’Reilly for the first time and offering one of his first iterations of how reaching financial success and cultural influence did not shield Jay from racism. Jay Z embodies the American Dream celebrated by Fox News, having escaped his former life as a hustler and become a millionaire businessman, “job creator” and family man. But he is still black. In fact, in a familiar damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don’t American bind, Hova suggests on “Threat” that it is that very success as a black man that makes him a target, presaging the eventual treatment of President Obama:
Jay embodies Fox's American Dream -- millionaire businessman, “job creator,” family man. Except for maybe one thing
MATTHEW PULVER
Fox News picked the wrong fight, once again, when Sean Hannity attacked Jay Z last month for meeting with New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo to push for reform to the state’s justice system in the wake of the killing of Eric Garner. Hannity contended that Jay’s former days as a crack dealer disqualified him from advising the governor on such matters. It is the latest in a long series of attacks on the Brooklyn rapper, and if the past is any indication, we can expect return fire from Hov sometime soon.
Jay Z has had beef with a number of fellow rappers, but it’s his more than 10-year beef with Fox News that’s gone on longest. The feud can be traced all the way back to 2003, when Bill O’Reilly invited Dame Dash, co-founder of Jay Z’s Roc-a-Fella Records, and then-Roc artist Cam’ron to defend rap music against the host’s charge that it’s hurting black children and black America generally. Jay Z would clap back later that year on the Black Album’s “Threat,” calling out O’Reilly for the first time and offering one of his first iterations of how reaching financial success and cultural influence did not shield Jay from racism. Jay Z embodies the American Dream celebrated by Fox News, having escaped his former life as a hustler and become a millionaire businessman, “job creator” and family man. But he is still black. In fact, in a familiar damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don’t American bind, Hova suggests on “Threat” that it is that very success as a black man that makes him a target, presaging the eventual treatment of President Obama:
I don’t care if you C. Delores Tucker,
Or you Bill O’Reilly, you only rilin’ me up.
[...]
Rehabilitated, man, I still feel hatred;
I’m young, black and rich, so they wanna strip me naked.
Not a whole lot has changed since that first exchange in 2003. The opening attack from O’Reilly constitutes the main thrust of his eventual decade-long anti-rap position, with Hova being his principal target. While Jay sees his work largely as rhyming reportage (“I’m only trying to tell you how black ni***s live”), O’Reilly misunderstands description as justification, memoiric depiction as active advocacy. In fact, O’Reilly appears to have no idea how rap works as an art form or how it operates in American culture. He demands something from the art form that it’s never promised. He then proceeds to compound that ignorance with post-racial make-believe, imagining some sort of scenario in which at some point the conditions for black opportunity, safety and advancement had reached parity with that of whites, and that it is now black cultural expression–rap being primary–that is to blame for the state of black America. For O’Reilly, culpability has been successfully handed off to black America, and any positions of precarity–economic, physical and otherwise–are now wholly due to their own actions. Rap is not an expression of continuing racial, cultural and economic subjugation, says O’Reilly, but inversely the very reason for black Americans’ subordinate position.
O’Reilly’s thesis grew to pervade the network, so that following the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, Fox’s Geraldo Rivera was able to blame Martin’s death on his mere aesthetic participation in hip-hop culture: “I think the hoodie is as much responsible for Trayvon Martin’s death as much as George Zimmerman was,” Rivera offered on the network’s popular morning show. O’Reilly echoed Rivera a year later. Frequent O’Reilly guest Bernard Goldberg names sagging pants, a style some suggest emerged from the phenomenon of black mass incarceration, as another threatening signifier. The news network, following O’Reilly’s early lead, has worked to criminalize black youth culture, and only hip-hop that denies the existence of racism and works to uphold and maintain the existing cultural and economic order escapes condemnation from Fox.
Jay Z, being something like the poet laureate of hip-hop culture, has spent his career challenging, complicating and outright debunking that narrative. Jay is well aware of the socio-political milieu out of which his unlikely ascent began. Hova assails Fox News’ frequent contributor Oliver North and conservative patron saint Ronald Reagan for designing the circumstances of Jay’s teens and early adulthood. He calls himself a “product of Reaganomics,” pointing to the era’s (very often racialized) assault on the poor and working class. Jay Z’s most common and most damning charge is that Reagan’s teamfacilitated a massive influx of cocaine, that which a young Shawn Carter would find himself selling retail during the height of the crack crisis. On “Blue Magic,” Jay Z raps about Iran-Contra, the shocking episode during which Nicaraguan Contras did, in fact, traffic cocaineas a means to supplement the secret funds from the sale of arms to the Iranians. Jay Z raps,
[I] Blame Reagan for making me into a monster
Blame Oliver North and Iran-Contra
I ran contraband that they sponsored
Before this rhymin stuff we was in concert
Jay sees himself as a political actor, albeit one defined by the contradiction and complexity: “I’m Che Guevara with bling on, I’m complex.” On 2011’s “Murder to Excellence,” Jay points out that he was born on the day Black Panther Fred Hampton was assassinated by the government in Chicago. Hampton’s murder on Dec. 9, 1969, in a way closed the 1960s and bookended the civil rights era, as the 21-year-old dynamic leader remained perhaps the last galvanizing figure to emerge during the era. “I arrived on the day Fred Hampton died,” Jay raps, continuing, “real ni***s just multiply,” suggesting a lineage of which he is a part. The rapper has also likened himself to Mumia Abu Jamal, a Black Panther on death row for the murder of a police officer, a conviction roundly challenged by the black left.
No détente was reached in the early sparring between O’Reilly and Hov, and with “The Black Album” being Jay’s “last” in order for him to take over as president of Def Jam, the feud was left to smolder for a few years. Rap beefs tend to reach settlement after a length of time, but the Jay Z-O’Reilly battle had only just begun. (One of the greatest hip-hop feuds, Jay Z and Queens rapper Nas’ historic battle on wax, was squashed during this period. After which, Nas even joined in like a tag team partner to attack Fox News, helping lead a New York City protest against the network in 2008 and devoting an entire song, Untitled’s “Sly Fox,” to Rupert Murdoch’s organization.)
While not attacking Fox News specifically, Jay Z would release searing indictments of the Bush administration, Reagan and the conservative establishment generally during the lull in fighting. That period’s “American Gangster” album is arguably Jay’s most thoroughly critical and insightful musical venture, weaving a dense, loosely autobiographical narrative of a drug dealer during Reagan’s ’80s. The Iran-Contra-alluding “Blue Magic” was that album’s first single. “Anywhere there’s oppression, the drug profession flourishes,” he raps on the album’s opening “Pray,” challenging O’Reilly’s facile narrative of post-racial free will.
But both O’Reilly and Jay Z would remain behind their ideological fortifications and keep their powder dry until the election of President Obama. Then it hit the fan.
Nearly the entire Fox News team mobilized to attack Jay Z after the rapper joined Young Jeezy and others onstage the night before Obama’s inauguration to deliver a performance of Jeezy’s “My President Is Black.” Both performers and audience joined in a moment of unbridled celebration of the historic moment, with Hov asking the DJ to bring his verse back multiple times to rejoicingly repeat it.
Or you Bill O’Reilly, you only rilin’ me up.
[...]
Rehabilitated, man, I still feel hatred;
I’m young, black and rich, so they wanna strip me naked.
Not a whole lot has changed since that first exchange in 2003. The opening attack from O’Reilly constitutes the main thrust of his eventual decade-long anti-rap position, with Hova being his principal target. While Jay sees his work largely as rhyming reportage (“I’m only trying to tell you how black ni***s live”), O’Reilly misunderstands description as justification, memoiric depiction as active advocacy. In fact, O’Reilly appears to have no idea how rap works as an art form or how it operates in American culture. He demands something from the art form that it’s never promised. He then proceeds to compound that ignorance with post-racial make-believe, imagining some sort of scenario in which at some point the conditions for black opportunity, safety and advancement had reached parity with that of whites, and that it is now black cultural expression–rap being primary–that is to blame for the state of black America. For O’Reilly, culpability has been successfully handed off to black America, and any positions of precarity–economic, physical and otherwise–are now wholly due to their own actions. Rap is not an expression of continuing racial, cultural and economic subjugation, says O’Reilly, but inversely the very reason for black Americans’ subordinate position.
O’Reilly’s thesis grew to pervade the network, so that following the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, Fox’s Geraldo Rivera was able to blame Martin’s death on his mere aesthetic participation in hip-hop culture: “I think the hoodie is as much responsible for Trayvon Martin’s death as much as George Zimmerman was,” Rivera offered on the network’s popular morning show. O’Reilly echoed Rivera a year later. Frequent O’Reilly guest Bernard Goldberg names sagging pants, a style some suggest emerged from the phenomenon of black mass incarceration, as another threatening signifier. The news network, following O’Reilly’s early lead, has worked to criminalize black youth culture, and only hip-hop that denies the existence of racism and works to uphold and maintain the existing cultural and economic order escapes condemnation from Fox.
Jay Z, being something like the poet laureate of hip-hop culture, has spent his career challenging, complicating and outright debunking that narrative. Jay is well aware of the socio-political milieu out of which his unlikely ascent began. Hova assails Fox News’ frequent contributor Oliver North and conservative patron saint Ronald Reagan for designing the circumstances of Jay’s teens and early adulthood. He calls himself a “product of Reaganomics,” pointing to the era’s (very often racialized) assault on the poor and working class. Jay Z’s most common and most damning charge is that Reagan’s teamfacilitated a massive influx of cocaine, that which a young Shawn Carter would find himself selling retail during the height of the crack crisis. On “Blue Magic,” Jay Z raps about Iran-Contra, the shocking episode during which Nicaraguan Contras did, in fact, traffic cocaineas a means to supplement the secret funds from the sale of arms to the Iranians. Jay Z raps,
[I] Blame Reagan for making me into a monster
Blame Oliver North and Iran-Contra
I ran contraband that they sponsored
Before this rhymin stuff we was in concert
Jay sees himself as a political actor, albeit one defined by the contradiction and complexity: “I’m Che Guevara with bling on, I’m complex.” On 2011’s “Murder to Excellence,” Jay points out that he was born on the day Black Panther Fred Hampton was assassinated by the government in Chicago. Hampton’s murder on Dec. 9, 1969, in a way closed the 1960s and bookended the civil rights era, as the 21-year-old dynamic leader remained perhaps the last galvanizing figure to emerge during the era. “I arrived on the day Fred Hampton died,” Jay raps, continuing, “real ni***s just multiply,” suggesting a lineage of which he is a part. The rapper has also likened himself to Mumia Abu Jamal, a Black Panther on death row for the murder of a police officer, a conviction roundly challenged by the black left.
No détente was reached in the early sparring between O’Reilly and Hov, and with “The Black Album” being Jay’s “last” in order for him to take over as president of Def Jam, the feud was left to smolder for a few years. Rap beefs tend to reach settlement after a length of time, but the Jay Z-O’Reilly battle had only just begun. (One of the greatest hip-hop feuds, Jay Z and Queens rapper Nas’ historic battle on wax, was squashed during this period. After which, Nas even joined in like a tag team partner to attack Fox News, helping lead a New York City protest against the network in 2008 and devoting an entire song, Untitled’s “Sly Fox,” to Rupert Murdoch’s organization.)
While not attacking Fox News specifically, Jay Z would release searing indictments of the Bush administration, Reagan and the conservative establishment generally during the lull in fighting. That period’s “American Gangster” album is arguably Jay’s most thoroughly critical and insightful musical venture, weaving a dense, loosely autobiographical narrative of a drug dealer during Reagan’s ’80s. The Iran-Contra-alluding “Blue Magic” was that album’s first single. “Anywhere there’s oppression, the drug profession flourishes,” he raps on the album’s opening “Pray,” challenging O’Reilly’s facile narrative of post-racial free will.
But both O’Reilly and Jay Z would remain behind their ideological fortifications and keep their powder dry until the election of President Obama. Then it hit the fan.
Nearly the entire Fox News team mobilized to attack Jay Z after the rapper joined Young Jeezy and others onstage the night before Obama’s inauguration to deliver a performance of Jeezy’s “My President Is Black.” Both performers and audience joined in a moment of unbridled celebration of the historic moment, with Hov asking the DJ to bring his verse back multiple times to rejoicingly repeat it.
Comment