Racist Groups Using Hip-hop to Spead Hate

August 15, 2008

Recently, Turn It Down was asked to contribute an article to a magazine overseas regarding the existence and potential of white power hip-hop here in the United States.  Several European nations are seeing a sharp rise in racist and nationalist hip-hop, and our sister organizations wondered if America is seeing a similar cultural absurdity, particularly since America is essentially the birthplace and epicenter of hip-hop.

A large portion of membership and participation in the Turn It Down Campaign comes from bands and fans within the punk and metal genres, along with indie, alt.country, and other subgenres of rock.  This may be due to the fact that these genres are the ones most often hijacked by white nationalist music.  Additionally, or perhaps as a reason for this tendency, white nationalists find their most fertile recruiting grounds among the fans of these predominantly white music subcultures.

But hip-hop?!

Whether or not you’re a fan of the genre, it seems common cultural knowledge that hip-hop emerged from the black and Puerto Rican communities, initially in New York and soon after in Chicago, Los Angeles, and across the nation.  The notion that hip-hop could ever find validation within our nation’s enclaves of white nationalism seems ludicrous.  

But believe it or not, there is white power hip-hop out there.

You may have heard of Woodpile.  They were a blip on the controversy radar a couple of years ago when they were signed to West Coast Mafia Records, run by well-known black rapper C-BO.  The band and the label have staunchly maintained that Woodpile, who market their music to incarcerated white listeners and often pay homage to ‘the Woods,’ a white racist prison gang, are not in any way racist.  They admit that they encourage ‘white pride,’ but their lyrics stop there.  If anything, we’ve concluded that Woodpile is a bit silly, but not explicitly racist.

Politiko, however, is less ambiguous.  Politiko emerged as part of the brief ‘Ron Paul Rap’ trend, in which artists created and posted tracks endorsing Ron Paul all over the internet.  Politiko’s track was fairly benign, but his follow-up work spelled out where he stands:

“I’m a conservationist
Conserve America, ‘cause the white man created it
Other races are defacing it
Soon they’ll be renaming it to Aztlan...
This is how every civilization has fallen.”
--Politiko, “NotSee”

Here we have one example of what most culturally literate Americans would consider unthinkable – a white artist using hip-hop to spread racist hate.  (Go ahead.  Take a moment to get your mind around it.  We needed to do so ourselves.)  But if you think WE find it hard to stomach, you should read the chatter among white racists on the subject.

Messageboards across the white power online community contain heated debates around the question of whether or not the white power movement should acknowledge and use the power and popularity of hip-hop to further their cause.  Some admit that it would be an undeniably effective tool in reaching alienated white youth, as white youth are the single largest consumer group of hip-hop music.  Other hardliners refuse the possibility of having anything to do with a decidedly minority form of music; they feel that to use hip-hop, even for the purposes of recruitment and propaganda, would be to sink to the level of one of the groups they hate most.

We can’t say for sure if white power hip-hop has a chance to taking off in the United States.  Our gut and sense of cultural history both say it’s impossible, but our research forces us to acknowledge at least a shred of possibility.  We also can see that the white power movement is actively considering it – only the latest of many calculated possible efforts, directly aimed at recruiting new membership by infiltrating another music subculture.

Apparently, there’s enough hate to go around

June 15, 2008

While the Turn It Down Campaign focuses on white power music and the presence of white power groups in music subcultures, we would be remiss not to mention a new avenue of hate music, brought to us by many of the same bands producing racist hate music around the world today.

Smashing Rainbows features violently anti-gay tracks by relatively well-known white power bands like Angry Aryans, Empire Falls and Chaos 88, as well as eighteen other bands from the U.S. and eight other countries.  Song titles include “Smear the Queer,” “Killer of Faggots” and “Torture and Humiliation.”  The cover art for the compilation shows a man’s face, twisted up in anger, and his fist is toward the viewer as though he is throwing a punch.  One catalog writeup for the album claims Smashing Rainbows is “defending straight people everywhere.”  Those track titles aren’t “defensive.”  They are overtly hostile and seem to be calling for violence against the gay community.  

Released in February, this compilation is a product of a newer white power label called Fetch the Rope.  (Subtle, we know.)  Fetch the Rope Records claims close alliance with virtually every major producer and distributor of white power music and propaganda in existence today, including Stormfront, NSM88 and Final Stand Records.  Fetch the Rope’s website claims, “Our purpose is to disseminate White Power music as widely as possible around the World. We are an introductory stepping stone for White people who are discovering the White Nationalist movement for the first time....especially our White youth.”

Fetch the Rope plainly states that the label exists to infiltrate our youth’s music subcultures and indoctrinate young people into the white power movement.  They are using homophobia as one avenue to do so, as part of the white power movement’s efforts to expand the list of fears and hostilities from which they draw new membership.

June is commonly regarded as “Pride Month” by the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgendered community.  Turn It Down will be in touch with GLAAD and other organizations devoted to protecting human rights in the gay community, but our June news update seemed a good time and place to inform people involved with our campaign about this detestable new approach to recruiting for the white power movement.  Smashing Rainbows is pathetic in every sense; hate is hate, and we should definitely Turn It Down.