Revolution by the Book The AK Press Blog

Colonialism Is Back. In Fact, It Never Left.

Posted on September 9th, 2011 in Reviews of AK Books

Jared Ball’s amazing mixtape manifesto, I Mix What I Like!, continues to garner accolades from scholars, musicians, reviewers, and etc. You can find all of the book’s recent press hits on Jared’s blog, updated daily at imixwhatilike.com. But one of the most exciting recent reviews the book has received is this one below, written by Juliana “Jewels” Smith, PhD candidate in Ethnic Studies at UC San Diego, and friend of the collective. Jewels’ review is great; she highlights a lot of the important and compelling aspects of Jared’s arguments–what drew us to this manuscript in the first place–but she also offers a nuanced and balanced critique of the avenues that the book doesn’t explore. We’re thrilled to have her permission to post the review here, and we encourage all of you to repost it widely!

Colonialism is Back—In Fact, It Never Left

A Review of Jared Ball’s I Mix What I Like: A Mixtape Manifesto

Jared Ball’s work exists in multiplicity: as radio show host on WPFW, a professor of Communications at Morgan State, and a journalist for the Black Agenda Report and his own mix radio show, Voxuion.com.  And much like his work, his new book, I Mix What I Like is equally expansive.  Taking on mass media for his subject matter, Ball looks specifically at radio and journalism, as mediums that determine our communication, consciousness, and ideas.  As Ball says in an interview, the idea behind the book is that “the mixtape, as hip-hop’s original mass medium, its national medium, is itself an extension of and response to the continuing colonization of African America. And to the extent that there is a ‘hip-hop nation,’ it too is, naturally, an internally-held colony.”[i]

Ball wants the reader to understand that Black communities in the U.S. are internal colonies, which is to say that there is built-in structural inequality that accounts for the disproportionate distribution of resources in music.  In the chapter, “The Colonized Rhythm Nation,” he writes,

Black music—as a raw –material natural resource—has always been and continues to be a powerful component of the larger political economy…which works Black people under “plantation-like conditions” for a hip hop industry that produces “aggregate worldwide revenues” of at least $40 billion a year.  These conditions exist because the fundamental relationship remains fully intact.  It is not simply a matter of analogy. (26)

This fundamental relationship also takes the form of copyright laws, ownership of content, and proprietorship of the popular,[ii] translating into not only what we think, but what we think about. Ball continues,

The importance of intellectual property law, as a function of colonialism cannot be overstated.  A consumer-and service-based society that produces fewer material goods by the day requires the transmutation of thought into commodity, both for the purposes of commercial exchange and the constraint of ideas.  Intellectual property, “the ownership and control of content through the mechanism of copyright,” and the ownership of thought function to maintain control of ideas.  Once controlled, the profit derived from promotion, sale, and distribution is used to increase the social and political power among the producers. (85)

The error of the oft-quoted idea that corporations are obsolete because of internet downloads and declines in sales is brought into sharp relief if we consider the assessment that “what is not accounted for, is the inability to gain popularity without them [corporations]..” (90). Even bootleg economies, such as the mixtape, still sell the artists that corporation’s produce, which means that they not only rely on corporate modes of production, but also that they reproduce capitalist control over what one thinks about.  This type of ownership Ball is referring to is indistinguishable from the ownership of one’s own consciousness.  Being that our consciousness is shaped in large part by what we are exposed to, then to what degree are we exposed and by whom?

As a whole, I Mix What I Like functions as a patchwork of essays, fusing the idea of the mixtapes from Hip Hop into a format for journalism.  Some chapters are twenty five pages long while others, like the very important “Freemix Radio: The Original Mixtape Radio Show” chapter, are six pages long.  “The Colonized Rhythm Nation” chapter sets the groundwork for thinking about Hip Hop as a colonized nation within a nation.  The chapters on “Intellectual Property, Copyright, and the Ownership of Thought” and “Payola and Playlists” should be read strategically by artists and any consumer of music to understand why some messages are made more accessible than others.  The chapter, “The Mixtape and Emancipatory Journalism” take two fairly unrelated subjects, the hip hop mixtape and the idea of emancipatory journalism and align them as strategic allies.

Perhaps his most tangible critique is in the chapter “White Liberalism and Progressive Journalism,” where Ball writes about the many roadblocks radical Black journalists face even from left media.  The nexus of “inattention” paid to Black communities in the U.S., the overrepresentation of international issues, and a focus on the “acceptable” Black stories, those that either the mainstream media has already reported on or commemorations of, more often than not, Civil Rights anniversaries, is tantamount to truncating an effort within the U.S. for a greater social change according to Ball.   How is this so?  Ball writes that,

The White left, in both media studies and practices, often—even after levying powerful and informed critiques—still prefers that we remain shackled to notions of government petition, inclusive ownership, more diverse staffs, etc.  This again, returns to fundamental gaps that remain between liberal criticism and the genuinely threatening rebellious behavior that existed in popular political movements and continues unchecked. (146)

For Ball, the White left become the gatekeepers of the legitimate forms of resistance because they are the most visible left (DN!, NPR) and therefore stand in the way of a more radical critique of mass media and society in general.

Ball avoids the pitfalls that media critics like Noam Chomsky leave out, giving the reader not only an historical understanding of mass media and race as the purveyor of the colonizer’s interests (read mass media), but a way to strategically counter the colonizer’s stronghold on ideas and consciousness.  Enter anti-colonial theorists such as Kwame Ture, Frantz Fanon, Amilcar Cabral, George Jackson and Kwame Nkrumah to highlight the similarities between Black communities in the U.S.A.  and the “former” European colonies.   These theorists give much needed perspective on how the internal colonial model is not only a helpful analogy to the experiences of Black folks in the U.S.A., but what is going on in the relationship between say Beverly Hills and South Central.

So what are the options for the independent and Black radical journalist in a colonized world?

Mixtape radio is a “21^st century underground press” intended to decenter the idea of objectivity in journalism and establishes the precedent of worthy news by communicating and exchanging information with the public, via the street.  In this sense, one bypasses the middleman, the corporate entity that owns the product, the content, and the artist’s distribution. Ball reiterates,

What is at issue here is not simply the threat to profit, as explained earlier, but the threat to unsanctioned communication taking place among those who are either already colonized, or those who are engaged in the performance, production, or distribution of culture of the colonized.  A lack of attention to the methods of distribution may lead to a lack of control over message, content, and information, and therefore, the ultimate threat of behavior based on illicit forms of thought. (124)

In this sense, it becomes imperative that the colonized, the Hip Hop nation as he calls it, create outlets to organize against the onslaught of misinformation.  Community members have the potential to explain the world around them through mixtape radio.

I wish that I could call this book exhaustive. Ball’s arguments are compelling and well-researched (his footnotes are over 60 pages long in a 156 page book.)  It clearly demanded a lot of research and thought.  I am, however, concerned about this book’s silence on gendered violence (symbolic and physical).  While he mentions mixtapes are not free from the process of colonization, I Mix comes dangerously close to presupposing that the mixtape itself is inherently revolutionary or anti-capitalist.  Like anti-colonialist pschiatrist Frantz Fanon theorizes, in a colonial situation, objects and technologies are never value-free.  So in this sense, it is possible to have a tool of resistance, the mixtape, that may challenge capital and relations of power with regards to distribution of the word, be that music or journalism.  However, the actual content in the mixtapes is more complicated as it can be both anti-colonial and colonial.  A mixtape may remain colonial in lyrical and aesthetic content.  Many of us have bought a mixtape with a half-naked woman on it or heard lyrics that were misogynistic in the mixtape.  And this is where discounting or omitting one of the fundamental tenets of colonization, that being sexual subjection, will make Ball’s use of a colonial analysis incomplete.  The sexual violence towards and control over native/Black bodies is imperative to address if we are to engage in any anti-colonial resistance.

Despite this major omission, I Mix is an important read for all of those interested in mass media, journalism, radio, and Black politics.  I Mix functions as both a treatise and critique and should be read as such.  For those getting into radio or journalism as well as the everyday listener, that’s you, this is a great training ground to sift through the cacophony of corporate backed beats and lyrics.   As Ball reminds us, it is not just that we mix what we like, but that we invent the re-mix. We still have to ask what do we like to mix and why we like it.

[ii] Ball cites corporations UMG, WMG, Sony and EMI whom supply 100 percent of the songs with the most spins or airplay nationally.  On any given day, “UMG and Sony regularly 90 to 100 percent of all top ten songs spun on radio nationally.” (208)  Since the ability to determine what is popular falls into the hands of a few corporations, we can surmise that the content of what is readily accessible to a wide national and international audience may be censored or policed.  Then, of course, there is payola, or the payment in exchange for promotion or popularity. (91)  While payola is old news, “intentionally popularizing, in this case, one form of hip hop or blackness” gives the few companies that own artist’s work, a monopoly on how Blackness will be packaged, perceived and performed.  I would also argue here, that in terms of gender, women become viewed myopically as well.