Commercialization and Cash Grabs
December 16, 2022
On the internet, the commodification of ideas and intellectual properties is rampant. Companies that operate digitally, like Amazon, attempt to commodify almost every tangible item, profiting off of inflation and cost increases. Social media influencers commodify themselves and their relationships, using the audience’s empathy to manipulate them into buying merch or their sponsors. Yet, the commodification of Black culture on the internet has proven to be problematic.
One such case is the rapid rise and fall of musician FN Meka in August of 2022. Accused of being a “caricature” of Black artists and culture, digital music artist and proclaimed “Artificial Intelligence” icon FN Meka — created by Brandon Le and publicized by business executive and manager Anthony Martini — was signed and then released from Capitol Records in a matter of days. This came shortly after a recording of FN Meka using the N-word was released to the public under the assumption that the two who managed the AI artist also wrote the lyrics.
The creative pair was criticized for the supposition that there were no Black people on the executive managing team since there are no Black people publicly associated with managing the artist, which could be seen as a problem as FN Meka constantly uses the N-word and clearly sports racial stereotypes in his character. His Twitter and Instagram were also considered to be messy, with some posts making light of police brutality and hood culture, which problematically commodifies the Black struggle by using these shocking images and posts to gain likes and retweets.
To add to the story, Kyle the Hooligan, a rapper based out of Houston, alleges that not only was he the voice behind FN Meka, but the team never paid or even credited him for his work. Instead, Martini misled audiences into believing that Artificial Intelligence generated the music. He apologized for his fabrication, but the misconception lingers in consensus.
The creators of this team weren’t only trying to sell music — they were trying to sell a stereotype. The creation of such a caricature not only reinforces negative stereotypes about Black people but is also problematic because of its devastating effects on continuing inequity and racism. Discrimination can be heavily dependent on negative stereotypes, and the prevalence of the internet has carried on this prejudice at an expeditious speed. Adding in the alleged information that the Black person who recorded the raps and provided the voice without being paid plays like a sick joke in which the punchline is Black people. The creation of this character follows historical patterns in which Black people are the butt of the joke, deserving the likening to minstrel shows or old, bigoted cartoons popular in the early 1900s.
“If you go back and watch some old media and television and read old newspapers, you would see a lot of the same stereotypes that are being played out today being played back then. I think there’s more of an abundance of negative stereotypes that are out now just because there’s more media and technology,” Heavens said.
Credit not only applies to the media that’s publicized due to the internet but also to forms of media that are made and then spread online. One of the grand debates online is whether or not something widespread on the internet can fairly be considered “yours.” But the argument against that makes it easy to exploit Black talent and content creators.
One such occurrence of exploitation happened to the content creator and teenager Jalaiah Harmon in 2021. At the time, Harmon was 14 when she created the global TikTok phenomenon, “The Renegade,” on Instagram. The dance, watered down for the mainstream by simplifying much of her complex choreography, took off — without her name attached to it.
TikTok star Charli D’Amelio instead received millions of dollars in compensation and endorsements for Harmon’s dance — all for something that she did not create. These particular sorts of trendy dances — often originating from places like Instagram or Dubsmash — are frequently made by smaller Black creators and then “watered down” to be incorporated into the mainstream culture, which, in this case, is TikTok.
“It plays into the history of non-Black people [appropriating] Black style when it suits them. And once they take it, they make it theirs,” Thompson said. “[Harmon] couldn’t even put up a fight because, by the time [people] figured out it was her dance, Charli was already known around the world for it. It was already ‘Charli’s’ dance.”
Furthermore, many TikTok creators such as Marcel Williams (@Marcelllei), Kaychelle Dabney (@Kaychelled) and Noah Webster (@NoahMadeSMK) have accused Tiktok of hiding their content related to discussions about anti-Black racism as well as making it more difficult to properly credit people who created dances and trends, many of whom were Black.
Now, this is also a conversation about internet culture and theft as a whole, but this most certainly has many parallels with historical examples, such as many white artists “appropriating” Black music without proper credit or, even more, the recent “Gen Z-ification” of African American Vernacular English (AAVE). These aspects are called “fads” and “trends” when, in reality, it’s Black culture.
To someone unaware of these nuances, these may not seem like huge problems and are more of a matter of circumstance and bad luck than racism. But it happens over and over and over again. These patterns are redundant and a giant slap in the face to Black creators who have always had to work thrice as hard to get their due despite the racism mentioned above, whether that’s in online content creation or other means that could result in success and subsequent benefits.
The commodification of Black culture repeats historical patterns and significantly denies current Black creators their due. We must discontinue the discrediting and commodification of Black artists to halt these perpetuated systemic injustices.