Rap gets its first billionaire – but has it lost its edge?

Dr Dre could be hip-hop’s first billionaire after selling his Beats headphone company to Apple.

He shot to fame with gangster rap pioneers NWA in the late 1980s, scandalising white America with records like F*** tha Police and Gangsta Gangsta, which glorified drug dealing and ghetto violence.

While details of exactly how much Dre (real name Andre Young) will make from the detail are yet to emerge, the 49-year-old is probably now the world’s wealthiest hip-hop artist, with earnings of around $1bn.

His promotion to the board of one of America’s biggest companies symbolises how hip-hop artists – once seen as some of the most dangerous and radical performers around – have positioned themselves at the heart of corporate America.

Other luminaries on Forbes magazine’s Hip Hop Rich List include Sean “Diddy” Combs (worth a reported $700m), Jay Z ($520m) and 50 Cent ($140m).

All these artists have business interests that stretch far beyond the music world and all have embraced the trappings of corporate success.

Former drug dealer Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson has diversified into film production, acting, clothing, beverages, publishing and boxing promotion.

Jay Z – who also raps about having sold cocaine in his youth – now stars in investing seminars alongside stock market guru Warren Buffett, dressed in a sober business suit.

For a rock star, joining the corporate elite would probably lead to accusations of selling out.

But rappers like Dr Dre have never made a secret of their ambitions. After all, NWA was the group who summed up their philosophy as: “Life ain’t nothing but bitches and money.”

Music journalist Alex Ogg, author of The Hip Hop Years, said: “I don’t think you can accuse Dre of any hypocrisy in regard to his economic ambitions. It’s been there from the beginning.

“There is this idea of authenticity in hip-hop. It’s all about keeping it real. You get smacked with that statement again and again. And this is pretty authentic given what he has said in the past.

“The myth of rebellion in rock and roll is that you are against The Man. Hip-hop is being The Man.”

It wasn’t always quite like this.

Public Enemy’s Chuck D used to attack corporate capitalism, singling out a sports brand beloved by hip-hop fans in the 1991 track Shut ’em Down.

He raps: “I like Nike but wait a minute/The neighbourhood supports so put some money in it/The corporations owe, they gotta give up the dough to my town/Or else we gotta shut ’em down.”

In 1990 fellow New York rapper KRS-One put out Love’s Gonna Get’Cha, warning against falling in love with “material items” and urging youngsters not to fall for the gangster lifestyle.

Such sentiments would be completely out of place among today’s biggest-selling rap records.

Iggy Azalea is currently number one on the Billboard chart with Fancy, in which she reels off a list of luxury brands and boasts about her wealth, asking: “Can’t you taste this gold?”

Arguably the hardest rap record in the Top 100 – Move That Doh by Future, featuring Pharrell, Pusha T & Casino – is as far from KRS-One’s moral message as it is possible to get.

In the video, rappers with thick gold chains urge listeners to “move that dope” and brag about the proceeds of drug dealing: “A brand new Maserati/That’s a whole lot of new money.”

For US hip-hop business veteran and author Dan Charnas, rap’s loss of its political edge is sad but inevitable.

“I think that we had an era in the 1980s and ’90s when to be political was in fashion and it was of interest to young people, but society is different now.

“The fact is that political hip-hop came from a small, restricted group of young people who were under siege. They are somewhat less under siege now.

“The policies of Reagan and Bush are no longer in use. Those kind of things were the cultural milieu in which hip hop evolved. Those things are gone.

“You get a music that is basically a reflection of the times. The down side is that hip hop is not as compelling right now, because it has lost that political dimension.”

Alex Ogg agrees: “We had the militancy of Public Enemy. We also had the afrocentric Dream Warriors and Stetsasonic – that idea of connection to a bigger picture and larger world.

“From the ’90s onwards it did become conservative, or borderline reactionary. It becomes much more focused on materialism. It’s a great shame in lots of ways.”

Some commentators have suggested that hip-hop lost its soul when it cynically embraced the Reaganomics of the 1980s.

Is there a coded message in the Ronald Reagan masks worn by the “real dope dealers” in Future’s latest video – a subtle reminder of how the Reagan administration was implicated in helping cocaine traffickers fund the Contra rebels in Nicaragua?

“I’m guessing that they were conscious of that,” says Dan Charnas. “They are saying: ‘You know what? Y’all do it.”

But while US hip-hop tends to endorse an aggressive version of the American dream, that doesn’t make it entirely conservative, according to Charnas.

“I don’t know if conservative would be the word I would use.

“Hip-hop has stood in contravention of white supremacy but that has never been a financial or social or economic argument.

“You can be anti-white supremacy and not be anti-capitalist. It’s not too dissimilar to black nationalism, which wasn’t necessarily about rejecting capitalism – it was about pooling capital and amassing equity.

“In the 1990s artists started to retain the equity that previous generations of black musicians and entrepreneurs were not successful in retaining. That was a huge victory for hip-hop.”

If hip-hop can be forgiven for celebrating the improved economic status of black Americans, some prominent fans argue that it is capable of doing much more.

Barack Obama, who is a personal friend of Jay Z, has said: “I love the art of hip-hop. I don’t always love the message of hip-hop.

“There is a message that is not only sometimes degrading to women, not only uses the N-word a little too frequently, but also – something I’m really concerned about – it’s always talking about material things, always talking about how I can get something, how I’ve got more money and more cars.

“Hip-hop is not just a mirror of what is, it should also be a reflection of what can be. Imagine something different.”