Originally posted by G.I. Joe
After more than 20 years, I’ve finally decided to tell the world what I witnessed in 1991, which I believe was one of the biggest turning point in popular music, and ultimately American society.
I have struggled for a long time weighing the pros and cons of making this story public as I was reluctant to implicate the individuals who were present that day. So I’ve simply decided to leave out names and all the details that may risk my personal well being and that of those who were, like me, dragged into something they weren’t ready for.
Between the late 80′s and early 90’s, I was what you may call a “decision maker” with one of the more established company in the music industry. I came from Europe in the early 80’s and quickly established myself in the business.
The industry was different back then. Since technology and media weren’t accessible to people like they are today, the industry had more control over the public and had the means to influence them anyway it wanted. This may explain why, in early 1991, I was invited to attend a closed door meeting with a small group of music business insiders to discuss rap music’s new direction. Little did I know that we would be asked to participate in one of the most unethical and destructive business practice I’ve ever seen.
The meeting was held at a private residence on the outskirts of Los Angeles. I remember about 25 to 30 people being there, most of them familiar faces. Speaking to those I knew, we joked about the theme of the meeting as many of us did not care for rap music and failed to see the purpose of being invited to a private gathering to discuss its future. Among the attendees was a small group of unfamiliar faces who stayed to themselves and made no attempt to socialize beyond their circle. Based on their behavior and formal appearances, they didn’t seem to be in our industry.
Our casual chatter was interrupted when we were asked to sign a confidentiality agreement preventing us from publicly discussing the information presented during the meeting. Needless to say, this intrigued and in some cases disturbed many of us. The agreement was only a page long but very clear on the matter and consequences which stated that violating the terms would result in job termination. We asked several people what this meeting was about and the reason for such secrecy but couldn’t find anyone who had answers for us. A few people refused to sign and walked out. No one stopped them. I was tempted to follow but curiosity got the best of me. A man who was part of the “unfamiliar” group collected the agreements from us.
Quickly after the meeting began, one of my industry colleagues (who shall remain nameless like everyone else) thanked us for attending. He then gave the floor to a man who only introduced himself by first name and gave no further details about his personal background. I think he was the owner of the residence but it was never confirmed. He briefly praised all of us for the success we had achieved in our industry and congratulated us for being selected as part of this small group of “decision makers”. At this point I begin to feel slightly uncomfortable at the strangeness of this gathering.
The subject quickly changed as the speaker went on to tell us that the respective companies we represented had invested in a very profitable industry which could become even more rewarding with our active involvement. He explained that the companies we work for had invested millions into the building of privately owned prisons and that our positions of influence in the music industry would actually impact the profitability of these investments.
I remember many of us in the group immediately looking at each other in confusion. At the time, I didn’t know what a private prison was but I wasn’t the only one. Sure enough, someone asked what these prisons were and what any of this had to do with us. We were told that these prisons were built by privately owned companies who received funding from the government based on the number of inmates. The more inmates, the more money the government would pay these prisons.
It was also made clear to us that since these prisons are privately owned, as they become publicly traded, we’d be able to buy shares. Most of us were taken back by this. Again, a couple of people asked what this had to do with us. At this point, my industry colleague who had first opened the meeting took the floor again and answered our questions. He told us that since our employers had become silent investors in this prison business, it was now in their interest to make sure that these prisons remained filled. Our job would be to help make this happen by marketing music which promotes criminal behavior, rap being the music of choice.
He assured us that this would be a great situation for us because rap music was becoming an increasingly profitable market for our companies, and as employee, we’d also be able to buy personal stocks in these prisons.
Immediately, silence came over the room. You could have heard a pin drop. I remember looking around to make sure I wasn’t dreaming and saw half of the people with dropped jaws. My daze was interrupted when someone shouted, “Is this a f****** joke?” At this point things became chaotic.
Two of the men who were part of the “unfamiliar” group grabbed the man who shouted out and attempted to remove him from the house. A few of us, myself included, tried to intervene. One of them pulled out a gun and we all backed off. They separated us from the crowd and all four of us were escorted outside.
My industry colleague who had opened the meeting earlier hurried out to meet us and reminded us that we had signed agreement and would suffer the consequences of speaking about this publicly or even with those who attended the meeting. I asked him why he was involved with something this corrupt and he replied that it was bigger than the music business and nothing we’d want to challenge without risking consequences.
We all protested and as he walked back into the house I remember word for word the last thing he said, “It’s out of my hands now. Remember you signed an agreement.” He then closed the door behind him. The men rushed us to our cars and actually watched until we drove off.
A million things were going through my mind as I drove away and I eventually decided to pull over and park on a side street in order to collect my thoughts. I replayed everything in my mind repeatedly and it all seemed very surreal to me.
I was angry with myself for not having taken a more active role in questioning what had been presented to us. I’d like to believe the shock of it all is what suspended my better nature. After what seemed like an eternity, I was able to calm myself enough to make it home. I didn’t talk or call anyone that night.
The next day back at the office, I was visibly out of it but blamed it on being under the weather. No one else in my department had been invited to the meeting and I felt a sense of guilt for not being able to share what I had witnessed. I thought about contacting the three others who wear kicked out of the house but I didn’t remember their names and thought that tracking them down would probably bring unwanted attention.
I considered speaking out publicly at the risk of losing my job but I realized I’d probably be jeopardizing more than my job and I wasn’t willing to risk anything happening to my family. I thought about those men with guns and wondered who they were.
I had been told that this was bigger than the music business and all I could do was let my imagination run free. There were no answers and no one to talk to. I tried to do a little bit of research on private prisons but didn’t uncover anything about the music business’ involvement. However, the information I did find confirmed how dangerous this prison business really was.
Days turned into weeks and weeks into months. Eventually, it was as if the meeting had never taken place. It all seemed surreal. I became more reclusive and stopped going to any industry events unless professionally obligated to do so. On two occasions, I found myself attending the same function as my former colleague. Both times, our eyes met but nothing more was exchanged.
As the months passed, rap music had definitely changed direction. I was never a fan of it but even I could tell the difference. Rap acts that talked about politics or harmless fun were quickly fading away as gangster rap started dominating the airwaves.
Only a few months had passed since the meeting but I suspect that the ideas presented that day had been successfully implemented. It was as if the order has been given to all major label executives. The music was climbing the charts and most companies were more than happy to capitalize on it. Each one was churning out their very own gangster rap acts on an assembly line.
Everyone bought into it, consumers included. Violence and drug use became a central theme in most rap music. I spoke to a few of my peers in the industry to get their opinions on the new trend but was told repeatedly that it was all about supply and demand. Sadly many of them even expressed that the music reinforced their prejudice of minorities.
I officially quit the music business in 1993, but my heart had already left months before. I broke ties with the majority of my peers and removed myself from this thing I had once loved. I took some time off, returned to Europe for a few years, settled out of state, and lived a “quiet” life away from the world of entertainment.
As the years passed, I managed to keep my secret, fearful of sharing it with the wrong person but also a little ashamed of not having had the balls to blow the whistle. But as rap got worse, my guilt grew. Fortunately, in the late 90’s, having the internet as a resource which wasn’t at my disposal in the early days made it easier for me to investigate what is now labeled the prison industrial complex.
Now that I have a greater understanding of how private prisons operate, things make much more sense than they ever have. I see how the criminalization of rap music played a big part in promoting racial stereotypes and misguided so many impressionable young minds into adopting these glorified criminal behaviors which often lead to incarceration.
Twenty years of guilt is a heavy load to carry but the least I can do now is to share my story, hoping that fans of rap music realize how they’ve been used for the past two decades. Although I plan on remaining anonymous for obvious reasons, my goal now is to get this information out to as many people as possible.
Please help me spread the word. Hopefully, others who attended the meeting back in 1991 will be inspired by this and tell their own stories. Most importantly, if only one life has been touched by my story, I pray it makes the weight of my guilt a little more tolerable.
Blogged at Conspirazzi here
Vexman's Thoughts 
This is interesting. There is a grain of truth here, but I don’t buy this story. Here are a few facts to consider:
It’s true that the early 1990’s was a pivotal period for the growth of private prisons and the ‘going public’ of private prison firms, as this census of private prison facilities from 1994 (focused on 1993) clearly shows: https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/Photocopy/149685NCJRS.pdf
So that’s clearly on point.
But in my view the scope of for-profit prisons tends to be exaggerated. Most of the profits from prisons do not come from for-profit prisons. The first private prison opened in 1984 as a jail in Tennessee. By 1991 it was still tiny, probably not exceed 1 or 2 percent of the prison population. Even now they only house about 7% of state prisoners. (However they house a much larger share of detained illegal immigrants and it is a huge growth industry there.) That isn’t to say that prisons aren’t an enormous cash cow. It’s just that the vast majority of the money in the prison-industrial complex goes into building prisons and supplying them with services. There was (and still) a lot of money to be made in the prison boom, but most of it is not in private prisons. (Though they still are, obviously, profitable.) In 1995 there was a Federal bill that poured billions of dollars into state prison construction, but that money went into building public prisons. Even now, the largest private prison company, CoreCivic (an Orwellian re-branding of the Corrections Corporation of America) still only earns half its revenue from private prison contracts.
The prison boom started in the mid-1970s, long before Gangsta Rap. The boom accelerate through the 1980s and well into the 1990s, boosted by Federal funding for state prisons mentioned above.
Nor were racial disparities a new phenomenon. They did get worse in the 1990s, but that was arguably the continuation of a trend
:
But even as incarceration rates continued to climb in the 1990s, the crime rate began to drop and has been dropping pretty steadily ever since:
So if it was intended to encourage criminal behavior, gangsta rap was apparently not successful. Though I suppose you could argue that crime rates would have dropped even further if not for gangsta rap, but frankly I don’t think it plays any causal role in encouraging crime. It certainly helps cement in the public mind the association between race and criminality, but I don’t think the public needed any help in that regard in 1991. Criminality had long been associated with blacks before the advent of gangsta rap.
In short, while there is a kernel of truth to this story, I believe it’s bogus.
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Thanks, daddieuhoh, for your comprehensive comment.
I can understand the point you are making, but I see a major conflict of interests when bringing privately owned prisons under scrutiny. Where is the catch with such “services” being privately operated? Cui bono? That’s just one part of the other side of the coin.
Crime rates and its statistics don’t say a word about the thin line, which is drawn by judicial system when defining a crime. I remember watching a YT video years ago on this subject, where few victims were sent to serve the privately owned correctional institutions for minor issues, serving months at the time. I remember as well that I was stunned by the period of imprisonment for the sentenced few individuals. Will link it here if I’ll be able to find it. The point would be again, that there is a money interest with the prosecutors and judges to add volume to prison population. By the proportions of corruptions and recorded system failures within the USA, adding to it bunch of false-flag trials as with the case of O.J. Simpson, Tate/Manson and similar, one can assume that reaching those prosecutors and judges willing to be paid for populating prisons by their owners, is not a far-stretched conspiracy theory. Even without such G.I.Joe’s story, I was thinking exactly like he suggested in his post, but before I read his piece. How come that anybody would promote songs and music about street shootings, hustlin’ dope or fighting police? Isn’t that an act of incitement to public unrest? Well, not if you want the consumers/affected public running to the State for more protection. Coincidentally (or not even close), the same goal followed would be beneficial to add volume of prisoners to the correctional institutions – by encouraging and whitewashing inadmissible social behavior by pushing it via music records, public praising of problematic characters and occasional installations of martyrs among them (think Tupac or Notorious B.I.G.). Just bizarre. But all people that are aware of manipulation of public opinion going on would approve the idea, that musical trends are fabrication rather than a mere coincidence of available talented musicians, for which record labels are fighting for to sign a contract with. Would you promote street shootings and criminal activity? I bet not, and I bet the vast majority of population would reject it as an idea, let alone as a musical trend.
To be more direct with my thoughts – regardless of the same statistics pointing to G.I.Joe’s theory/story as well (or at least one cannot refute / overrule the influence of gangsta rap to increase in prison populus’ census), there is as much doubt of my rational mind to allow it being true. In my view, the told story might be as much true as it can be a product of one’s vivid imagination, with facts and circumstances showing both ways. But isn’t that a common notion for any covert operations going on?
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Full research can be found here : https://www.inthepublicinterest.org/wp-content/uploads/Criminal-Lockup-Quota-Report.pdf .
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Sometime last year I was forwarded a link about a man writing of a secret meeting he attended in the late 60s, same deal, confidentiality required, no notes taken, and he wrote anonymously about it. He said that even they knew of the planned future, that American automobiles would be outclassed by foreign models, that music would become intolerable to sensitive ears, that diet would promote obesity … etc. I think even football replacing baseball as the national pastime was included, all wisdom after the fact in my mind.
The problem is anonymity, as it unhinges the piece, much like our journalists using anonymous sources … they can write anything they want and there is no ability to fact check. After I read that piece I realized how easy it is to get untracked. The writer of this piece, if he wants to perform a public service, has to name names. Otherwise, even if every word is true, there is no credibility. If he signed a confidentiality agreement before knowing what was in store, he was a fool. And by what means are such agreements enforceable? Not legal, but only by force. Efforts at secrecy are extremely effective, secrets abound, but enforcement appears far more likely to be by fraternal bonds than force, otherwise they would fall apart.
I’ve long been suspicious that the reason for so many blacks in our prison system is that it is a segment of the population that was not under control, not pacified like whites. There was real potential for rebellion there. The answer, a large project involving government agents masquerading as “Black Panthers” and “Martin Luther King” was to first give them hope, then fake-kill their leaders. At the same time the Rockefeller drug laws made it easier to legally imprison any in the population with potential leadership qualities, entrapment made easy. The hoi palloi got caught in the crossfire. Rap music may have played a small role, as music is an important part of social control. But it came much later, after the majority of the heavy lifting had been done. Today blacks are under control, like whites. We’re all in prison.
Anyway, Vex, a trip to your blog is always a challenging but fun one.
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Thanks for your comment Mark, good points all around.
As much as I agree with you regarding anonymity and the fact, that the author signed NDA before the meeting allowing consequential racketeering, we might be looking at author’s piece from 2 different perspectives. For one, I find author’s opening statement: “After more than 20 years, I’ve finally decided to tell the world what I witnessed in 1991, which I believe was one of the biggest turning point in popular music, and ultimately American society. , a bit to pompous. Knowing what I know now, I find for instance hippie movement and peace&love music era much bigger psyop than (gangsta) rap, with former being a global trend. When I think of punk movement and anarchy of its harmonics involved (which is quite similar to disco era in that regard), it is all even more transparent – all music industry is controlled, steered and pushed, creation of the chosen few. Secondly, if you think about the major music stars, what can be learned is that they are all in majority – of the right bloodline. How do they get chosen as stars is beyond my knowledge, but in general not on the basis of the talent they showed. Anyway, since all major music records are in the hands of a chosen few, there is not much left to doubt about an idea/assertion that music industry is a tool, making profit while shaping public’s perception, behavior and consumerism. In that regard, author’s story about rap is merely re-confirming all I knew about the music industry behind it. I have to say it again – I’ve always admired how devilish good TPTB’s plans are thought of, with so many different goals and individual projects overlapping, pushing some weird and sinister agenda.
I agree, rap music was just a part of the big picture, an integral part of subordination of the blacks. How big or small it is, I have no clue. While there is no way to fact-check author’s piece, there are equal chances for the story to be true, as much as it may be a fabrication. Maybe in time, somebody else present there at that meeting will publish his story as well, confirming it actually took place. Though we may never learn any names involved in any case. Fraternal bonds are for sure much bigger guarantee for secrecy in the long term, but I do believe that some of the manipulators may occasionally reveal some truth behind such manipulations. Which is the reason why we occasionally learn some untold and new facts about anything kept as secret, so I’d again leave this story with some credits regardless of the fact, that it can’t be properly authenticated.
Thanks for your compliments, I’m glad that you got some food for your thoughts at my blog. My compliments to you too, you and your team are running a fantastic blog.
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I’m curious as to why GI Joe was invited to this meeting in the first place. Clearly his involvement wasn’t needed to push the agenda. If confidentiality was required, why bring in 30 people who are likely to be shocked by such a meeting?
Also, how does one “quickly establish” themselves in the music industry as a “decision maker?” That seems unlikely without some major connections.
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Welcome BMSEATTLE. Excellent point made, with only speculations to be made to explain it actually. I would imagine that many studios get contracted for making records for the big labels, but they don’t actually make any high-leveled decisions. Making a package doesn’t say anything about the content of the package, same is here – you need mass of studios to produce a bus-load of rappers in short term. I imagine that would be the goal of one actual decision maker, as it was decided to add another rubbish musical trend. Those allegedly present security guys in the meeting would explain that some issues were anticipated, that’s why was confidentiality pushed as well – for some kind of safety measures. More likely, safety measures in such cases go with racketeering or bullying rather than with some silly paper agreements.
Author’s view of his decision-making position is in my opinion out of proportions of reality. Decisions about musical trends, stars, appearance, etc, are done by people we don’t get to know, I believe.
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