By (ebonyicons)
Before I understood a single thing about power, I understood a run.
I mean the vocal run — the way a voice in a Black church climbs a syllable like a staircase with no top, bends it, worries it, refuses to let one note stay one note. That was my first music. That was the sound of God in the room, and it came out of Black throats, and I did not yet know that this was the headwater of nearly everything the world would later sell me back at a markup.
I was a kid in motion. The DMV, then St. Louis, and summers down in Mississippi — moving between Black communities and white ones, between regions with their own accents and appetites, their own ideas of who I was allowed to be. Music was the one thing that made the trip with me, the same in every zip code and never the same twice. So I went looking. I want to be honest about the looking, because it matters to what I finally understood. I loved Korn. I loved the White Stripes, Björk, the Cranberries, the Judds. I fell hard for K-pop — for BoA, whose voice I chased across a language I didn’t speak, and for the whole architecture of the genre, its precision and its ache. I still love all of it. I wandered the whole sonic map like a person trying houses, sitting in each one, asking: is this me, is this home, is this where the ache goes quiet.
It took me most of my life to notice I had wandered in a circle. That every genre I loved was, somewhere down in its foundation, built from the same run I first heard in church. That I had gone searching the world over for a sound to belong to and arrived, exhausted, back at the center I was born inside. Black music. The source. The thing everyone else had been drinking from all along while I went looking for water.
I study systems. Power, violence, who takes and who is taken from. I did not expect that study to lead me here, to my own record collection, to the music I love most. But the apparatus does not stop at bodies. It reaches into art. And when the art is your culture, the theft is not abstract. It is the sound of your own grandmother’s church, sold back to you with a stranger’s name on it.
Start with the naming, because naming is where power hides in plain sight.
Fab 5 Freddy understood this. In Everybody’s Fly, his memoir of building the culture from inside it — the graffiti, the block parties, the bridge he made between the Bronx and downtown — he writes as an architect, not a spectator, and that vantage matters, because hip-hop is one of the few Black art forms that got to name itself. That was not incidental. Black music had always, before, been named by other people: white critics, white journalists, white executives leaning over a Black art form to decide what it would be called, and therefore what it would mean, and therefore who would be understood to own it. The founders of hip-hop reached for that authority on purpose. They would not be named this time. They would do the naming.
That idea reorganized how I think about ownership. Because to name a thing is to claim it, and to be the one named is to be claimed. The namer has the power. The named becomes property. Once I saw it in music I could not stop seeing it everywhere — that the fight over what to call something is never small, is always the first move in the fight over who gets to keep it.
Now hold that beside Michael Jackson.
He did not crown himself. The title came from outside — Elizabeth Taylor, a stage, 1989, “the true king of pop, rock, and soul,” later trimmed to the part that stuck. King of Pop. A name conferred, then absorbed into the machinery of promotion. And I want to be exact about why this matters, because it is not a complaint about a nickname. It is about what the nickname did.
Michael Jackson was not the king of some separate genre called pop. He was the culmination of Black music itself. Every element we adore in him is Black art at its highest resolution. The ad-libs are scatting. The percussion in his throat is beatboxing. The footwork the world credits to Fred Astaire — that crediting is the whitewash; look instead at the Nicholas Brothers and you will see exactly where it lives. He gathered every Black tradition available — gospel phrasing, R&B, funk, the coming thing of hip-hop — and fused them into one body moving across a stage. He was not the king of pop. He was the king of the whole inheritance, rendered so completely that the world had to invent a raceless word to hold him.
That word was the trick. “Pop.” A category with no color, no church, no origin, floating free of the Black hands that made every sound inside it. To name him King of Pop was to lift the crown off Black music and set it on a shelf marked universal — where universal has only ever meant available to whiteness.
Watch what the shelf does once the crown is on it.
I came up measuring success by that word. Pop is the general population, the chart summit, the sign that you have arrived — not niche, not genre, not lane, but everyone. And here is the arithmetic that took me years to see: pop, the genre built entirely from Black music, is the one genre Black artists can no longer enter.
We are sorted. R&B. Urban. Sometimes, if we are strange enough, alternative. But pop — the crown, the center, where the money and the innovation and the immortality live — is held, with rare exception, for white artists making diluted versions of the exact sounds we invented. A Black artist has to reach a Beyoncé altitude, a once-in-a-generation gravitational force, just to touch the category that would not exist without us. The rest are kept in the rooms with our names on the door, while the great hall bears no name at all and admits almost no one who looks like the people who built it.
This is not an accident of taste. It is architecture. It is the same move as the crown — take the Black thing, strip its origin, rename it something raceless, and guard the raceless thing against the people it came from.
Now the part that turns the whole picture, because it is where most of us aim our anger at exactly the wrong target.
In the 2000s, as hip-hop and R&B reached for lush new textures, producers sampled widely — including from Arabic music, and there was real and righteous grief in Arab artistic communities about their heritage being lifted, chopped, looped under lyrics that had nothing to do with the sacred or the tender origins of those sounds. The most famous case became a lawsuit: Jay-Z and Timbaland’s “Big Pimpin’” was built on a flute line from a 1957 Egyptian composition, and the composer’s family sued, arguing the use dishonored the work.
Here is what actually happened, and why it matters. Timbaland found the sound on a compilation CD sold as license-free. He paid a hundred thousand dollars to the party listed as the owner. Jay-Z pointed to liner notes crediting the original. The rights had already been signed away — from the composer’s heirs to a record company, then licensed onward to a Western music corporation. Years later a court dismissed the case, in part because the relative who sued no longer controlled the rights he was suing over. The Black artists had gone to the marketplace, found the sound sold as cleared, and paid the name on the label.
So I need to say this plainly, because it is the spine of everything I am arguing. The grief of that Arab artistic community is valid and correct. Their heritage was extracted and commodified and stripped of its meaning. But the theft did not happen at the moment a Black producer bought the sample. The theft happened earlier, up the chain, when a corporation was able to stamp owned by us, cleared for use onto someone else’s inheritance and sell it as clean goods. By the time it reached the studio, the fruit was already stolen — and displayed in a legitimate-looking store, with a price tag and a receipt.
You do not steal a pineapple by buying it at your supermarket. Dole and the long imperial history of how that pineapple came to be cheap and available and stamped as theirs — that is the theft. The shopper who pays the listed price is not the thief. And when the grievance gets aimed at the shopper instead of the corporation that laundered the goods, the actual thief walks out clean, and two robbed communities are left in the aisle blaming each other while the store keeps the money.
That is the fraudulent label of ownership. That is the whole mechanism, in miniature. White supremacy’s genius is not only that it steals — it is that it issues itself the paperwork, sells the stolen thing as legitimate, and then stands back to watch the people it robbed fight over who really did the taking. Direct your fury at the customer and the thief is never punished. Read the label as truth and the crime becomes a transaction.
If you want to see the label-makers defend the fraud in real time, watch what happens when someone forces the door.
Beyoncé made a country album. Country — with the banjo at its heart, and the banjo is an African instrument, the form itself soaked in Black string traditions and Black voices the industry spent a century scrubbing out. She made Cowboy Carter, became the first Black woman to top the country album chart since that chart began in 1964, and the country establishment answered by giving her zero nominations at its awards while the album dominated everything. When she won Best Country Album at the Grammys anyway, the response — the very next cycle — was to split the category in two.
Sit with the timing. A Black woman wins the category, and the category is immediately reorganized. I will not assign intent to every vote. I will tell you what the pattern does regardless of intent: the moment the gate is breached, the gate is moved. The door adjusts to the person walking through it. And it happened to her in the genre her ancestors built. She did not wander into someone else’s house. She came home, and they told her she wasn’t from there.
Widen the lens past our own community, because the machine runs the same on everyone it decides is not the default.
This year the Recording Academy created a Best Asian Pop Music Performance category. BTS — arguably the biggest musical act on earth — withdrew from the Grammys in protest, saying they wanted music heard and loved for what it is, not divided by region or language. The Academy’s leadership defended the category as celebration, as a spotlight for artists who “weren’t being heard.”
And here race-neutrality reveals itself as the mask it always is. There is a Best African Music category and now a Best Asian Pop category — but no Best White Rock, no Best European Pop, no Best Caucasian Jazz. Whiteness is never a category. Whiteness is the unmarked center, the “music” against which everything else is a hyphenated regional variant. The big awards — Album of the Year, the crown categories — stay the raceless great hall, overwhelmingly white, precisely because everyone else has been sorted into labeled side rooms. The “celebration” is the exclusion wearing the face of inclusion. You do not honor people by building them a smaller room. You honor them by unlocking the big one — and the big one is never unlocked, only defended.
The category is the crown in reverse. For Michael, they invented a raceless word to lift him out of Blackness. For BTS, they invented a regional word to keep them out of the center. Opposite tools. Identical function. The default stays white, and the default stays winning.
I say this as someone who loves that music — who found something in BoA and in K-pop I couldn’t find in the houses closer to home. That love is exactly why the side room offends me. You do not get to sort the thing I traveled all that way to find into a smaller category and call the sorting a favor. The music that helped raise me does not need the industry’s permission to matter, and neither did the church run I started with.
And underneath all of it, the money — because theft of the name is only ever the setup for theft of the wealth.
Black musicians have been robbed structurally for a century: stolen masters, predatory contracts, publishing signed away by artists never shown what they signed, white acts who covered a Black song and kept the house while the originator died broke. That is old news, which is exactly the problem — it is so old we stopped calling it robbery.
Streaming is the same theft in a new container. The industry moved us from ownership to access — from paying the artist for the record to paying a platform for the faucet. The per-stream rate has fallen by enormous margins even as the platforms’ valuations soared; a track now has to clear a minimum threshold to earn anything at all; the major labels reportedly pull in something like a million dollars an hour while the artist collects fractions of a cent. This hurts musicians across every color line, and I will not pretend otherwise. But lay it over the specific, unbroken history of Black art extracted from Black hands and the pattern is unmistakable. The container keeps changing — sheet music, vinyl, the cover version, the contract, the stream. The function never changes. The wealth flows away from the people who made the sound and toward the people who own the pipe.
Here is what I finally understood, sitting in the ruins of my own long search for a sonic home.
The apparatus I have spent my life studying — the one that decides which bodies are protected and which are expendable, whose suffering counts and whose is filed away as acceptable — does not stop at flesh. It works on art the way it works on people, because art made by a people is just that people in another form. Take the thing. Strip its origin. Rename it something that erases the maker. Guard the renamed thing against the maker’s own children. Move the money out the back door. And do all of it in the language of celebration, universality, neutrality — the vocabulary that lets everyone in the room feel innocent while the theft completes itself.
And this is the part that should frighten all of us, not only those of us whose churches got looted for parts: white supremacy is costing everyone, in measurable dollars and unmeasurable culture, and it keeps us fighting each other for scraps while the goalpost slides down the field. The Arab family suing the Black producer. The country gatekeepers barring the Black woman from the genre Black people built. The fans of one sorted community resenting another sorted community, each convinced the other got the better side room. All of us in the aisle, blaming the shopper, while the store — the one that stamped the fraudulent label on all of it — counts the money and moves the goalpost again. Divide the robbed and you never have to answer for the robbery.
I went looking for a home in Korn and Björk and the Judds, in BoA and all the K-pop I chased across languages I didn’t speak, and I found real beauty in every one of those houses, and I regret none of it. But I came all the way around to the truth I started with in that first church, before I had any words for it: the run I heard as a child is the headwater. Nearly every sound the world loves traces back to Black throats that were never paid, never named, never let into the great raceless hall their own genius built.
They named Michael the King of Pop so pop would never have to admit it was Black.
They gave Beyoncé the trophy and moved the category so the door could seal behind her.
They built BTS a side room so the center could stay reserved.
They sold the sample as clean so the customer would take the blame.
They turned the record into a stream so the last dollar could follow the master out the door.
Every one of these is the same sentence at a different volume, and I am done mistaking the volume for a difference in kind.
Say the names. Of the genres and who made them. Of the sounds and where they were born. Of the corporations that stamped their names on other people’s inheritance and sold it back to the children of the robbed. Fab 5 Freddy and the founders knew: naming is where they take it, and naming is where we take it back. Aim your anger up the chain, at the label-maker and not the neighbor holding the receipt, or the theft goes unpunished forever.
Home was never lost. It was only renamed.
And I know my way back now, because I finally know what to call it — and who to bill for it.
ebonyicons 
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