When Fox news reports on hip-hop culture you can almost guarantee that it’ll be mired in shoddy reporting, ignorant assumptions and laughable quotes.
Gerarldo Rivera kept that trend alive when he criticized Kendrick Lamar’s performance of “Alright” (from his album To Pimp a Butterfly) at the BET awards, calling his lyrics “counterproductive” and “exactly the wrong message.” He even went as far as to label hip-hop “as the real oppressor of black people,” FOX News The Five co-host, Eric Bolling, assisting the idiocy with a lyric pull quote lead-in:
As you catch that, Lamar states his views on police brutality with that line in the song, quote, ‘And we hate the popo, wanna kill us in the street, fo-sho.
Rivera is a representation of the blind hate directed at hip-hop culture. Instead of talking about the systematic oppression, the police brutality or the economic freeze outs he blames hip-hop, one of the few outlets that have allowed a free platform for Black America to express its frustration, not to mention the countless jobs it has provided.
Geraldo Rivera is a carrier of a dangerous disease, the one of willful ignorance. By his logic there’s no difference between Young Thug and Nas or Chief Keef and Lupe Fiasco. He’s generalizing an entire medium of expression without understanding an ounce of where it’s coming from, which lends itself to a generalizing of an entire race. He’s a false prophet leading his flock into a ravine of racist assumptions.
Kendrick Lamar responded to the criticism during an interview with TMZ and was adamant on how Rivera is missing the overall message, which is that despite all the adversity Black America has faced everything will be alright. He rightfully chastises Rivera and wonders aloud “how can you take a song that’s about hope and turn it into hatred.” The answer is that Rivera knows what he’s doing, which is spewing out senseless propaganda hoping that something will stick.
Fox News is a joke, and people with half a brain know that. Kendrick Lamar is one of the few voices out there that offer hope and insight within an industry that welcomes neither. Let Geraldo have his two cents that way it’ll be easy to identify who the enemy is in all this.