hollywood billionaire

Chapter 473 Anger

"Did you hear that?"

"Did you hear that?!"

Dr. Dre gave Han Yi a bear hug with all his strength, and he was extremely excited when he came to the stage. The veins on his hands holding the microphone were bulging, and even his two thick lips were slightly moving and trembling.

He hadn't been so excited for a long time.

"Oh my god! I haven't felt this way in years! Yi is really an excellent speaker, don't you think so?"

After receiving an extremely enthusiastic response from the audience, Dr. Dre nodded twice, licked his lips, and tried to calm his extremely excited emotions by taking deep breaths.

"I didn't prepare anything... Oh, okay, I did prepare a boring, pre-written speech, but I'm not going to read that crap word for word now."

He took out a stack of papers from his shirt pocket and tore them into pieces bit by bit in front of everyone. Amid deafening cheers, Dr. Dre held the microphone in his right hand and pressed the index finger of his left hand on the CD player, slamming the CDs.

"I want to be honest with myself and with you, and I want to speak out my true thoughts and feelings from the bottom of my heart. Therefore, the speech you will hear next will contain a lot of swear words, a lot of mumbling and grumbling, complaints and nonsense. They may not sound good, but I promise you that every word that comes out of my mouth today is 100% true."

He repeated the inhalation and exhalation action twice, and only after his breathing was no longer so heavy did Dr. Dre continue to speak.

"Ladies and gentlemen, I am outraged."

"I've been this angry ever since I can remember."

"In 1972, I was angry because I saw my father abusing my mother. He was an amateur R&B musician and an even more amateur father. He had no way to support his family, was mediocre in talent, never knew how to make good music, but always showed off to others that he was a musician."

"Seeing him fly into a rage over minor setbacks, seeing him slam the door after slapping my mom, I was furious. I thought, is this what you think musicians are supposed to do? Let me show you how to do it. I became a DJ, playing hip-hop in clubs. Soon I was producing hip-hop with DJ Yella, joined World Class Wreckin' Cru, and released Surgery, which sold 50,000 copies in Compton alone..."

"But I was still angry because I couldn't see a way out and hope. We were a hip-hop group, a hip-hop group worshipped by Compton fans in the underground rap circle. But after signing with CBS and Legendary Records, we were forced to wear bright leather jackets and sequined jeans like Prince and Michael Jackson, pretending to be a white man singing glam rock, showing eight teeth to the camera."

"I was angry that hip-hop was never seen as a serious genre, and that every major label executive tried to extinguish the craze and force us to assimilate into something that was acceptable to the mainstream."

"So I left the group and in 1986 I met Ice Cube and, along with a bunch of other angry people, we founded NWA."

"YES!"

The key point hasn't been mentioned yet, but several voices have already started cheering from the audience. There is no doubt that they are all rappers from the Temple label.

No matter whether you identify yourself as West Coast, East Coast or Atlanta, NWA is a senior respected by the entire rap community.

"This time we didn't care. We weren't wearing fucking sequined jackets, we were wearing big black T-shirts, bigger black baseball jackets. Black Compton baseball caps, black OG Mad Dogger sunglasses. Gold chains, fingerless gloves, anything to make us look tough and not to be messed with."

"We say whatever we want, we sing whatever we want. We write lyrics about troubled youth in the ghetto, we write songs about institutionalized racism, we write satires about police brutality..."

"Fuck the Police!" 21 Savage, who came from an Atlanta gang, has already shouted out the title of the song.

"Yes, that's the 'hip-hop national anthem' that caused the FBI to send us a warning letter." Dr. Dre pointed in the direction of 21 Savage and laughed, "We vented all our anger, but did it bring any good? Nothing. The people we wanted to conquer responded to our anger with even greater anger."

"LAPD families threatened to burn down our house, the FBI tried to get record companies to silence us directly, and police across the country, after "Fuck the Police", discrimination and persecution against African Americans not only did not ease, but became more serious. In 1992, you all know what happened that year. I turned on the TV and saw my compatriots holding speakers in the street, playing this song over and over again, marching for Rodney King. This scene made me so angry that I couldn't say anything. Not only was I angry at the police, but I was also angry at myself. Because I thought that violence could be used to fight violence, but it didn't help anyone."

"As I looked at the next chapter in my life, I said to myself, hey, Dre, maybe you should try a different approach to this. Maybe you don't need to vent all your anger, maybe it's better to keep it inside and show people the good things in life. That's why I made the album "The Chronic" and then founded Aftermath," he said. "I gave the world what they wanted, I gave them a gangster world full of upbeat rhythms and funky music. The G-Funk genre I created became a defining element of West Coast hip-hop, which was completely different from East Coast hip-hop and Southern rap musically. I made California's laid-back style tangible and could be recorded on sheet music. I am hailed as the godfather of West Coast hip-hop, and I am training the next generation of artists, first Snoop Dogg, then Eminem, and now Kendrick Lamar."

"I made millions, I made tens of millions. I was successful, I was so successful that I founded a headphone brand with Jimmy, and that headphone brand was so successful that it was bought by Apple for $10 billion..."

From the anger of a teenager in the shadow of domestic violence, to the anger of creation alienated by commercialization during the World Class Wreckin' Cru period, to the social anger marked by "Fuck tha Police" during the NWA period, and finally to the artistic sublimation of "The Chronic" after the Los Angeles riots in 1992. This vein clearly shows how black artists represented by Dr. Dre transformed personal trauma into cultural weapons, and how they reconstructed their expressions in the face of real frustration.

This wonderful fairy tale, unique to the music industry, fascinated the practitioners in the audience.

Until Dr. Dre said the next sentence.

"I'm standing on top of a mountain, literally. Nothing can make me angry, and frankly, few people dare to do things that make me angry right now... I shouldn't have any anger now, but I can't help it. I am - still - very angry."

Andre slammed his fist on the table three times, and the courtyard fell silent instantly.

"I was angry because I realized that I had never solved anything, I had never healed anything. I was just running away, and I had been running away my whole life. G-Funk is great, it speaks to me and it speaks to a lot of people, but it doesn't change the fact that it's a commodity."

"It is a product of compromise, a perfect example of the music industry co-opting the narrative of resistance. They have transformed the symbols of resistance that have condensed from generation to generation into exchangeable value, completing the detoxification of criticism. Hip-hop music is now fun, cool and harmless. It transforms the real class anger on the streets of Compton into a consumer spectacle in the living room of the middle class. Just like jazz... the rhythm of resistance that originated from the labor songs of black slaves eventually became the background music of cocktail parties for the white elite."

"Of course, times are changing. In the past, black jazz musicians didn't benefit from the popularity of jazz, but now, as rappers and producers, we benefit from the prosperity of hip-hop music. Now you can tour all over the world and earn hundreds of thousands of dollars. But has anything actually changed? Is the music industry more inclusive? Are we allowed to be really angry and really rebel? Or is everything we see and hear now a product of compromise that has been embellished?"

"If the music industry is so free and so fascinating, why don't we have a black CEO running Universal, Sony or Warner? We have a n*gga like LA Reid who can be a CEO of a subsidiary and he can do a good job, but he can never sit on the throne of power at the top of the group because it's too dangerous."

The reappearance of the scene of his father's violence in 1972 and the violent scenes on TV news in 1992 form a double trauma mark. This mirror structure in the folds of time reveals how structural violence is transmitted from generation to generation through the nested system of family-society-country, and also reveals the reason for Dr. Dre's anger.

“Now I’m not going to stand here and pretend that only African Americans are being treated unfairly. I’m not even going to pretend that this is just a race issue. This is not about black and white, red and blue, men and women. This is about the voiceless and the voiceless. There are people in this world who have been silenced and silenced for too long, and now, it’s time to give their voice back.”

“This is why I chose to join Han Music.”

Dr. Dre shook his index finger and his voice became more and more trembling.

"I didn't take this job for the money. I have enough money to last me ten lifetimes. I'm not an extravagant person, and I can live well."

"I took this job because I owed myself closure."

"I'm going to fight like hell to make HMG as big as Universal, Sony, and Warner, because I fucking want to be the first black CEO to rule the music industry. I'm not going to speak for myself this time, because I don't have anything to say. I've said my part, but I know each of you has a lot to say. You all have a voice, and you chose to be here because you don't want to compromise with the status quo of our industry... This time, I'm more willing to be the guardian of the party."

"You all have your own voice, guys, I want you to remember this, every one of you has your own voice, let this idea sink into your mind and settle." Dr. Dre pointed to his temple and said word by word, "It doesn't matter what that voice is. That voice can be black, that voice can be white. That voice can be straight or bent. That voice can come from the local area or from a foreign country. That voice can be logical and rational, or it can be completely out of order and crazy. No matter what that voice is, I promise you, HMG will protect it."

"We will defend your right to be independent, clever, curious, angry, ignorant, and reckless, and do everything in our power to ensure that it is not disciplined, co-opted, or assimilated."

"Because the music industry is a garden, and a garden should grow all kinds of flowers, not all that crap that tries to look different but is the same inside."

"This is my promise to you, and this is also Yi's promise to me."

“Now, please applaud yourselves and the wonderful future we are about to create together. Please give another round of applause to Yi Lai and welcome him back to the stage to announce something that is much more important than my appointment as CEO.”

"Come on, Yi."

(End of this chapter)