What the hit FOX show really demonstrates about the recording industry.
by Ziwe Fumudoh
Lee Daniel’s “Empire” has become one of the hottest shows of the season, managing to attract 11.3 million viewers per episode. The series follows Lucius Lyon, the patriarch of the Lyon family and the CEO of the revered hip-hop record label Empire. Taking a page from the life and times of Sean “Puffy” Combs, the show explores the life of Lucious, a former multi-platinum recording artist, as he rises from the depths of poverty to become a savvy entrepreneur. With this new power comes a litany of secrets from his past as a former drug dealer. Additionally, Lucious must juggle manipulating his children who come with inferiority complexes and unparalleled amounts of privilege, while still keeping Empire the sharpest competition in the music industry. “Empire” is a modern soap opera set within the hip-hop industry. This fresh setting allows the show to shine, as it combines the musical genius of Executive Music Producer Timbaland with the seasoned acting of Terrence Howard (Lucius Lyon) and Taraji Henson (Cookie Lyon), allowing the show as a characterization of black talent in hip-hop.
The most interesting aspect of this show is its “inside look” at the music industry. During the pilot episode, Lucius makes an impassioned speech about the Internet defeating the artist’s ability to create art. Thus, he believes his label is the key to an artistic revolution—he’s taking his company public, with the hope that it will allow people to make art the way he used to make it. In the modern climate of the music industry, Lucius’s push to make Empire public is a less-than-practical idea. With the Internet, consumers have the ability to access music however they choose—whether it’s streaming music on Spotify, purchasing a single on iTunes, or downloading an entire discography for free illegally, these options have left a gaping hole in the music industry’s profit margins. While albums were once considered the cash cow of the music industry, their profits in 2014 dipped by 8.4 percent from the previous year. Between 2013 and 2014, there was a 54 percent increase in instances of streaming, and a 15 percent and 13 percent decrease in the number of CD and digital sales, respectively. Artists are notoriously underpaid for their streams. With Spotify, labels, managers, and artists, get a cut of 60 to 84 cents per play. This small cut has artists like Taylor Swift pulling their albums entirely from Spotify. With this shift in record sales, labels have turned to sponsorships and product deals for other forms of earnings. In the modern landscape, labels function as a middleman between the people and music. The Internet allows users to find artists that appeal exactly to their tastes— and allows artists to create without the creative restraints of a label.
Describing this utility of the Internet, hip hop artist, Versailles says, “The internet is a beautiful tool for those people who know what the next thing is or who create the next thing themselves. They don’t have to wait for someone in an office to catch on.” Websites like Youtube, Soundcloud, and even Myspace (in its prime), allowed unknown artists to gain exposure through an egalitarian medium.
Despite all this, “Empire” proves that labels continue to have power. Describing this influence, Versailles says, “The label model is mostly obsolete, but what these people have going for them is their connections. They can make one phone call and a song is playing on every radio in the country on a 40 minute rotation.” This notion is emulated in “Empire” when Cookie books a last minute press conference for Jamal, Lucious’s middle child, wants to premiere a song and come out of the closet, and every major news outlet is there. It was Lucius’s label connections that got the Teen Choice Award nomination party booked at his club, which allowed Hakeem and Tiana, Lucious’s rapper son and an up-and-coming Empire R&B princess, respectively, to debut their song [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJl-Ikw2qxs]. This kind of press is powerful, and certainly Lee Daniel’s “Empire” captures labels’ ability to make things happen.
Last week’s episode of “Empire,” “False Imposition,” suffered from a redundancy that stalled the momentum of the series. The theme of the week was authenticity—who has it, who doesn’t, and how it in turn affects the product of hip-hop. Our first encounter with authenticity is with Hakeem, who as we all know, raps about hoes and being a thug when in actuality he is a spoiled, petulant child. Cookie calls her son out about rapping about the streets when he is “not about that life.” Yet he goes on to premiere “Keep it Movin” to critical acclaim at his father’s club. In this respect, “Empire” shows how manufactured notions of authenticity can succeed in hip-hop.
This emphasis on authenticity derives from hip-hop’s roots. Widely hailed as “the Negro News,” hip-hop originated in the South Bronx during the 1970s, at a time when New York City was a depressed cityscape. This setting allowed hip-hop to become the vernacular equivalent of political discourse for its practitioners. One of the most pivotal albums in early hip-hop history was N.W.A’s debut studio album “Straight Outta Compton” (1988). Penned mostly by MC Ren and Ice Cube, the album was a hood anthem that characterized the real-life experiences of black people in our nation’s poorest regions. The album surveyed the tension between black people and police, the glamour and grit of drug dealing, and the excessive violence. N.W.A was documenting what was going on around them, and hip-hop artists ever since have been emulating that image for its success.
Due in part to gangsta rap’s wild success and popularity in mainstream culture, many artists are looking for that viral song or video that makes them a hit. Sometimes this means they sacrifice their true selves to go for what’s popular. In an interview with him, Chicago-based musician and visual artist Kevin Carey expressed his exhaustion with the music scene, stating, “I got fed up with the way the way that rappers wanted to portray themselves in videos. Some of these artists wanted fake guns and drugs in their videos, to ride off that Chief Keef wave, but that was not them at all.”
Yet, hip-hop artists are not necessarily given the same creative licenses as performers in other genres. Versailles says, “Other genres are allowed to be super expressive and push imagination to the limit, but in hip-hop, rather than being appreciated as a creative genius, you can be looked at as a poser.”
Take Rick Ross, for example. He’s an artist that has notoriously been exposed as a former correctional officer. This is a man that raps about dealing dope and packing heat, yet he was part of the institution that imprisoned men for these crimes. To take it a step further, the Rick Ross moniker is ripped from a convicted drug trafficker, Ricky Ross, who reformed his life and renounced his past crimes. Thus, quite literally, Rick Ross the rapper is inauthentic. Yet, his latest album has sold 397,000 copies and can be heard on every hip-hop station and dance club in the United States. On the inauthenticity of Rick Ross, Kevin Carey says, “It probably hurts his image a bit. He’s still making music that I am going to listen to. ‘Blowin’ Money Fast’ will always be a dope song.” In that regard, it seems that authenticity is not at the crux of being a talented artist.
Similarly, Empire features the talents of artists masquerading as different identities. The characters Tiana and Hakeem are played by real artists Serayah and Yazz, respectively. Both artists have music careers of their own, and both promote the songs they perform on “Empire” as their own. These artists are portraying fictional characters to advance their own careers. Suddenly, they are on a national scale working with the likes of Timbaland, which for all intents and purposes is a major step up for their careers. Their Empire songs are getting radio play on iTunes and Pandora, whereas before they were relative unknown. Thus, in this regard, their authenticity is undermined by the characters they play. Yet, it is their willingness to treat their hip-hop identities as more fluid that has catapulted them to the main stage.
As one of the first network shows to capture the hip-hop industry on a week to week basis, “Empire” is pioneering a space for hip-hop in main television culture. Riddled with falsities, the show’s most pressing need is to entertain, and it does just that. It reminds hip-hop fanatics of that nostalgia they felt during the rise of Bad Boy Records, Rock-A-Fella Records, and Death Row Records to name a few. “Empire” provides viewers with a peek into hip-hop’s complex history, and any show that can do that, is bound to be a hit.
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Ziwe hails from Lawrence, Massachusetts. She started writing at Northwestern University where she studied film, African-American studies, and poetry. Currently, she’s acclimating to having adult responsibilities, like feeding herself. When she’s not watching TV, she spends her time staring out the window and thinking about chows.
