BIN Daily Podcast. March 15, 2023

Host Ramses Ja takes a look at the controversy surrounding NBA star Ja Morant.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:11):
This is the Black Information Network Daily podcast, and I
am your host, Ramsay's Jah And sometimes the amount of
stories they make their way to us means that we
simply can't cover everything that comes our way. But from
time to time, a story just stays with me and
I feel compelled to share it with you and give
you my thoughts. And now one more thing. The Memphis

(00:33):
Grizzlies have suspended All Star guard Ja Morant for at
least two games while the league investigates a video shared
on his Instagram live early Saturday morning in at Morantis
flashing what appears to be a gun inside a nightclub,
holding it to the side of his face. Morant has
issued an apology to his family, as teammates, as coach,

(00:54):
as and fans, saying he does take full responsibility for
his actions. The twenty three year old also says he's
going to take some time to get help and learn
better methods of dealing with stress. Okay, so today we're
going to talk about Job Morant. M hm. You know,

(01:17):
if you listen to the show um or any length
of time, you know that I'm not a big sports guy,
but anybody named Job I'm gonna pay attention. To at
least a little bit. And you know, it's it's very
rare that someone would have my name. So, um, yeah,

(01:41):
this guy. You know, whenever his highlights come up on
my social media or you know, anything that comes up
good or bad, I'm always checking it out. Just just
a fan of him because he stands out, We'll say that.
But um, you know, because I don't follow sports as

(02:03):
closely as maybe most folks do a lot of folks do.
When his name makes it into the news and it's
not a highlight or anything like that, it seems to
be like it's in the news for the wrong reasons.
And most recently, as you know, he has been put

(02:26):
on suspension or showing a gun in a video. Now,
if you don't know the story, in short, he was
in Colorado. His team is in Memphis, but he was
in Colorado, and he was at a strip club dancing,
and he had a shirt off and in a brief

(02:53):
moment showed a gun. He pulls a gun up to
like his face to show that he has it, and
puts it back down and keeps dancing, and the fallout began. Now,
by the time this story made its way to me,
there were already a lot of things in place to

(03:18):
address this. There were you know, his contracts were on
the line. You know, he was negotiating with these corporate
endorsements and all this sort of stuff was happening, you know,
and his potential net worth is potentially being eroded by

(03:38):
this moment of or this lapse in judgment, we'll call it.
And you have to admit, it doesn't look good. He's
in a strict club, shirtless with a gun out of town,
and it looks even worse when you come across these
other little bits of information. Grew up in a two

(03:59):
parent household, he went to private school. You know, he
was not street in the traditional sense of being street
or being hood, and he's sort of portraying that. And
as a result, you know, now there's not only an
NBA investigation, but there's an investigation by the police in
Colorado because they have laws there that says you can't

(04:21):
have guns and alcohol or he can't be intoxicated or
something like that with guns, and so there's an investigation
there as well. And you know, with hundreds of millions
of dollars potentially on the line, you start to realize
the magnitude of this situation, and it's sort of like

(04:46):
when Dave Chappelle said, when keeping it real goes wrong.
The thing is, as we mentioned, this isn't even keeping
it real for John Morant. He is pretending he is
trying to be something that he is not. He was

(05:08):
not raised this way according to his father, and it's
a sad situation to see play out. So what I
wanted to talk to you about today was where this
potentially comes from, and of course get your thoughts on it.
So my theory is that it comes from hip hop culture,

(05:31):
not not authentic hip hop culture, but really hip hop
culture when it meets capitalism and commercial commercialization as dictated
by non black people. I'll explain so in my estimation,

(05:55):
hip hop began as an art form, musical art form
in the Bronx from poor children who didn't have much
in the way of instruments or ways to throw parties

(06:19):
for themselves. This is why turntables became the central instrument
to hip hop music because you could get a turntable,
you can get a record player out of your mom's house,
plug up a couple of speakers, and you know loop
the breaking the breakdown in the song just looping back
over and over again. That's the best part of the song,

(06:39):
and that's the part where everybody can dance and you know,
breaking down, and then you get rapping over the top
of those songs, you know, which comes from you know,
the MC culture, you know, keeping people partying, keeping people dancing,
and just kind of emcy in the events. And that

(07:02):
kind of found mainstream success when rapping started to become
more of a reflection of those environments, in particular in
the Bronx in New York, where people were poor and
you know, there was a lot of crime and you know,

(07:24):
police misconduct and you know, on and on drugs. There's
all kinds of stuff going on. So this is kind
of like the CNN of the hood. I've heard that
said before, and I kind of like how that sounds
because I think it's accurate. So now you have young
people rapping over a new form of music that they

(07:46):
just invented out of what was lying around, as is
often true with black people, and telling stories and sharing
those stories with people who had no access to those
types of neighborhoods. Hip hop took off because of people

(08:08):
buying the music and partaking in the culture that did
not live there, because if you're just in the Bronx
selling to the Bronx, you're not going to have a
long career. But if you're in the Bronx and selling
it to the United States, well, now you have a
lot of people that can support that genre in that craft,
and it can grow into what it is now. And

(08:29):
those people then had a firsthand account of what it
was like to be in the inner city. So fast
forward a bit. Rather than reporting on what's going on
in the hood, now you have people rapping about succeeding

(08:53):
in that environment. I've become successful by selling this or
by doing this activity, or by you know whatever. I'm
the boss, you know. And of course hip hop has

(09:14):
always been very aspirational, so that type of narrative became
central to a lot of hip hop songs and it
still is in a lot of ways. And so it
became about, you know, being the man in a manner
of speaking, but in that environment, here's how here's my

(09:39):
situation when I was born, Here's what I did about it,
and now I'm all the way on. So instead of
rapping for the sake of rapping, you're rapping because you
have these experiences where you've been successful, you know, or whatever.
So fast forward a bit more changes again. So now
instead of rapping about being successful or making a way

(10:02):
out of no way by selling this or doing that
or whatever, now, weirdly enough, the music is not about
selling but rather consuming either the products that you know,
the rappers of an old souled or consuming you know,

(10:24):
name brands or you know, whatever it is. And rather
than you know, being the protectors of your community. You know,
in the early nineties, there was this movement about you know,
um black unity and all that sort of stuff, and
it was kind of a militant component to it. Think

(10:47):
Public Enemy, I think ice Cube. That made way for
like this gangster element, thug element, where now in order
to be the biggest and the baddest and the most successful,
now you need to be super matul as well. And

(11:11):
this is a caricature of black life in America. Sure,
there are some places in this country where the reality
is you definitely need to really think about what safety
could mean for you and for your family. Absolutely, there's
places where people do sell drugs. That's you know, there's

(11:33):
people who are not old enough to have a job,
where the only economically viable option for them to keep
their mother in their house is to do whatever street
crime they can to make money. I know these stories,
they're very true, but rap has glorified that to the

(11:56):
point where if you're not doing those things, if you're
not like keeping it Brillard and the rest of them,
if you're not the most down or the most dug
or the quickest to bust your gun, or you sold
the most dope or whatever, you're not popping the most pills,
You're not you know, whatever it is that's going on
in your in your wraps. Then it feels like you're

(12:21):
not keeping up with the culture. It feels like you're
getting left behind. You want to go in a different direction.
Let's say Megan and the Stallion wanted to make a
song that didn't include her Anatomy or Doji Cat or
you know the City Girls or Cardi b or any
of those guys wanted to make a song that had
nothing to do with their bodies or body parts. Um,

(12:47):
that would be a departure from what they're seeing as success. Now.
I'm not I'm not saying that hip hop is bad.
I'm not saying, you know, there's there's certainly a space
for adult content and environments. You know, I own nightclubs
and I'm a DJ, so I play all these artists,
is why I know their music, even the old school artists,

(13:09):
you know, and in the right environment where they're adults
doing what adults like to do, no problem there. But
we also have to realize that, you know, there's a
bit of a mixed bag here, and as always, there
needs to be some balance. And we don't get to

(13:31):
decide if we don't own the means of distribution, and
we don't get to decide how our music is used
if we keep selling our catalogs. I say we, I
mean these artists. You may have heard in recent news
that a lot of artists are being offered tons of
money for their catalogs, which to me is very sad.

(13:55):
But there's a ripple effect to making and championing this
type of music beyond really adult environments, to where five
years ago, when John Morant was still a child, he

(14:16):
probably had access to all the music that was available
at that time, and none of the popular music really
reflected you know what. I would say the best parts
of our culture would be a lot of it is glorifying,
like kind of the party elements of our culture and

(14:37):
the fun elements. But you know, our excellence goes beyond
the club in my opinion, and the heroes and Jahn
Morant's mind and in his world should be people like
Jordan and people like Lebron, people like Kobe where it'd

(15:03):
be hard for you to imagine them being in a
strip club, shirtless with a gun. I'm not going to
pretend like Alan Iverson wasn't a controversial basketball player when
he was playing. But Alan Iverson mostly got a lot
of attention for the braids and the tattoos. It's not

(15:24):
to say he didn't have trouble, you know, but you know,
he rolled with his friends and he actually was from
that environment. John Morant was not. He's all pretended. And
that's the part that feels kind of sad because it

(15:45):
is possible for us to have heroes that don't carry guns,
that don't sell drugs, do drugs, that don't rap even
you know, it's just you know, what we see as
success a lot of times looks like rappers. And you know,

(16:09):
I'm a I'm a conspiracy theorist to a point, not
really not going to jump off the deep endeavor, but
I often question why that is, why are we not
represented fully? I consider myself to be successful, you know, successful,
more successful than a lot of rappers that I actually know.

(16:32):
Met these people many times, and they're the ones who
are celebrated by our culture, and they have to continue
to pretend to be this version of themselves that I
don't I don't imagine they really want to be because

(16:54):
it sells. Remember once upon a time people were rapping
to get money to get out of the hood. It's
so funny because what is the term that rappers use
to describe having made it being being successful? Balling? And

(17:21):
where does balling come from? Those NBA basketball players contracts?
They've made it. So when you hearing rap music, Oh
I'm balling, I'm balling, you know, it's because hip hop
had always aspired to reach that level, and now what
we have is a person on that level aspiring to

(17:47):
mimic what is in fact a caricature of what a
hip hop artist is. It's like the modern day menstrual show,
where black people paint black basis on themselves so that

(18:10):
they can continue to work. So I guess, in short,
what I'm saying is that while there absolutely is a
significant amount of personal responsibility that goes into this story.
The other part of this is that we need to

(18:35):
keep an open mind when consuming hip hop music, hip
hop culture, and sharing it. Do we roll our windows
down and play it loud when we're driving through the neighborhood,
all the cuss words and everything spilling out into the streets.
I haven't really seen that too much these days, but

(18:55):
once upon a time that was a popular thing to do.
I did it, and I matured, and I realized that's
probably reinforcing some stereotypes. Maybe the people think that black
men are minister society, don't have any regard for anyone else,
or whatever it is that these people might believe to
be true. I'm inadvertently reinforcing those pulsets. So I think,

(19:21):
moving forward, we all can learn from this moment. We
all can decide who to lift up, when to lift
them up, and we all can decide what that should
look like. So the next time your favorite artist comes
out with a song and she's not talking about her body,

(19:44):
she's talking about something different, give it a few more spins,
put in a request, you know, get the Spotify numbers
up by the album. Who knows, But I think that
we all can help shape this culture in a meaningful way.
And I think we all know better than anyone else
that money moves the needle. And if we don't have

(20:05):
any elder statesman or tribal council deciding how our culture
will be marketed and consumed, then we let our voices
be heard with our dollars, with our streams, and indeed
with the way that we consume it. And it might

(20:26):
be a slow train, but I think that we can
get back to the point where we want to be
like Mike and maybe be a little bit less like
money bag Yo. All right, so let me know what
you think. Reach out to me as always on the
red microphone Talkback future on the iHeart Radio app, or

(20:47):
you can hit me on all social media at RAMS
this job. Let's talk about it, all right until we
do piece. This has been a production of the Black
Information Network. Today's show is produced by Chris Thompson. Have
some thoughts you'd like to share? Use the red microphone
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I am your host ramsas Jaw on all social media.

(21:09):
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