Occupy Wall Street, Racial Neoliberalism, and New York’s Hip-Hop MogulsEithne Quinn

Final version of an article published in American Quarterly vol. 6, no. 1 (March 2016)

The Occupy movement was one of the most striking grassroots political mobilizations on the US left in recent years. It started on September 17, 2011, in New York, when protestors set up camp for the night in Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan. By late October, people had established hundreds of occupations in public places in big cities, towns, and college campuses across the United States and beyond. Occupy Wall Street (OWS), as the first New York camp became known, quickly came up with the slogan that spearheaded the mobilization: they represented the 99 percent, they declared, in opposition to the 1 percent elite.1 These terms drew on Joseph Stiglitz’s much-discussed Vanity Fair article of May 2011, “Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%,” in which he made connections between the Arab Spring revolutions and conditions in the United States: “Americans have been watching protests against oppressive regimes that concentrate massive wealth in the hands of an elite few. Yet in our own democracy, one percent of the people take nearly a quarter of the nation’s income.”2 In what the economist Thomas Piketty describes as “an explosion of inequality,” by 2009 the wealthiest 1 percent of US households held on average 225 times the wealth of the median household.3 In its name and location, OWS most flagrantly indicted Wall Street financiers whose practices had spurred the 2008 financial collapse. But “we are the 99 percent” also brought more general trends of social injustice into focus. The movement helped establish a new discursive collectivity—albeit in terms that privileged class above other forms of oppression—of poor, working-class, and middle-class peoples.4 It held rearticulative power by challenging the terms of corporate-capitalist common sense, which, even after the financial crash, promoted the idea that downward redistribution and reinstituting the social safety net were somehow antipopulist compared with the tax-cutting, small government rhetoric of the neoliberals and Tea Partiers.5

The central positions promulgated by Occupy—especially that the gap between the rich and the rest was too large—had wide public endorsement.6 Its supporters included artists and celebrities—nowhere more so than from the world of hip-hop (another movement birthed in New York City). Along with many overtly politicized rap artists, several of New York’s most business-oriented hip-hop figures became associated in different ways with the mounting protest—especially three individuals whom I focus on in this article: Russell Simmons of Def Jam, Shawn Carter (Jay Z), and Curtis Jackson (50 Cent). These three were all within the ranks of the 1 percent in 2011.7 As both symbol creators and entrepreneurs, they had built rap-inflected brands not just in music but diversified, through share holdings and licensing deals, into clothing, TV, film, sport, colognes, books, drinks, restaurants, and so on. Though they had joined the financial elite, Simmons, Carter, and Jackson had developed careers through building star brands that represented people, in intersectional race and class terms, near the other end of the economic spectrum. Hip-hop culture—which comprises the core elements of rapping, deejaying, break dancing, and graffiti art—was first developed by working-class youth in late-1970s New York,

emerging from subculture to mainstream during the same years that saw the rise to dominance of liberalized capitalism. As scholars have shown, hip-hop was complexly determined by some of the worst social trends associated with neoliberalism: soaring inequality, extreme marketization, mass criminalization, and chronic unemployment.8 While many political rappers adopted oppositional stances to these trends, the hip-hop culture associated with Simmons and especially Carter and Jackson tended to celebrate materialism and enterprise with all the gusto of individuals who have “made it” against terrible odds. Indeed, as market fundamentalism became hegemonic, these rap moguls emerged as totems of neoliberal realignment, crystallized in the annual “Cash Kings” roundup, “The World’s Highest Paid Hip-Hop Artists,” produced by Forbes magazine.

Cultural studies scholars have, as a consequence, critiqued these hip-hop moguls as emblems of neoliberalism. Paul Gilroy describes rap celebrities, including Simmons, Carter, and especially Jackson, as “black vernacular neoliberals,” who embody the “substantial political shift in which selfishness and privatisation have displaced racial structures onto an interpersonal scale and facilitated the replacement of imperfect democracy by what we are told is the non-negotiable force of a natural hierarchy.”9 Mark Fisher describes rappers like Carter and Jackson as prime “capitalist realists,” who help shore up the notion that there is no alternative to the brutalizing market.10 Herman Gray influentially maps the “racial neoliberal regime of difference,” of which hip-hop moguls are surely preeminent examples: “The object of recognition is the self-crafting entrepreneurial subject whose racial difference is the source of brand value celebrated and marketed as diversity; a subject whose very visibility and recognition at the level of representation affirms a freedom realized by applying a market calculus to social relations.”11 These are powerful and pessimistic arguments about how racial difference—and a privileged, commoditized African American subjectivity in particular—has served to consolidate contemporary capitalism, both by disavowing structural inequalities through enticing bootstrap personal advancement narratives and by rearticulating collective, emancipatory notions of black freedom as individualist, consumerist ones. Yet, with the financial collapse of 2008, the attendant crisis in neoliberal legitimacy, and the growth of protest activity, new ideas about the potential vulnerability of supercapitalism came to the fore. Would the crisis, asks Stuart Hall, “presage business as usual, the deepening of present trends or the mobilization of social forces for a radical change of direction?”12

The present article explores how New York’s rap moguls responded to Hall’s question when a vigorous protest movement rose up on their doorsteps. Doreen Massey, writing, along with Hall, as part of the “After Neoliberalism” manifesto, asserts: “The fact that [neoliberalism] . . . has now run into its own crises provides an opportunity for a new imagining.”13 Had rap’s capitalist realists long harbored reservations about unbridled markets that had worked so well for them as individuals, but at the expense of their communities? Were they shocked into awareness by how the crisis, which wiped out the wealth holdings of working-class people, had been seized on by the financial elite as an opportunity for further upward redistribution? To what extent did they see an “opportunity for a new imagining” not only to express political critique but also to revivify their own cultural texts and star brands? Could it help them move beyond the still lucrative but increasingly vacuous ghetto self-help entreaties to “get that dirt off your shoulder”?14 On a secondary level, the crisis offers an opportunity to engage and assess aspects of the scholarly accounts of racial neoliberalism introduced above. The striking confluence of culture, race, and business in mainstream hip-hop has surely led to new opportunities for capitalist consolidation. But these moguls’ hard-won understanding of race, class, and the market might

also, when the anticorporate backlash emerged, have provided some tools for critique. These creative entrepreneurs have considerable financial literacy, which they first honed on the street and developed in growing their business empires in the conglomerated cultural industries. Given that they were well placed to speak truth to financial power, the extent to which they did so—and the extent to which they were attuned to the vast racial and material inequalities of contemporary America—is important. That some of the scholarly accounts of racial neoliberalism may not leave much room to draw distinctions between Simmons, Carter, and Jackson, I suggest, may be politically concerning.15

Race and Occupy Wall Street

The fit between Occupy Wall Street and hip-hop culture was assuredly imperfect. The first wave of OWS protestors was majority white and middle class—many were part-time college students and unemployed college graduates. A Panamanian American Occupy activist, Sandra Nurse, describes the initial encampment as “very white,” an assessment echoed by David Graeber, an anthropologist/occupier, in his influential account The Democracy Project.16 White middle-class men predominated at the early general assemblies. Despite Occupy’s celebrated “horizontalist” and networked structure, which encouraged internal contestation, critique, and deliberation, economic (along with environmental) justice was privileged, with other axes of dispossession too often treated as distractions from the central story.17 The mobilization, in its early days, thus missed opportunities to expand its critique intersectionally, diminishing its claims to represent the 99 percent.18 Reflecting on Occupy’s early demographics and priorities, one commentator, Stacey Patton, went so far as to write a Washington Post article titled “Occupy Isn’t Black America’s Fight.”19

However, commentators may risk overstating exclusions. In their exploration of the mobilization’s identity politics, the political scientists Emily Welty, Matthew Bolton, and Nick Zukowski paint a less exclusionary picture, in which, despite “potential fissures,” OWS also “serves as an umbrella to gather people from different identity groups.”20 Angela Davis, who addressed general assemblies, and who has argued for the necessity of cross-racial mobilization in the post–civil rights period, asserted that “the Occupy movement’s exhilarating potential lies in forging a unity that can make a new majority of the old minorities.”21 Even at its outset, the movement was far from solely white. The People of Color (POC) caucus and Occupy the Youth working group quickly formed. Prominent nonwhite participants included, for instance, Micah White, then editor of the satirical anticorporate magazine Adbusters, who first developed the idea for Occupy Wall Street; Manissa Maharawal, who contributed to the wording of OWS’s first public declaration; and Arun Gupta, cofounder of the Occupy Wall Street Journal.22 Further complicating race and class assumptions about the early days of the Zuccotti mobilization, many homeless occupiers, who were majority nonwhite, helped hold down the space and, though some tensions arose, shared important practical advice about sleeping rough and dealing with the authorities.23 As the mobilization grew, its demographics “started to change very quickly,” recounts Nurse.24 A second OWS general assembly was instituted, conducted in Spanish. “Within a matter of weeks,” states Graeber, “we were seeing African-American retirees and Latino combat veterans marching and serving food alongside dreadlocked teenagers.”25 The mobilization increasingly attracted racially diverse working-class constituencies, with unions, including New York City’s Transit Workers Union, giving strong backing. A widely cited survey report by City University on the demographics of OWS (its data drawn from the later 2012 May

Day Occupy rally) found that non-Hispanic whites made up 62 percent of the participants.26 While the press interpreted this survey as evidence of Occupy’s racial nonrepresentativeness, the figures do suggest that a sizable minority—over one-third—were people of color. Occupy inspired the formation of “Occupy the Hood,” created by Malik Rhasaan, born in Queens, with a reported seventeen branches in early 2012, and several hundred OWS protestors joined a vigil in Harlem organized by the National Action Network for Martin Luther King Day, capturing some of Occupy’s possibilities for cross-racial coalition.27

Detailing minority participation and cross-racial networks seems important in its own right, given repeated attempts, fueled by the corporate-owned mainstream media, to discredit Occupy’s claims to represent the 99 percent. But much of the significance of this nonwhite participation—and of those representing other forms of inequality, including feminist, gender variant, and nonheterosexual activists—rested not on demographics but instead on how it challenged the mobilization’s at times crude privileging of material justice. For instance, Maharawal and others successfully blocked language in Occupy’s first public declaration that had “ignored the colonial, imperialist legacies of race.” Along with First Nations groups, they also mounted objections to the neocolonialist resonances of the very term Occupy, which raised uneasy parallels with the United States’ historic basis in imperialism.28 The POC caucus fed important intersectional perspectives into general assembly discussions, productively extending the parameters of this network movement. One of the most important interventions of the nonwhite activists surrounded race, youth, and state violence, and of all OWS’s homegrown stars to emerge virally through camera-phone footage, none was more prominent than Shamar Thomas, a black marine veteran who faced down a dozen police officers. His repeated statements—“there is no honor in police brutality” and “these are unarmed people”—followed the brutal police attack on protestors of all colors at the October 15 demonstration, and the footage has since been viewed eighteen million times (as of 2015).29 The powerful footage of Thomas indexes the protest history against brutal police violence on black people while foreshadowing the Black Lives Matter mobilization.30 Indeed, many in Occupy were part of what the commentator Gary Younge calls “the US itinerant left” that since found its home in this radical civil rights movement (“led by a generation of young activists intent on actualizing a new, radical, possibly queer politics led by people of color,” in Cathy Cohen’s words).31

While participation from a wide range of activists helped challenge Occupy’s class reductionism, the movement remained, it must be emphasized, concerned with economic justice—this was the central mobilizing touchstone for this particular convergence of the United States’ itinerant Left. Indeed, many people of color were drawn to the movement precisely because of Occupy’s rallying economic inequality critique, which they saw as deeply salient. The racial wealth gap, already historically debilitating, had been devastatingly exacerbated by the financial collapse of 2008: from US whites having, on average, about four times as much wealth as nonwhites before the recession, to whites having six times as much by 2010.32 This constituted, as Michael Omi and Howard Winant assert, “the largest regressive racial redistribution of resources to have occurred in US history.”33 As Occupy the Hood insisted: “Black, Brown and Native/Indigenous People . . . are disproportionately affected by the issues that the Occupy Movement has recently raised.”34 Thus the stated aims of Occupy the Hood and the POC caucus were twofold: to challenge the class reductionism of some of Occupy’s core members and, equally importantly, to seize on Occupy’s material protest to galvanize the working-class and poor communities of color whose wealth holdings had been ravaged by neoliberalist greed and dysfunction.

It is therefore of little surprise that, despite fissures, many in the hip-hop community (from diverse racial backgrounds) understood the significance of this grassroots youth movement. Many participated in the mobilization, including an early OWS appearance by Lupe Fiasco (Wasalu Jaco), who went on to write an Occupy rap and donate supplies of tents, tarpaulin, and propane at Occupy Denver. Rosa Clemente, a South Bronx–born hip-hop environmentalist and Green Party vice presidential candidate, was active in OWS; the political rapper Jasiri X released “Occupy (We the 99)”; and the radical Harlem rapper Immortal Technique (Felipe Coronel) gave a dramatic speech at OWS at 2 a.m. Leading political rappers, from Long Island’s Chuck D (Carl Ridenhour) of Public Enemy to Atlanta’s Killer Mike (Render), addressed camps. Talib Kweli (Greene) performed a new rap for OWS, tweeting afterward: “This is the New York City I love.”35 From its beginnings, hip-hop culture was a complex and contested arena of protest culture. The allegiance to Occupy of these and other divergently politicized rappers is indicative of hip-hop’s continuing, if underacknowledged, protest currents, further belying the idea that Occupy was not black (and brown) America’s fight.36 But would the fight resonate with New York’s rap moguls?

Russell Simmons: “This Is a Money Grab”

Russell Simmons, born in Queens, New York, cofounded the hip-hop label Def Jam Recordings in 1983, which signed seminal rap acts like Run DMC, Beastie Boys, and the preeminent political rap group Public Enemy. He had been one of the first to see the vast potential for launching black-owned brands to sell hip-hop culture to a broad market, cofounding the clothing label Phat Farm in the early 1990s and diversifying his brand into many other areas, including television shows, books, comedy, jewelry, and finance. By 2011 he enjoyed an estimated wealth of $340 million, presiding over his business from his Manhattan-based media firm Rush Communications.37 Simmons was actively involved in OWS, making about thirty-five visits to Zuccotti Park during the almost two-month encampment, as well as addressing general assemblies elsewhere. As the Huffington Post reported: “No celebrity supports the ‘Occupy’ movement more fervently than Russell Simmons.”38 He gave money and fund-raised, gave interviews and speeches, and networked and lobbied on behalf of Occupy. Simmons repeated his core message in Occupy addresses, in news media interviews, and through his hip-hop website globalgrind.com: “The lobbyists and the corporations run this country”; “this is class warfare that’s being waged on the poor and the middle class”; “they’re taking all the money from those who need it most and, you know, the Dow Jones is doing fine”; “this is a money grab.”39

Behind the scenes, he promoted the drafting of a constitutional amendment authored by Congressman Ted Deutch—the OCCUPIED (Outlawing Corporate Cash Undermining the Public Interest in Our Elections and Democracy) Amendment—to ban private donations in federal elections. Simmons announced the proposed amendment at Occupy Boston in November and explained: “It sounds like a revolutionary idea, but all of America would go for it. It’s easy sound bite. We want the money out of Washington and the bribery to stop.”40 Simmons also worked at alliance building, organizing the December press conference at which OWS announced its partnership with Occupy the Dream, led by the civil rights leader Benjamin Chavis and the Baltimore pastor Jamal Bryant. At the launch, they drew parallels between Occupy and Martin Luther King’s Poor People’s Campaign, and on King’s federal holiday in January, Occupy the Dream held protests in sixteen cities at Federal Reserve Bank locations, leaving behind crutches to symbolize how financialization was crippling communities.

Previous to Occupy, Simmons had already established a record of progressive campaigning. With Chavis, he founded the Hip Hop Summit Action Network (HSAN) in 2001, a social and philanthropic organization advocating for youth concerns, including Rock the Vote! (voter registration rallies featuring celebrities) and Get Your Money Right (programs teaching financial literacy to working-class youth). Simmons also organized rallies to protest the draconian Rockefeller drug laws—which included mandatory fifteen-year minimum sentences for selling and possessing even small amounts of illegal drugs—and in 2003 had joined high-level political negotiations to push through a reform bill. Though overturning the legislation was, at that point, unsuccessful, “Simmons’s activities could plausibly be connected to the bill’s eventual passage,” states the political scientist Lester Spence.41 At the same time that he emerged as a hip-hop activist, Simmons continued to amass a huge fortune, making $100 million when he sold his stake in Def Jam to Universal Music Group, the corporate colossus of the American music market. His best-selling self-help books—including the provocatively titled Super Rich, published in the year that Occupy discursively targeted this demographic—well captures the contradictions between his role as progressive campaigner and business magnate. In the introduction Simmons explains that “super rich” refers not to material wealth but to a meditation-informed “state of consciousness” in which “you’ll understand that you don’t need money or toys to be happy.”42

Scholars have tended to read Simmons’s pre-Occupy social activism with some skepticism. Craig Watkins and Lester Spence offer nuanced accounts, both suggesting that Simmons, though a tenacious progressive advocate, is from the world of business and runs HSAN in a top-down fashion that is disconnected from the grassroots.43 Simmons, as Watkins puts it, forwards a “star-power model of politicking” in which he relies on his “money, celebrity, and the influence they both generate.” HSAN is thus compared unfavorably with other hip-hop organizations, and Watkins concludes that, particularly in terms of organizational structure, “Simmons and Chavis Muhammad represent a brand of politics that, ultimately, is of little use to hip hop.”44 Spence largely concurs, and also critiques the discourses mobilized in Simmons’s advocacy. In an argument resonant of Gilroy and Gray, Spence suggests that HSAN’s Get Your Money Right program promotes “neoliberal governmentality” “by implicitly blaming black and brown populations for their economic circumstances and by shunting their behavior toward individual human capital development, as opposed to organizing them to fight against the structural factors that keep them economically subordinate.”45 Such criticisms can be situated within a broader critique of Simmons as instrumental in the corporate takeover of hip-hop—a subculture that “for many belongs to the people and communities that inspired its formation,” as Watkins puts it.46

Such scholarly reservations about Simmons’s activism were shared by some Occupiers. When Simmons started showing up at Zuccotti Park—spending time, taking part in yoga practice, addressing assemblies, and giving interviews—he was frequently heckled and met with suspicion. Interviewed by CNN at OWS in October, for instance, some of the crowd heckled both the news channel and Simmons, with one woman stating simply: “You are part of the problem, Russell.”47 Simmons sought to generate publicity by bringing along famous friends, including the widely reported visit by Kanye West on October 10, as well as tweeting a Zuccotti Park photo of himself with the pop singer Katie Perry and the comedian-actor Russell Brand. Jared Ball, of the Black Agenda Report, spoke for a number of activists when he stated that Simmons’s bringing celebrities “into the Occupy mix . . . is an attempt by the soft liberal Left to

co-opt anything that has any degree of revolutionary potential,” standing “in direct opposition to the . . . more ‘indigenous’ struggles and organizers.”48

There is understandable unease about the participation of business leaders in anticapitalist alliance building. Market values all too often undermine genuine cooperation and commitment, and progressive social change of course needs to be led by “indigenous organizers” rather than elites, or what Robin Kelley calls “great men.”49 Yet even Simmons’s detractors admitted that he became “fully ‘inside’ the [OWS] movement.”50 Celebrities may be totems of winner-take-all neoliberalism, and their involvement with protests can be co-optive, self-serving, and top-down; but they are also, inescapably, culturally influential and can potentially be effective advocates for and publicizers of social movements. Nurse later reflected on the growth of the mobilization, identifying “a real moment where we felt, wow, this thing is getting really big. We had, you know, Russell Simmons, Kanye West.”51 OWS was publicity savvy and knew it was partly reliant on mainstream media (which famous people can help attract) to grow the movement. Celebrities, like other people, should partly be judged by the amount of time they commit to causes, and there is no doubt that Simmons’s commitment was substantial. On one occasion, Simmons asked to be bumped up on the general assembly speakers’ list, only to be told by pivotal Occupy activist Marisa Holmes: “Are you crazy? You’re number 12. Get used to it!”52 This captures the conflict between top-down and horizontalist structures. Yet Simmons learned to wait his turn, as he repeatedly placed himself in uncomfortable and at times hostile situations—as a high-profile one-percenter in the midst of the ninety-nine.

Simmons spoke at general assemblies using the movement’s celebrated communicative innovation: the “people’s microphone.” Because of a lack of electronic amplification (the city government had turned off the campers’ power supply), the oral practice was adopted whereby speeches were amplified by repetition from the crowd, carrying the message from center outward. As Craig Calhoun remarks, it was, in itself, “a demonstration of participatory democracy.”53 Simmons emerged as a “people’s-mic” hip-hop orator, and his central contribution in these addresses was campaign finance reform: “The fact is our number one problem is the corporations and the other special interest groups that are more important to our politicians than the people. The lobbyists and the money have got to get the fuck out of Washington!”54 Simmons’s demand was not without irony: in promoting a constitutional amendment that would prevent unaccountable pressure being put on politicians, he tried, through backroom negotiations to generate bipartisan support, to exert unaccountable pressure on politicians. However, because he was echoing one of the central OWS concerns, this activity did have legitimacy. In its manifesto statement, Occupy had announced that it represented “the 99 percent trying to wrestle control of its government out the hands of the 1 percent,” and activists repeatedly highlighted the centrality of “‘get the corporate money out of politics’ messaging.”55 Political finance reform was vital because it would free politicians from corporate control to consider other policy reforms that the Occupiers desperately wanted: fairer taxation, environmental protection, penal reform, the reinstatement of the Glass-Steagall Act, and so forth.

If Simmons’s calls reflected some of Occupy’s concerns, they were also connected to specific hip-hop generation interests. The example he repeatedly used to illustrate “how money poisons our political system” is one to which black youth organizations, as well as Simmons himself, had long been drawing attention: mass incarceration and its disastrous consequences for black and brown communities. As he repeatedly explained: “The $15 million the prison industrial complex pays to lobby our politicians to keep unjust dysfunctional drug and other laws

on our books is a way they have occupied our democracy. They in turn make many billions off our government by filling their hotels (jails).”56 Here and with the OCCUPIED acronym, Simmons follows the postcolonial critique of OWS’s name, by describing lobbyists rather than the activists as the “occupiers.” Moreover, in such statements, Simmons’s anticorporate foregrounding of class is not at the expense of race. In this regard, Simmons shared ground with Angela Davis, the author of the formative 2003 book Are Prisons Obsolete?, who made similar arguments about Occupy’s potential in the battle against inequality, hypercapitalism, and mass incarceration.57 “It seems to me,” stated Davis in 2011, “that an issue such as the prison industrial complex is already implicitly embraced by this congregation of the 99%.”58 In drawing attention to the imbrication of political economy and racial politics, the reformist Simmons, like the radical Davis and grassroots Occupy the Hood, envisioned an OWS mobilization that avoided the dualism of “politics of redistribution” versus “politics of recognition” (to invoke Nancy Fraser’s classic terms), which still too often divides scholarly and social justice projects.59

Simmons certainly promulgates neoliberal discourses of the self, as scholars have suggested: his self-help books, financial literacy manuals, and “mindfulness” tweets are about developing the human capital of the free, possessive individual. However, as his Occupy contributions suggest, he is far from neoliberalist in his view of the state. Rather than see state intervention as oppressive and tyrannical, he consistently sees it as essential to controlling rampant markets. His commitment to downward redistribution casts doubt on the view that his main thrust is to consolidate neoliberal governmentality by blaming the poor for their situation. Simmons is certainly a contradictory figure. But his emphasis on human capital development could in part be the rhetorical invocation of a zeitgeisty market rhetoric by someone attuned to these discursive currents but mainly put to the service of more progressive ends. Just as the neoliberals often couch austerity policy in egalitarian language to make it more palatable, it is possible to promote progressive policies by using some of the terms of liberal individualism.

After Mayor Michael Bloomberg ordered the surprise 1 a.m. raid on Zuccotti Park by riot police in mid-November and razed the camp, Simmons if anything stepped up his support. This was the moment when, according to Graeber, “the liberal establishment . . . made the strategic decision to look the other way. . . . When the Tasers, batons, and SWAT teams arrived, that establishment simply disappeared and left us to our fate.”60 Simmons, by contrast, escalated his activities, announcing the launch of the constitutional amendment in late November, visiting camps, building alliances, and speaking out against state repression of the protestors. He explained and defended OWS on media channels that were increasingly intent on both demonizing and trivializing the mobilization, including effective studio appearances on Occupy-bashing Fox News shows Hannity and Bill O’Reilly. He continued to stress imbricated race and class injustices generated by money in politics, arguing that “special interests . . . spend millions of dollars destroying the fabric of the black community and make billions of dollars in return.”61

Thus I want to question whether Simmons stood “in direct opposition” to OWS, suggesting instead that there was efficacy in Simmons’s participation as a spokesperson and framer of the issues in terms of race as well as class (and also possibly as an alliance builder and lobbyist, though an assessment of these areas is beyond my remit). The binaries drawn by activists and sometimes scholars between conscious and commercial, between radical and co-opted, and between grassroots and celebrity, may not always serve the Left very well. In the edited collection Commodity Activism: Cultural Resistance in Neoliberal Times, many of the contributors point to the need for more detailed and less judgmental explorations of progressive

political engagement within the liberal-capitalist terrain. As Marita Sturken writes in the foreword, summarizing one of the volume’s key interventions: “We cannot dismiss these modes as simply hypocrisy, incorporation, or corporate appropriation. They demand a more complex, less cynical, less dismissive approach.”62

Simmons emerges as an effective if ambivalent OWS spokesperson: pragmatic, conciliatory (“our politicians”), intersectional, and social-democratic. The Occupy the Dream alliance was short-lived and, considered discretely, the OCCUPIED amendment failed (indeed, with the US Supreme Court ruling in 2014 that there would no longer be any limits on individual donations within election cycles, the channels for legal bribery actually opened further in the period Occupy’s high moment).63 Yet, considered as initiatives within longer struggles, Simmons’s activities, as with the case of the Rockefeller Laws, can perhaps be viewed more productively. Moreover, his most important contribution was to help popularize the critiques of inequality and financialization, explaining and illustrating the abstract dynamics of how “wealth begets power, which begets more wealth” (in Stiglitz’s terms), and doing so in ways that foregrounded race as well as class.64 Doreen Massey suggests in “Vocabularies of the Economy” that what is urgently needed, to move beyond neoliberalism, is “a more thoroughgoing, and popular, critique of market forces as producers of inequality”—a critique to which Simmons ably contributed.65 Born in 1957, he is a bit older than those that Bakari Kitwana influentially terms “the hip-hop generation” (born 1965–84), perhaps serving as a bridge between civil rights and hip-hop era protest cultures.66 Turning to a consideration of rap moguls who are wholehearted parts of the hip-hop generation—who came of age amid the brutal dynamics of neoliberal inequality—offers provocative points of comparison.

Shawn “Jay Z” Carter: “Occupy All Streets”

Shawn Carter, born in 1969 in Brooklyn, is the most famous of the three hip-hop moguls. When he could not get signed as the budding rap artist Jay Z in the mid-1990s, he cofounded his own label, Roc-A-Fella Records, and went on to build a hugely successful and critically acclaimed music career—by 2009 he had notched up more number one albums on the Billboard chart than any other solo performer (surpassing Elvis Presley’s record). He also became a successful music executive and diversified into other sectors, including his early move into clothing with the Rocawear label, launched in 1999. By the time that OWS emerged, Carter, based at his Roc Nation offices in Manhattan, had accumulated an estimated $450 million in wealth.67 While his “big pimping” sexual boasting was representative of rap music’s masculinist and heteronormative constructions that stood in diametric opposition to OWS’s queer and feminist projects, would Carter’s race and class identity politics chime with aspects of the mobilization’s economic critique?68

Carter did not visit Zuccotti Park, but as the mobilization spread nationally, he launched a T-shirt on his Rocawear clothing label with “Occupy all streets” printed on the front (red graffiti writing over the “Occupy Wall Street” slogan, crossing out the “W” and adding an “s” to “street”). When Carter had sold off his share of Rocawear for $204 million in 2007, he retained a stake and continued to oversee marketing and product development. With his famed business savvy, Carter saw an opportunity to tap into the political capital of OWS, and the T-shirt was launched “in support” of the movement, with publicity shots of Carter modeling it.69 Converting Wall Street into “all streets” may seem like a benign riff on the OWS slogan. But by stripping

out the symbolic locus (Wall Street), with its focus on financial inequality, Carter’s slogan suggests a probusiness dissipation of the movement’s specificity—a literal, graffitied neoliberal correction. It quickly emerged that Rocawear had no intention of donating any of the sales proceeds to Occupy, giving rise to condemnation. One Occupy organizer stated: “To attempt to profit . . . with an overpriced piece of cotton is an insult to the fight for economic civil rights known as #occupywallstreet.”70 The statement of another organizer, Patrick Bruner, read: “Naturally there will be some bloodsuckers who come out of the woodwork. A much better way to show your support for Occupy Wall Street would be to show up and participate in this momentous occasion and help to shape a new and better future.”71 The press reported that the $22 T-shirt was “swiftly pulled” by a chagrined Rocawear.72 However, it had simply initially rapidly sold out, with many more ordered just as the T-shirt’s street credibility plummeted because of bad press. Rocawear was left with lots of stock, which, several years later, it was still trying to offload on its website for a knockdown $5.99.

Rocawear’s attempt to gain currency from OWS exemplifies trends in corporate branding, with companies tirelessly seeking out new and resistive subcultural energies to link to their products. As classic texts by Thomas Frank and Naomi Klein explore, the incorporation of protest currents has been one of the key cultural trends in the strengthening of corporate capitalism.73 Rebellion, it turned out, was a highly marketable theme, rendering genuine cultural opposition increasingly difficult to sustain. Anyone could buy the accoutrements of rebellion, like the “Occupy all streets” T-shirt, in the relentless “conquest of cool.” Carter’s decision to link his brand with Occupy contrasts with rap’s then richest entrepreneur, Sean Combs (P. Diddy), also based in New York and with much of his wealth derived from clothing sales. Combs decided not to associate himself with OWS: not to criticize, endorse, or exploit its protest energies. Carter’s belief that his relatively more “street” star brand could tolerate and even benefit from being articulated to OWS, in turn, gave rise to bad publicity, which prompted the normally inscrutable Carter into making some revealing comments.

In a widely reported September 2012 New York Times interview, Carter spoke out about OWS, becoming “agitated” when the topic arose, despite the months that had elapsed since the camps were razed: “I’m not going to a park and picnic, I have no idea what to do. I don’t know what the fight is about.”74 This dismissal of Occupy is surprising, given that, as a Washington Post article title put it, the protest had “struck a chord” with a majority of Americans.75 According to Todd Gitlin, the movement had a “baseline popularity,” because people could readily “see that the point of the movement was to resist the grotesque inequalities that have become normal in American life. . . . So much was clear to anyone with the curiosity to listen.”76 Had Carter listened to those from the community he came from, he would have had a keen awareness of the immiseration brought on by the massive loss of nonwhite wealth holdings since 2008.

Despite his ability to understand capital flows, Carter showed no awareness of the structural interdependency between rich and poor in very unequal societies, continuing:

When you just say that “the 1 percent is that,” that’s not true. Yeah, the 1 percent that’s robbing people, and deceiving people, these fixed mortgages and all these things, and then taking their home away from them, that’s criminal, that’s bad. Not being an entrepreneur. This is free enterprise. This is what America is built on.77

Rather than the 1 percent versus the 99 percent, Carter divides up the 1 percent into the deserving and undeserving superrich. This well illustrates Thomas Piketty’s argument about the rise of the discourse of “meritocratic extremism,” in which the exorbitant earnings of the self-made elite are troublingly constructed, in contrast to inherited wealth, as “contributing to greater social justice.” This is the “kind of argument that could well lay the groundwork for greater and more violent inequality in the future,” warns the economist.78 Carter’s patriotic celebration of his own “free enterprise” suggests little if any comprehension of the entrenched market distortions of wealth accumulation, whether self-made or inherited. Just as color-blind racial discourses conceive of any vestigial racism as a matter of individuals rather than structures, Carter reads class conflict in terms of the personal wrongdoing by the likes of the perpetrators of the subprime mortgage scandal (“that’s criminal, that’s bad”), rather than see the wealth gap’s endemic properties.

The cultural influence of this preeminent rapper, who was the subject of a dedicated sociology course at Georgetown University, derives in part from his positioning, in the words of the cultural studies scholar T. Hasan Johnson, “at the crossroads of both popular and grassroots streams of hip-hop creativity”—widely admired for the quality of his rap flow and lyrical flair.79 It is partly the way in which his verses reflexively unpack his artistry’s turn to the market—what might, at first glance, be described as a critical capitalist realism—that makes Jay Z so admired. Cornel West has described Carter as “an unadulterated genius,” who “takes us to the core of the culture industry,” and Mark Anthony Neal has ably explored the aesthetic richness of Carter’s “Hip Hop Cosmopolitanism.”80 However, though scholars often laud Jay Z the artist, many have also commented on the rap mogul’s political disengagement. Essays by Davey D, Toni Blackman, and Johnson in Jay Z: Essays on Hip Hop’s Philosopher King well present the sense of disappointment and critique.81 For instance, Blackman states that Carter is “one of the few personalities with global relevancy, but he consistently chooses to say little on specific issues while the world is in crisis.”82 In the introduction to their edited collection, Erik Nielson and Travis Gosa conclude, persuasively, that “attempts at self-aggrandizement or self-enrichment seem to be Jay Z’s true political endgame.”83

Such negative assessments were only more salient when, in 2011, Carter released his critically acclaimed album collaboration with Kanye West, Watch the Throne (Roc Nation/Def Jam). Released just one month prior to the start of OWS, it found new dizzying tropes and sounds to celebrate vernacular neoliberalism. On “Lift Off,” Carter’s wife, Beyonce Knowles, croons the high-amp chorus: “We gon’ take it to the moon, take it to the stars / How many people you know can take it this far?” The album’s lead single, “Otis,” which provocatively samples the soul classic “Try a Little Tenderness,” is full of lyrical endorsements for luxury cars (“Maybachs” and “Benzes”) and watches (“Hublots” and “Rollies”). Carter’s product-placing raps about luxury goods encapsulate a branding environment explored by the scholar Devon Powers in which music extends ever “more deeply into consumerism’s phenomenology.”84 Carter’s rationale for his continuing streetness is the “Niggaz in Paris” (another hit from the album) defense: he embodies the aspirations of the oppressed. As Christopher Holmes Smith explains in his article on social mobility and rap entrepreneurs, “The hip-hop mogul is not intelligible without credible accounts of the lavish manner in which he leads his life,” and in so doing, in a manner absolutely antithetical to OWS, “inspires his more downtrodden constituents to ‘buy in’ to the emerging paradigm of accessible luxury and social status.”85

Carter thus emerges as a preeminent icon for Piketty’s meritocratic extremism, with the supposed “social justice” of his huge wealth and success propelled by three factors. First and

foremost, Carter’s rags-to-riches triumph is validated by overcoming racial disadvantage—such black empowerment politics encapsulates what Paul Gilroy describes as “the project of self-enrichment as collective vindication.”86 Second is the related overcoming of class disadvantage: his fortune is self-made. Carter frames his star image as the “we-shouldn’t-be-here victories for a kid from public housing.”87 Finally, as an iconic cultural entrepreneur, he further validates a sense of neoliberal social mobility because the “creative classes,” as scholars explain, have become powerful totems of “free enterprise” culture.88 In all, Carter’s response to OWS, alongside his musical output of 2011, reveals a talented and charismatic symbol creator, who was also an adept co-opter of black and leftist protest energies for self and corporate gain.89 Peddling themed T-shirts at the height of mobilization, Carter already demonstrated opportunism rather than solidarity in his “all streets” displacements and refusing to channel proceeds back to OWS. By the following year, after the “liberal betrayal” of OWS, he openly trivialized (“park and picnic”) and repudiated Occupy. As such, he played his own part in why, paraphrasing Stuart Hall, the reaction against neoliberalism after the crisis “refuses to ‘fuse.’”90 Perhaps surprisingly, another hip-hop generation mogul had less problem understanding what the fight was about.

Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson: “You Are Waking Up the World, Including Me”

Curtis Jackson, once again, hailed from the city that birthed Occupy: born in Queens in 1975, and with his G-Unit Records based in Manhattan. With the publicity image of an aggressive businessman and “thug” artist, this highly popular rapper emerged into the mainstream in the early 2000s. While far less influential and wealthy than either Simmons or Carter (indeed, he filed for bankruptcy in 2015), he had an estimated wealth of $100 million by 2011, mainly from record sales and energy drinks.91 His music, exemplified by his first commercial album, Get Rich or Die Tryin’ (Interscope, 2003), like Jay Z’s, was full of sexist and heterosexist themes, and presented hyperindividualist and hypermaterialist themes of making money, street reputation, and violent threat. Lester Spence describes Jackson’s 50 Cent as “perhaps the preeminent descriptive realist MC.” This is a prominent type of rap that emphasizes “a narrative of urban dysfunction and ‘the hustle,’” that, Spence suggests, works to forge “links between rap and the reproduction of neoliberalism.”92 Drawing similar conclusions from an examination of Jackson’s coauthored best-selling self-help book, The Fiftieth Law, Gilroy argues, again persuasively, that Jackson is “something like a popular avatar of the demotic neoliberalism that is both steeped in and warranted by several generations of uplift and self-reliance narratives.”93 Like Shawn Carter, Jackson did not show up to the Occupy camp. But he did stage something of a political reorientation around the time of OWS, spurred partly by the protest. In his widely circulated Facebook blog of October 2011, as the mobilization gained traction, Jackson blogged: “Shout out to Occupy Wall Street groups around the world. You are waking up the world, including me. Please keep up the peaceful protest, you are making a difference.”94

In this post, Jackson seized on one of the most populist grievances—that those responsible for the meltdown had not been prosecuted. He begins: “How fucked up that we have evidence that the big Banks have been corrupt, yet our governments aren’t punishing those that have stolen from the pension funds.”95 This critique held particular salience for African black and brown Americans who had borne the brunt of mass incarceration for (often petty) offenses. A central theme of gangsta rap had always been the leveling out of ethical hierarchies between legitimate and illegitimate business dealings in the age of inequality: both are “stealing.”96 This moral equivalence contrasts with the deep disjuncture in the state’s response to wrongdoing in

the two spheres, and this hypocrisy is heightened by the fact that the unpunished raids on “pension funds” had most corrosively affected nonwhite and working-class Americans.97 Jackson next picks up on Simmons’s central critique: “Our Politicians are puppets for whoever pays them into office. That’s how fucked our system is. Their broken promises for change cant happen.”98 Supporting this blog post, he sent several tweets to his five million followers, again invoking Occupy.99 If Jackson communicated a populist street anger through social media, he used a very different register on television business news channels. On CNBC in October 2011, for instance, the anchor asked: “A lot of people are demonizing capitalism right now. You look at the Occupy Wall Street movement. How do you fight against that?” A besuited Jackson politely retorted: “I’m pro-protesting, as long as it’s non-violent. It’s really them expressing themselves and saying that they want to make change.”100

The focus of Jackson’s media engagement in fall 2011 was the launch of his Street King energy drink, based on the “conscious capitalist” TOMS shoes model: each purchase generates a small donation to the needy through the UN World Food Program. With Street King, the pitch is that one drink buys a meal for a child in Africa. Through social and conventional media channels, Jackson stoked a sense of commodity activism, blogging:

Im fuckn angry that Children are dying everyday. There’s hard working people out there who do give a shit. Problem is those with the power—government and big business. . . . I don’t want to do business with these fuckers anymore. Do you? . . . we have the power to stop buying their products, banking with them. your dollar, that you worked hard for, does have power. together we can say—WAKE UP A-HOLES! The game is over.101

This is a mobilizing call amplifying Occupy’s message of rampant inequality and crony capitalism while serving to channel protest toward consumer activism (“your dollar . . . does have power”). Jackson was blunter about the connection he was drawing in one of his tweets: “I think the STREETKING business model is the answer. if major corporations used it There would be nothing to protest. Give Back.”102 He tried, opportunistically, to seize on and foment the anticorporate sentiments to create interest in his new drink.

Rather than construct business and protest as mutually contradictory, Jackson understood, in the words of Roopali Mukherjee and Sarah Banet-Weiser, that, “as a public relations venture directed at consumers in the US, social responsibility is embraced as a pro-business strategy.”103 The marketing of Street King correlates with “retail fundraising” for social causes, explored by the scholar Mari Castaneda, in which purchasing by Latina consumers becomes “a two-for-one endeavor that promotes feel-good consumption.”104 To the CNBC anchors, Jackson remarked, “I just think we could be conscious of the necessities we need for all humans on Earth.” By linking Street King to global poverty alleviation and Occupy, Jackson attempted to enhance the brand’s social relevance in a cluttered energy drink market while lending gravitas to his own street-king star image. Although in many ways this case recalls Carter’s launch of the Rocawear T-shirt, it remains different mainly because of its inequality and political corruption messaging. Jackson communicates some genuine allegiance to Occupy rather than Carter’s “Occupy all streets” blandishments and rebuttal.

Jackson’s allegiance to Occupy was symptomatic of a broad politicization spurred by the financial crisis and the arrival of a viable and vibrant protest movement. In the fall of 2011 a Nexis survey showed that the media focus “lurched over” to income and wealth inequality, and newspaper articles with headlines using the terms of the mobilization became (and remain in

2016) commonplace.105 Jackson’s alignment with Occupy, at the height of its power, can be seen as mainly a product, but also a very modest spur, of that lurch. His interventions were minimal, but the political potential of his “ability to talk to five million people from my cell phone at any time of day” should be acknowledged.106 In his social media self-projections of political awakening, he perhaps influenced the thinking of some fans—who, given the themes of his songs and books, were not a particularly progressive constituency. He was hardly preaching to the converted. There remains a deep and troubling disjunction between the commercially driven hustler themes in Jackson’s music and an incipient politicization in aspects of his publicity image. Indeed, important questions remain about how those in the eclectic Occupy camp would feel about an endorsement from Jackson (or Carter), given his hypermacho, heterosexist, environmentally unsustainable star image—presumably the Women Occupying Wall Street (WOW) or Queer/LGBTIQA2Z caucuses would be at pains to repudiate such an association. Nonetheless, Jackson’s limited contribution at that moment of popular ferment was the deployment of his street-smart image to endorse Occupy’s inequality and political-corruption critiques. He captured populist anger, seizing on Occupy’s financial critique in relation to double standards in the carceral state, linking financialization and bribery to poverty in the United States and beyond, and engaging audiences normally unreceptive to Occupy’s message. Jackson emerges as a fair-weather, self-serving, but nonetheless rhetorically convincing OWS commodity activist: exploiting movement energies at the height of the protest in ways that—even if it was incidental to his agenda—played its small part in propagating burgeoning inequality discourses.

Conclusion

As David Graeber suggests: “Occupy succeeded brilliantly in changing the national debate to begin addressing issues of financial power, the corruption of the political process, and social inequality.”107 It is within this discursive terrain that I have evaluated the responses of these hip-hop entrepreneurs. Moguls cannot mobilize the grass roots—indeed, questions remain as to whether their presence is itself demobilizing. But they can ably participate in discourse formation and dissemination. I have assessed in what ways they built up or undermined public receptivity for ideas that were gaining much-needed traction in an environment in which corporations held almost all the public relations cards. When a grassroots progressive movement emerged in their city amid soaring rates of racially determined inequality, some Hip-Hop “Cash Kings,” like Russell Simmons, along with many other rappers, endorsed and amplified the economic justice critique. Others, like Shawn Carter, commercially exploited and dissipated the mobilization’s energies while contributing to the corporate-backed media framing of the protests as entitled, unfocused, and anti-American. Still others, notably Curtis Jackson, took tentative if opportunistic steps to engage the growing debate about poverty, bankers, and political corruption—in Jackson’s case, prompting a social-media staging of a shift in outlook, from cynical disengagement to social anger. In the case of Simmons (and to a small degree Jackson), amplification of some of OWS’s core messages was supplemented by attempts, in tandem with many others, to extend the movement’s scope to foreground racialized poverty and the corporatized mass incarceration of black and brown people.

The present article suggests that a great deal remains at stake in the struggle for social justice in the commercial-cultural realm, and that scholars must guard against neoliberal determinism—affording too much agency to neoliberalism—in explanations of how individuals operate within rampant capitalist dynamics. The racial neoliberal critique, while vital and

persuasive, feeds into three interpretative tendencies in this case. First, it can lead to a leveling out of evaluative distinctions between hip-hop moguls (Carter, Simmons, and Jackson as all the same). Second, it can generate overly pessimistic conclusions about these actants, constructing such interventions as necessarily hypocritical, tainted, counterproductive, and self-aggrandizing in the face of left-liberal defeat (rap moguls as neoliberal emblems). Third, by partial contrast, neoliberal determinism can lead to a relative critical privileging of rappers, like Jay Z, who most deftly aestheticize capitalist realism, risking an overstatement of such artists’ political resistance (Carter as transgressive neoliberal trickster).

Celebrities are inescapably emblems of liberal individualism, and these famous black cultural entrepreneurs—with their flaunting of procorporate enterprise, unsustainable consumerism, and macho heterosexism—can certainly all be viewed, within certain interpretive lenses, as simply part of the problem. Yet to privilege this lens at the expense of others, and to be reticent about moving beyond totalizing critique, closes down significant spaces for cultural-political inquiry. As David Hesmondhalgh and Anamik Saha suggest, in their important article “Race, Ethnicity, and Cultural Production,” there is a tendency, especially in the field of black cultural production, to see “interaction with commerce as in itself a sign of aesthetic or political vitiation.”108 Rap moguls are culturally influential and must be taken seriously as analytic subjects. Yet to explore them carefully should not lead to the simple conclusion that all are actually ambivalent, contested, and contradictory (though they all are), which risks a different kind of leveling out of evaluative distinction. As Stuart Hall warns, once the analytic of ambivalence is foregrounded, we must avoid the attendant “temptation to slip into a sort of endlessly sliding discursive liberal-pluralism.”109 Instead, as I have shown, significant distinctions can be drawn between these individuals working within the neoliberal landscape. Some attempted to amplify aspects of the Occupy message about the explosion of inequality and the perils to democracy of liberalized capitalism, while others propagated the status quo’s trivializing reaction against the movement. Some took part in an intersectional reframing of Occupy’s materialist critique by foregrounding the racially incarcerative politics of neoliberalism (while closing down debate about other intersectional drivers of material inequality), while others disavowed the movement’s distributive critique. A full understanding of popular culture’s important role in processes of social continuity and change must include detailed, evaluative, and nontotalizing explorations of the commercial-cultural terrain.

Notes

1. Occupy General Assembly, “Declaration of the Occupation of New York City,” September 29, 2011, occupywallstreet.net/learn.

2. Joseph Stiglitz, “Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%,” Vanity Fair, May 2011, www.vanityfair.com/news/2011/05/top-one-percent-201105.

3. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 294–98; figure from Sylvia Allegretto, “The State of Working America’s Wealth, 2011,” Economic Policy Institute, Briefing Paper 292, March 23, 2011, 7.

4. See David Graeber, The Democracy Project: A History. A Crisis. A Movement (New York: Penguin, 2013), chap. 4; Todd Gitlin, Occupy Nation: The Roots, the Spirit, and the Promise of Occupy Wall Street (New York: HarperCollins, 2012), 18–19.

5. On postcrash market populism, see Thomas Frank, Pity the Billionaire: The Hard-Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right (London: Harvill Secker, 2012).

6. A Time poll released in mid-October found that 54 percent of those surveyed viewed the Occupy protest favorably, as reported in the Washington Post, “Occupy Wall St., Striking a Chord,” October 14, 2011.

7. See Zack O’Malley Greenburg, “Hip-Hop’s Wealthiest Artists 2011,” Forbes, March 9, 2011, www.forbes.com/2011/03/09/billionaires-11-focus-sean-combs-jay-z-dr-dre-be-billionaire_slide_3.html.

8. On the social and economic determinants that fed into the emergence of hip-hop culture, see, for instance, Tricia Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1994); Robin D. G. Kelley, Yo’ Mama’s Disfunktional! Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America (New York: Beacon, 1997), chap. 2; Bakari Kitwana, The Hip Hop Generation: Young Blacks and the Crisis in African-American Culture (New York: Basic, 2002), 3–83; Eithne Quinn, Nuthin’ but a “G” Thang: The Culture and Commerce of Gangsta Rap (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), chap. 3.

9. Paul Gilroy, “‘. . . We Got to Get Over before We Go Under . . .’: Fragments for a History of Black Vernacular Neoliberalism,” New Formations 80–81 (2013): 34.

10. Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Winchester, VA: O Books, 2009), 12.

11. Herman Gray, “Subject(ed) to Recognition,” American Quarterly 65.4 (2013): 780. See also the important contribution, discussed below, of Lester Spence, Stare in the Darkness: The Limits of Hip-Hop and Black Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).

12. Stuart Hall, “The Neo-Liberal Revolution,” Cultural Studies 25.6 (2011): 705.

13. Doreen Massey, “Vocabularies of the Economy,” Soundings: A Journal of Politics and Culture 54.1 (2013): 8.

14. Jay Z, “Dirt Off Your Shoulder,” The Black Album (Roc-A-Fella/Def Jam, 2004).

15. My secondary argument in this article draws on the “critical defense of music,” including contemporary music of the African diaspora exemplified by rap, in David Hesmondhalgh, Why Music Matters (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 165–71.

16. Nurse, quoted in Ruth Milkman, Stephanie Luce, and Penny Lewis, Changing the Subject: A Bottom-Up Account of Occupy Wall Street (New York: John Murphy Institute, City University of New York, 2013), 11; Graeber, Democracy Project, 58.

17. On the identity politics of OWS, see Emily Welty, Matthew Bolton, and Nick Zukowski, “Occupy Wall Street as a Palimpsest: Overview of a Dynamic Movement,” in Occupying Political Science: The Occupy Wall Street Movement from New York to the World, ed. Emily Welty et al. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 25–58.

18. On intersectionality paradigms, see Bridget Byrne, “Rethinking Intersectionality and Whiteness at the Borders of Citizenship,” Sociological Research Online 20.3 (2015), www.socresonline.org.uk/20/3/16.html.

19. Stacey Patton, “Occupy Isn’t Black America’s Fight,” Washington Post, November 27, 2011. See also Trina Jones, “Occupying America: Dr Martin Luther King, Jr., the American Dream, and the Challenge of Socio-Economic Inequality,” Villanova Law Review 57 (2012): 339–55.

20. Welty, Bolton, and Zukowski, “Occupy Wall Street,” 40.

21. Angela Davis, “The 99 Percent: A Community of Resistance,” Guardian, November 15, 2011. On the importance of class allegiance to left social movement building, see Peter Funke, “The Rhizomatic Left, Neoliberal Capitalism, and Class: Theoretical Interventions on Contemporary Social Movements in the Global North,” International Critical Thought 2.1 (2012): 30–41.

22. See Graeber, Democracy Project, 36.

23. See Christopher Herring and Zoltan Gluck, “The Homeless Question,” in Occupy! Scenes from Occupied America, ed. Astra Taylor et al. (London: Verso, 2011), 163–69.

24. Nurse, quoted in Milkman, Luce, and Lewis, Changing the Subject, 11.

25. Graeber, Democracy Project, 58.

26. Figure from Milkman, Luce, and Lewis, Changing the Subject, 1–48.

27. See Janell Ross and Trymaine Lee, “Occupy the Hood Aims to Draw People of Color to OWS,” Huffington Post, October 14, 2011, www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/14/occupy-the-hood-occupy-wall-street_n_1009850.html.

28. See Welty, Bolton, and Zukowski, “Occupy Wall Street,” 42–43.

29. “One Marine vs. Thirty Cops: Sgt. Shamar Thomas,” filmed by J. Handy, October 15, 2011, www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmEHcOc0Sys&feature=kp.

30. Cathy Cohen, “Afterword: When Will Black Lives Matter?,” in The Hip Hop and Obama Reader, ed. Travis Gosa and Erik Nielson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 280–81.

31. Gary Younge, “The Itinerant US Left Has Found Its Home in the Occupy Movement,” Guardian, February 26, 2012.

32. Signe-Mary McKernan et al., “Less Than Equal: Racial Disparities in Wealth Accumulation,” Urban Institute, Washington, DC, April 26, 2013, www.urban.org/UploadedPDF/412802-Less-Than-Equal-Racial-Disparities-in-Wealth-Accumulation.pdf.

33. Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, 3rd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2015), 227.

34. Occupy the Hood mission statement, quoted in Welty, Bolton, and Zukowski, “Occupy Wall Street,” 43.

35. “Talib Kweli at Occupy Wall Street,” Rolling Stone, October 7, 2011.

36. There is a substantial literature on the politics of hip-hop culture, including Cheryl Keyes, Rap Music and Street Consciousness (Urbana: Illinois University Press, 2004); Murray Forman and Mark Anthony Neal, eds., That’s the Joint! The Hip-Hop Studies Reader (New York: Routledge, 2004), 307–88; Kitwana, Hip Hop Generation, 145–215; S. Craig Watkins, Hip Hop Matters: Politics, Pop Culture, and the Struggle for the Soul of the Movement (Boston: Beacon, 2005); Jeffrey Ogbar, Hip-Hop Revolution: The Culture and Politics of Rap (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007); Tricia Rose, The Hip Hop Wars (New York: Basic, 2008); Travis Gosa, “Hip-Hop Politics, Activism, and the Future of Hip-Hop,” Journal of Popular Music Studies 21.2 (2009): 240–46; Cathy Cohen, Democracy Remixed: Black Youth and the Future of American Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); and James Peterson, The Hip-Hop Underground and African American Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

37. Greenburg, “Hip-Hop’s Wealthiest Artists 2011.”

38. Jo Piazza, “Russell Simmons on Occupy Wall Street,” Huffington Post, November 23, 2011, www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/23/russell-simmons-on-occupy_n_1108795.html.

39. Simmons soundbites from OWS footage, September 28, 2011, www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ryR1gN6PhsNovember 2011.

40. Quoted in Hannity, “Supporting the Occupation,” Fox News, November 29, 2011.

41. Spence, Stare in the Darkness, 120.

42. Russell Simmons, with Chris Morrow, Super Rich: A Guide to Having It All (New York: Gotham, 2011), 5.

43. Watkins, Hip Hop Matters, chap. 5; Spence, Stare in the Darkness, chap. 3.

44. Watkins, Hip Hop Matters, 145, 146, 162.

45. Spence, Stare in the Darkness, 128.

46. Watkins, Hip Hop Matters, 149.

47. “Russell Simmons Heckled at OWS,” October 14, 2011, www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8-edkn6tpM.

48. Jared Ball, “Russell Simmons Still Ain’t Hip-Hop and He Ain’t No Occupier Either!,” Black Agenda Report, October 25, 2011.

49. Robin D. G. Kelley, “‘He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands’: US History and Its Discontents in the Obama Era,” Journal of American Studies 45 (2011): 185–200, esp. 189.

50. Glen Ford, “Occupy Wall Street’s Next Phase,” Black Agenda Report, January 18, 2012.

51. Nurse, quoted on “Occupy Wall Street: The Future and History, So Far,” NPR: Talk of the Nation, February 9, 2012.

52. Holmes, quoted in Mark Binelli, “The Battle for the Soul of Occupy Wall Street,” Rolling Stone, June 21, 2012, www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-battle-for-the-soul-of-occupy-wall-street-20120621.

53. Calhoun, “Occupy Wall Street,” 30.

54. Simmons’s address to general assembly, September 29, 2011, archive.org/details/youtube-ows-RussellSimmonsSpeakingtoGeneralAssemblya-FqQJuv-0gJE.

55. Occupy General Assembly, “Declaration of the Occupation”; Astra Taylor and Mark Greif, “Scenes from an Occupation,” in Taylor et al., Occupy!, 20. See also Maurice Stucke, “Occupy Wall Street and Antitrust,” Southern California Law Review 85 (2012): 33–51.

56. Russell Simmons, “Why I Occupy,” Global Grind, May 2, 2012, globalgrind.com/2012/05/02/why-i-occupy-wall-street-russell-simmons-blog/.

57. Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (New York: Seven Stories, 2003).

58. Davis, “99 Percent.”

59. Nancy Fraser, Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the Post-Socialist Condition (New York: Routledge, 1997).

60. Graeber, Democracy Project, 140–41.

61. Quoted in Cavan Sieczkowski, “Russell Simmons on Jay Z Occupy Wall Street Diss,” Huffington Post, September 12, 2012.

62. Marita Sturken, foreword to Commodity Activism: Cultural Resistance in Neoliberal Times, Roopali Mukherjee and Sarah Banet-Weiser (New York: New York University Press, 2012), x.

63. See Nicholas Confessore, “Ruling Spurs Rush for Cash in Both Parties,” New York Times, April 4, 2014.

64. Stiglitz, “Of the 1%.”

65. Massey, “Vocabularies of the Economy,” 8.

66. Kitwana, Hip Hop Generation, xiii.

67. Greenburg, “Hip-Hop’s Wealthiest Artists 2011.”

68. Jay Z featuring UGK, “Big Pimpin’,” Vol. 3 . . . Life and Times of S. Carter (Roc-A-Fella/Def Jam, 2000).

69. Rocawear representative, quoted in John McDermott, “Keepin’ It Real,” Financial Times, November 15, 2011.

70. Quoted in Sieczkowski, “Russell Simmons.”

71. Quoted in “Rather Rap with Ya Feet,” Sunday World, November 20, 2011.

72. Ed Crooks, “Rapping and Rolling in It,” Financial Times, December 17, 2011.

73. Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Naomi Klein, No Logo (London: Flamingo, 2000).

74. Quoted in Zadie Smith, “The House That Hova Built,” New York Times, September 6, 2012.

75. Washington Post, “Occupy Wall St., Striking a Chord.”

76. Gitlin, Occupy Nation, 33, 108.

77. Quoted in Smith, “House That Hova Built.”

78. Piketty, Capital, 416–17.

79. T. Hasan Johnson, “The Prodigal God and the Legacy of Socially Responsible Hip Hop,” in Jay Z: Essays on Hip-Hop’s Philosopher King, ed. Julius Bailey (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011), 87.

80. Cornel West, introduction to Bailey, Jay Z, 1; Mark Anthony Neal, Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities (New York: New York University Press, 2013), chap. 2.

81. Bailey, Jay Z, chaps. 1, 3, 5.

82. Toni Blackman, “Jigga Speaks: The Tradition of Black Oratorical Genius,” in Bailey, Jay Z, 33.

83. Erik Nielson and Travis Gosa, “Introduction: The State of Hip Hop in the Age of Obama,” in Gosa and Nielson, Hip Hop and Obama, 9.

84. Devon Powers, “Strange Powers: The Branded Sensorium and the Intrigue of Musical Sound,” in Blowing Up the Brand: Critical Perspectives on Promotional Culture, ed. Melissa Aronczyk and Devon Powers (New York: Peter Lang, 2010), 288.

85. Christopher Holmes Smith, “I Don’t Like to Dream about Getting Paid: Representations of Social Mobility and the Emergence of the Hip-Hop Mogul,” Social Text, no. 77 (2003): 71. By the end of President Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign, Carter had become, as Nielson and Gosa argue, “Obama’s symbol of bootstrapping, de-racialized self-sufficiency” (Gosa and Nielson, Hip Hop and Obama, 10).

86. Gilroy, “We Got to Get Over,” 28.

87. Alex Pappademas, “Men of the Year 2011: King: Jay-Z,” GQ, November 13, 2011, www.gq.com/story/jay-z-gq-men-of-the-year-issue.

88. Sarah Banet-Weiser and Marita Sturken argue that “the idea of the ‘creative class’ rejuvenates—and rebrands—the historical notion of a meritocracy” (“The Politics of Commerce: Shepard Fairey and New Cultural Entrepreneurship,” in Aronczyk and Powers, Blowing Up the Brand, 269).

89. For a qualified defense of Carter, see the conversation between leading hip-hop scholars Bakari Kitwana and Mark Anthony Neal, bakarikitwana.com/announcements/lets-move-beyond-jay-z-belafonte-beef-action (accessed January 13, 2015).

90. Hall, “Neo-Liberal Revolution,” 705.

91. Greenburg, “Hip-Hop’s Wealthiest Artists 2011.”

92. Spence, Stare in the Darkness, 85, 5.

93. 50 Cent and Robert Greene, The Fiftieth Law (New York: G-Unit Books, 2009); Gilroy, “We Got to Get Over,” 31.

94. 50 Cent, Facebook post, October 30, 2011, www.facebook.com/50cent/posts/10150349003253797.

95. Ibid.

96. See Quinn, Nuthin’ but a “G” Thang.

97. The value of black families’ retirement accounts shrank 35 percent between 2007 and 2010, while white accounts actually grew (figures from the Urban Institute, as reported in Annie Lowrey, “Wealth Gap among Races Has Widened since Recession,” New York Times, April 28, 2013).

98. 50 Cent, Facebook post.

99. See 50 Cent, tweets, October 30, 2011, twitter.com/50cent/status/130846037203091456 and twitter.com/50cent/status/130848243176308736.

100. 50 Cent interview, Power Lunch, CNBC, October 25, 2011, hiphop-n-more.com/2011/10/50-cent-talks-album-headphones-street-king-on-cnbc-power-lunch/.

101. 50 Cent, Facebook post.

102. 50 Cent, tweet, October 30, 2011, twitter.com/50cent/status/130848243176308736.

103. Sarah Banet-Weiser and Roopali Mukherjee, “Introduction: Commodity Activism in Neoliberal Times,” in Mukherjee and Banet-Weiser, Commodity Activism, 11.

104. Mari Castaneda, “Feeling Good While Buying Goods: Promoting Commodity Activism to Latina Consumers,” in Mukherjee and Banet-Weiser, Commodity Activism, 273.

105. Gitlin, Occupy Nation, 47, 50. See also Greg Ruggiero, “Editor’s Note,” in Occupy, by Noam Chomsky (New York: Penguin, 2012), 10–11.

106. 50 Cent interview, Power Lunch.

107. Graeber, Democracy Project, 141.

108. David Hesmondhalgh and Anamik Saha, “Race, Ethnicity, and Cultural Production,” Popular Communication 11 (2013): 190–91.

109. Stuart Hall, “New Ethnicities,” in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, ed. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (1988; rpt. London: Routledge, 1996), 445.