Death is so common in hip-hop now that we don't even take time to mourn the deceased. The sudden departure of the BET Hip Hop Awards (HHA) from cable television was announced last month and it garnered nary a hashtag nor R.I.P trending topic anywhere on Elon Musk's internet. Maybe rap is feeling so revitalized, with the likes of the Clipse, Freddie Gibbs, JID and Chance the Rapper competing this year for top billing, that we no longer need awards and industry accolades to measure the culture's worth?
Or maybe rap is no longer pop enough to pay the bills?
Apparently, the show's TV ratings had been on the decline. The year after celebrating hip-hop's golden anniversary in 2023, the show's annual viewership fell off a steep cliff — down nearly 50% in 2024. The network hasn't pulled the plug outright; "suspended" is how BET's CEO Scott Mills described the current state of both its hip-hop and Soul Train award show franchises in an interview with Billboard. Yet, the announcement couldn't have come at a more precarious time. The shelving of the show just so happens to coincide with the sale of Paramount Global, BET's parent company, to Skydance Media — a merger cleared by the Federal Communications Commission after Paramount agreed to pony up $16 million to settle President Trump's lawsuit against CBS' 60 Minutes. Skydance also made a few concessions in the run-up to sealing that FCC deal, including a pledge to eliminate all of Paramount's DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) initiatives: No more Office of Global Inclusion. No more aspirational goals "related to hiring female employees and employees of color." No more annual bonus incentives for meeting said DEI goals.
Now, Black Entertainment Television existed long before diversity, equity and inclusion became, or inspired, all the rage. But I'm not even sure how Paramount plans to spell BET — let alone program for it — without DEI. This is bigger than the BET HHAs, to be honest. Still, I've found myself mulling, if not fully in mourning, over this award show's indefinite fade to black. Hell, Greg Tate been told us hip-hop was dead. No one's losing sleep over our commercial exploits at this stage in the game. Whatever post-radical pulse there is left sustaining us in the last 20 years is less about our vitality as a community and more about our successful rebrand into America's hottest commodity. But when your culture becomes product, it can be shelved indefinitely. When your culture exists only to support corporate bottom-lines, it can be recalled or discontinued when it no longer does.
I still remember attending the first BET Hip Hop Awards back in 2006. The production budget must have been flush, because the network taped that inaugural joint at Atlanta's prestigious Fox Theatre, shutting down the bougiest section of Peachtree Street to roll out the red carpet in the middle of Midtown. Coming just five years after the network debuted its annual, flagship BET Awards, the rap-centric spinoff marked hip-hop's indisputable dominance in an era when it was regularly ranked among the most popular genres despite the double-whammy physical bootlegging and digital piracy was putting on rap's recorded revenue. The award show was also a major coronation of the South's rise in rap, after years of being dismissed by hip-hop's East Coast-focused media elite.
The purists were busy splitting hella hairs over the distinction between rap and real hip-hop. But the HHAs made the convergence between the genre's corporate ambitions and cultural traditions seem less contradictory. We got the best of both worlds when BET made cyphers a show staple, taking mainstream artists back to the roots of MCing. Surprises, like Erykah Badu freestyling, drew us in. And despite being pre-recorded, they magically paired the feel of improvisation with dream collaborations — from Eminem and his Shady cohort Slaughterhouse and Yelawolf in 2009 to TDE with Kendrick throwing down the gauntlet on Drake a full decade before their slow-building beef would go pop. Yet the best thing about the BET HHAs was almost never having to second-guess the winner in any given category: No controversial snubs. No overtly racist omissions. No Macklemore winning best rap album over good kid, m.A.A.d City. It was proof that award-show predictability can be a crowd-pleaser where it counts.
BET had a foothold on an underserved audience. Until it didn't.
The broader industry ignored its first wake-up call, when hip-hop/R&B became the most-consumed genre in the nation in 2017, according to Luminate (formerly Nielsen). Then, in the wake of George Floyd's viral murder and the national reckoning over Black lives, institutions like the Recording Academy began redressing their historic role in Black artists being criminally overlooked. Since his appointment in 2021, the Academy's first Black president/CEO, Harvey Mason Jr., has made it his business to expand the diversity of the voting membership. When Kendrick Lamar took home five Grammys earlier this year, including the coveted song and record of the year for "Not Like Us," hip-hop was surprised that, for once, the Academy got it right. While mainstream institutions expanded their inclusivity, BET's music offerings shrank. After the network ended its popular music video countdown series 106 & Park in 2014, the Hip Hop Awards felt like BET's odd stepchild rather than the culmination of decades of Black music programming.
The last time I attended a taping of the BET HHAs, the industry was busy forecasting rap's funeral. The year was 2023, hip-hop's 50th anniversary, so a celebration of life seemed in order. We paid homage to the dearly beloved in attendance, from Marley Marl to Red Alert. I even spied former BET exec Stephen Hill, who kicked off the network's awards franchise near the turn of the millennium, skipping the red-carpet rigamarole for an incognito side entrance. No longer recorded in the heart of Atlanta, BET had long since moved the show's taping to a suburban outpost. The main event, downsized to a sideshow. The veritable graffiti was on the wall, but rap was still alive. This once-passing fad, never projected by the originators or detractors to make it this far, had smashed every measurable and monetizable metric over the last half century. Yet, in the midst of an otherwise golden anniversary, the industry seemed hellbent on spinning one woeful narrative: For the first year in three decades, no rap songs or albums had hit the number one spot on the Billboard 200 or Hot 100 charts. Alas, hip-hop had lost its former glory, read the premature obits.
It's the kind of commemoration you'd expect when outsiders assume responsibility for telling your story.
Truthfully, the BET HHAs were never hip-hop's holy grail. The Source Awards had a legendary crack at that in the '90s; the Vibe Awards also gave it a respectable go. Both ultimately met the ill fate of print media. But BET's 18-year run is deserving of some sort of recognition. It consistently beat all the so-called industry arbiters when it came to crowning rap's up-and-coming. Now that it's shelved, there's a conversation worth having about why hip-hop has not been able to sustain a longer-running award show and why more public institutions haven't flourished in its honor.
The lasting strength of an award show isn't found in its overnight ratings. It's in the power it has to shape cultural memory long after it airs. A TV award show is just another popularity contest defined by a narrow slice of the zeitgeist. But what it becomes in the aftermath is a public archive that can shape, and even warp, our cultural memory. There's power in that, the power to own the narrative. The power to write, and in some cases rewrite, history. We're witnessing, in real time, the extreme lengths those in power will go to wrest away control of the historical narrative. The Smithsonian museums, including the National Museum of African-American History and Culture, have come under attack for focusing too much on "how bad slavery was," according to President Trump. The Kennedy Center's programming and board got taken over for programming "woke culture."
Apparently, President Trump took a quick tour of the National Museum of African-American History and Culture shortly after taking office in his first term. I remember attending around the same time in 2017, and feeling a sense of pride over my culture being given the grand exhibition it deserves. It was my first time seeing, in real-life, the black paramilitary uniform and replica Uzi gun that Public Enemy's S1W security detail used to tote while marching onstage. Ditto for the first vinyl album cover from hip-hop godfathers The Last Poets, with the incendiary lyrics from their epic single "When the Revolution Comes" printed on the back. At the time of his visit, Trump celebrated the "unbreakable American spirit" on display, but in his second term he's become hypercritical of "a divisive, race-centered ideology" undergirding all of the Smithsonian museums.
I honestly don't know how worried we should be about the vast hip-hop collection at the NMAAHC — still lovingly called the Black Smithsonian by many — where Dilla's MPC beat machine also lives. It doesn't seem like the sort of thing that would wind up on a presidential hitlist. Then again, paper straws seemed pretty innocuous, too, until several months ago. If a portrait of Black persecution like "The Scourged Back," the historical image of escaped slave "Peter," drew the federal government's ire, it's not a stretch to imagine a depiction of Black retaliation eliciting a similar reaction. Has Trump seen the album cover of To Pimp A Butterfly with Kendrick Lamar and his shirtless homies mean mugging on the White House lawn while a dead judge lies at their feet? Or Ice Cube's Death Certificate, with the corpse of Uncle Sam toe-tagged on a gurney? Or the original cover for The Coup's 2001 album Party Music, with Boots Riley pressing buttons as the Twin Towers explode in the background?
How much hip-hop iconography would be considered anti-American under this new regime of revisionist history? Where would our legacy live, if banned from the Internet, besides our heads and our hearts? How would we preserve it for future generations?
It's been a long time since anyone blamed hip-hop for being too woke. Just peep the Venn diagram of artists who've won BET HHA accolades and caught recent heat for supporting Trump; it runs the gamut from Snoop Dogg to Sexxy Red. The fraught nature of this political moment may get dismissed as fake news, but this much is true: Whenever Black history comes under siege, our culture becomes vulnerable. Rap/R&B are still the most-consumed genre, but the dip in dominance in recent years has given major labels the green light to begin a mass deprioritization. A near exodus of Black executives has followed that downward trend. Without sustained industry investment or any widespread institution building, rap faces the threat of having its outsized contributions overwritten, its stories overlooked. The impermanence of our digital footprint, especially in this age of AI scraping and incomplete catalog streaming, is distorting our story. Who knows how many entries, histories, entire discographies have been lost to the ether?
Rap's ephemerality, especially in a digital age, has made it priceless but also seemingly worthless, ubiquitous but homeless. In Black Ephemerality: The Crisis and Challenge of the Musical Archive, scholar Mark Anthony Neal notes the unprecedented "accessibility of the archive of contemporary and historical Blackness" — or "big Black data," as he calls it. But he also laments how digital accessibility has reduced our music to "the ambient background of the continued exploitation and commodification of Black culture."
At a time like this, when the record of America's sordid history is actively being deleted by folk in power, losing the BET Hip Hop Awards feels trite in comparison. It may even come as a relief to those of us who've often questioned or criticized how well — or unwell — any such award show represented us. But it's also a reminder that our culture is never safe from cancellation — not by so-called woke mobs, haters or trollers, but by the station owners and license holders and power brokers. Hip-hop never should've relied on a TV network to canonize the culture. It left us too beholden to waxing and waning commercial interests, too indebted to chart performance as the final metric of success. But there was a utility in having something resembling a monument — erected for us, if not exclusively by us — that we could return to year-after-year as a kind of historical record. An annual spectacle to refute our constant erasure, whether intended or committed in ignorance, from the zeitgeist.
What we need are more public archives, democratically compiled and accessible to the masses. More multicasts of our sonic uprisings to compete with America's myopic narrowcasting. It's part of the reason why I'm hopeful about the projected grand opening of The Hip Hop Museum in the Bronx, the cultural birthplace. Funded through a mix of public and private dollars, the design of the 50,000 square-foot museum was led by "hip-hop architect" Michael Ford, who insisted on starting the process with a cypher. "Our communities sometimes are left out of what happens," he told Uprising newsletter in 2024. Alongside "some of the top young Black architects from all across the country," he and co-founders Rocky Bucano and Kurtis Blow invited MCs, breakdancers and other icons like Roxanne Shante to sketch and plot out ideas before the ultimate designs were drawn up. "It really was working with the culture."
How it will stand up against the ever-churning machinery of American popaganda remains to be seen, but at least a brick and mortar building, once complete, can't be suspended or shelved indefinitely.
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