“You can't fool all the people all of the time, but if you fool the right ones, then the rest will fall behind,” says Rapper M-1 in his song Propaganda. The US people are stuck in the media’s rhetoric and lose their identity.
Corporate ownership of the US media is the topic frequently touched upon in rapper M-1’s lyrics. American rapper M-1 (Mutulu Olugbala), from underground political hip-hop duo Dead Prez, does not believe in a free and non-biased media in his home country.
The media in the US are the right hand of the ruling class and its voice, says M-1 in his interview to RT. Real lives of people are wiped out by the government’s major interests: oil, dollars and control. People are made to focus on these things, instead of their own personal interests and relationships.
When we talk about the ruling class, itself, we should not be misled by its outward division into democrats and republicans, who are just “two sides of one coin”, thinks M-1.
“Obama, representing capitalism, being just a continuation of George Bush is an understatement,” says M-1. “The same old kind of rule that happened across the country is still happening in the same old way, but represented by a face more familiar, a face that is usually associated with oppressed and poor people.”
Nothing has changed much in the US since the latest presidential elections, observes the rapper, neither inside the country nor in its external affairs. By this time, living conditions in the US are as ripe for uprising as in Egypt, points out M-1, who visited Cairo on the eve of the recent revolution there. “The way we are being governed now treats a good sector of our people less than human. And the enemy, during this particular time that we are in, is the lack of information and political education,” he says.
“Our main enemy is ignorance, not a proper political education. Once we can understand and diagnose what we are living under, all humane beings who recognize that me and you have human rights will fight for the rights of human beings,” concludes M-1.