Yasiin Bey weighed gave Shock Exchange the industry co-sign:
The machinery is saying we don’t even have to cultivate personalities anymore. We can cultivate personas … to get spokes people or representatives of a lifestyle or an idea they may not even subscribe to themselves. They can sell it though …
I’ve had program directors even tell me, ‘Mos I love your music, but it doesn’t fit into our format.’ The format is predictable … It’s sex violence, love songs, glamor, dance … There’s no real information on these stations. As a result there’s no real information in the music … their programming mandate is about surface, pop culture.
That’s problematic for us as a community because the only culture we have in this county is one that we create. NOw the people who create culture have been bribed and co-opted … by these huge corporations that say, ‘the only way we’re take your message to the masses is if you represent what we are comfortable with seeing you community or seeing your demographic … we’re comfortable with you representing this to them … anything outside of that we are hesitant.
Shock Exchange chronicles how inner-city kids from Brooklyn predicted the Great Recession and the one that is pending. The mainstream media, including the Financial Times and Martin Sandbu, would have the public believe no economists saw the Crisis coming. They do not want African Americans to know that blacks predicted the Great Recession or that African Americans are smarter than their white counterparts. The last thing they want is for African Americans to know about Shock Exchange – it could not only inform, but awaken other blacks and dare them dream and seek greater heights.
Yasiin Bey points out the brilliance of Shock Exchange for putting out heat – that 110 degrees in the shade – and not simply putting out surface material that leads to nowhere.
