It is no wonder Ice-T excels as a talking head in this three-part docuseries on how the dastardly music industry has exploited Black artists. His 20 years in the rap game and 25 seasons acting as a street-hardened sex crimes detective on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit have supplied him with apt insight. “I always call it a pimp business,” he announces in the opening moments. “It’s like: ‘OK, you have what I need, we’ll sell it, we’ll take the majority of the money.”
This is as good a summary as any of how things go, but it isn’t the first time the injustice has been noted. In 1975, James Baldwin wrote about “the terrifying economics” lived by his friend Billie Holiday, observing: “The music industry is one of the areas of the national life in which the blacks have been most persistently, successfully and brutally ripped off.” It is not that the record business has a monopoly on American racism, of course. Nor are Black artists the only ones being exploited. But racial factors do deepen the inequities, in ways that Paid in Full comprehensively lays out.
Take the roving scouts of Columbia and RCA Victor who, in the 1920s and 30s, were notorious for preying on poverty. One common scam involved seeking out Black musicians in southern juke joints, plying them with booze, then bundling them into a studio to perform. The musician would be lucky to get a flat fee of, say, $100 for a recording that might go on to make millions. This was the fate of several blues pioneers and, as Paid in Full’s music historians remind us, their descendants have also been deprived of the life-changing generational wealth that royalties and publishing rights would have brought.
It happened in other ways, too. Jim Crow-era segregation meant Black artists usually required a white middle-man for such everyday arrangements as booking venues or setting up payola (cash-for-airplay) deals. This led to some of music history’s most ludicrous injustices, such as Pat Boone’s sauceless cover of Tutti Frutti outselling Little Richard’s deliciously deviant original. Or Chuck Berry sharing writing credit on Maybellene with two white guys he had never met; a payola-pocketing radio DJ and the landlord of the recording studio. It also created a career path for rip-off managers, exemplified here by Louis Armstrong’s longtime associate Joe Glaser – a former Al Capone heavy for whom the recording racket was just another kind of protection. The documentary neatly juxtaposes a rundown of Glaser’s misdeeds with a clip of Armstrong performing on a late-1960s TV show. His cosy refrain about this “wonderful world” of ours has never sounded so bitterly ironic.
Later episodes reverently trace the musician-to-mogul trajectory and undisputed business genius of Motown’s Berry Gordy and Jay-Z. That’s interesting, but maybe not quite as interesting as the eccentric also-rans and noble failures that are nodded to more briefly. Wattstax, the $1-a-ticket festival protesting police brutality that Stax Records put on in 1972, deserves its own episode, if not an entirely separate Summer of Soul-style feature.
It is also a shame that Paid in Full doesn’t follow up on episode one’s anti-capitalist analysis by questioning the morality of those who choose to conquer a corrupt system rather than dismantle it. At the very least, Jay-Z deserves some side-eye for that moment in 2022 when he succumbed to rich-guy-brain-rot and equated being called a capitalist with being called the N-word. But the Paid in Full team are clearly fully paid-up Hov’ worshippers and therefore too deferential for any of that.
Once across the Atlantic, episode three finds firmer ground in detailing how Black British music culture has evolved a proudly DIY ethos that has proved impervious to top-down industry control. If Skepta can make 2014’s best music video for £80, why would he bother with a major label? “Grime doesn’t need A&R-ing from high above,” Trevor Nelson tells us. “Grime is A&R-ed at street level, [where] everyone knows what’s hot.”
Later it’s mooted that Stormzy, with his #Merky Records, is realising the change that Sam Cooke said was coming – a suggestion that feels far-fetched at first, but Zawe Ashton’s coolly neutral narration talks us round. It helps that Spotify CEO Daniel Ek comes off like a mini-me to Elon Musk’s Dr Evil. Clearly, someone has to take down the tech billionaire supervillains, and it might as well be Croydon’s finest.
• Paid in Full: The Battle for Black Music aired on BBC Two and is on iPlayer now.
