April 26, 2017
Blacklisted: How The Oakland Police Department Discriminates Against Rappers and Music Venues
Artists, promoters, and civil-rights advocates say police policy bans artists and levies huge security fees on rap venues.
Last year, Philthy Rich’s hometown release-show for Hood Rich 4 was supposed to be a victory lap. The staunchly independent local rapper’s previous album, Real Niggas Back in Style, climbed to No. 5 on Billboard’s “Heatseekers” chart, and Philthy seemed poised to clinch that distinctly Bay Area rap-game ambition: local empire, national reputation.
But on the day before his November 18 gig at downtown nightclub Vinyl, venue owner Oscar Edwards says an Oakland cop visited him personally to tell him that Philthy’s show, advertised for weeks, was a “problem.”
Abruptly, Edwards and Philthy called it off. It was a familiar situation: Edwards said the department edits and censors local hip-hop lineups “all the time.”
For Philthy, it was a costly disappointment. He’d flown in three guest performers, put them up in hotels, and chartered a van with a driver and a security guard to bring everyone to the club. Philthy’s manager, PK (for Prashant Kumar) estimated the loss to be approximately $10,000.
“There’s no way it wasn’t malicious,” PK reckoned of the department’s motive. “‘Let’s let him set up the show — and then cancel it at the last minute.’
The Oakland Police Department says it “does not cancel shows,” but Philthy isn’t the only local rapper who, following police pressure on promoters, has been removed from lineups or had shows canceled outright.
In fact, several artists, promoters, and club owners who spoke to the Express in recent months described two different approaches to nightlife oversight in Oakland. They say genres besides hip-hop seldom if ever receive police scrutiny, while rap — one of the Town’s most prized cultural exports — is subjected to burdensome, costly regulations that critics call discriminatory.
Oakland rappers aside from Philthy, including Birch Boy Barie and Project Poppa, even have the impression that they’re banned from performing in their home city — a prospect that alarms civil-rights advocates.
“It’s very disturbing,” said Oakland attorney Dan Siegel. “Even if some of these guys have had run-ins with the cops, what does that have to do with whether or not they can play a show?”
The rap shows in question are legitimate concerts at permitted Oakland venues, not underground gigs or secret warehouse parties. And while Oakland city code requires police to provide written explanations for denying special-event applications, venue owners say they’ve never been offered such documents, and police nightlife overseers declined to be interviewed for this article.
San Francisco attorney John Hamasaki, whose defense of Richmond artist Laz tha Boy brought attention to government prosecutors’ punitive use of rap lyrics as evidence in criminal trials, said the opacity with which Oakland police censor shows “indicates that OPD knows they’re infringing on these artists’ right to perform.”
Even the City of Oakland’s cultural affairs manager, Roberto Bedoya, is troubled by the apparent uneven enforcement. “The city’s commitment to racial equity needs to be considered when it comes to how these policies are enforced,” he told the Express. “Any racial bias at play in policing artist speech — that’s worth looking at.”
Philthy, born Philip Beasley, 34, supported Hood Rich 4 with an incident-free, seventeen-date West Coast tour earlier this year. Conspicuously absent was a gig in Oakland, the subject of affection in so many of his songs. Last November, the day after his canceled local show, the rapper and his out-of-town friends handed out 500 turkeys at the Rainbow Recreation Center in his East Oakland neighborhood of Seminary.
His charity didn’t go unnoticed: The Alameda County Board of Supervisors formally proclaimed November 19, 2016, as “Philthy Rich — H.U.G.S./F.O.D. Thanksgiving Day.” The supervisors also thanked the rapper and his co-organizers for their “philanthropic hearts.”
“I’d love to play Oakland, but I’m not even trying to talk to a promoter about doing shows there,” he told the Express while on the road. “I don’t want to disappoint people when I’m not allowed to show up.”
“It is heartbreaking. Usually tours end in your hometown.”
http://www.eastbayexpress.com/oakland/blacklisted-how-the-oakland-police-department-discriminates-against-rappers-and-music-venues/Content?oid=6482231
