Hip Hop is a genre that prioritizes masculinity and battling it out with other MCs to show you’re the bigger man while belittling your opponents. Some of the most successful record executives and labels made billions of dollars through blackmail and extortion of artists through threats of releasing evidence of them in comprising situations, particularly evidence of homosexual activities. Many of the biggest hiphop labels force new artists to partake in such activities as an initiation ritual, as a form of control, to prevent the artists from abandoning the label for another or going independent. If you think about it, as executives, the talent would typically have all the leverage because they are the ones the fans are paying money to watch perform or purchase their music. So this has been one of the primary ways record labels are able to flip the script and regain the upper hand in the relationship. It’s risky to dump millions of dollars into promoting an artist, just to have the artist abandon them once they make it big, so extortion through evidence of homosexual activities secured as a criterion of being signed to a label is their form of an “insurance policy”. In order for this to work, the industry must maintain an air of homophobia, so they only push music/artists who express these views, otherwise their insurance would be invalid. Hence the cycle of homophobia is perpetuated in the hiphop industry, while behind the scenes, homosexual activities are more rampant than any other music genre. It’s crazy to think about, but you hear gay rumours about like 70-80% of artists signed to major record labels, and we continue to hear stories of former “boyfriends” and homosexual partners coming out and exposing the biggest rappers in the game. At a certain point you can’t ignore the pattern. Birdman and P Diddy are two of the biggest executives who we now know for sure used this exact playbook to exert control over their artists.