Rap music and anti-Semitism: how Wiley’s tweets draw on a long and ugly history
Grime artist Wiley has been dropped by his management and banned from Twitter for an extraordinary tirade of anti-Semitic posts late last week. In the heavily criticised flurry of Tweets, Wiley, real name Richard Cowie, likened Jews to the Ku Klux Klan and told them that Israel is not their country. Twitter’s perceived lateness in removing Wiley’s broadside prompted further outrage, and has led to condemnation from the Home Secretary and the Prime Minister, as well as a 48-hour boycott of the social-media platform by thousands of disgusted users. The grime artist’s outburst is just the latest in an unfortunate line of anti-Semitic controversies emanating from certain members of the hip-hop community. Some rappers have an uncomfortable track record of anti-Jewish sentiment that goes back decades – leading to a 2011 Jewish Chronicle article calling hip hop “the music where it’s okay to be anti-Jewish”. But where does the animosity stem from? And what can be done about it? There are, unfortunately, dozens of examples of anti-Semitic sentiment in rap. In 1988, Public Enemy’s Professor Griff made a series of anti-Semitic and homophobic comments to Britain’s Melody Maker magazine, including: “If the Palestinians took up arms, went into Israel and killed all the Jews, it’d be alright.” The following year, he continued his attack in The Washington Times, telling the paper that Jews were “responsible for the majority of wickedness in the world”. He was removed from the band soon afterwards. Ice Cube, meanwhile, has long made references to Jews in his raps. His 1991 track No Vaseline contains a line about his former band NWA “letting a white Jew tell you what to do”, in reference to the collective’s manager Jerry Heller. Only this month, the rapper was criticised by NBA basketball star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in The Hollywood Reporter for anti-Semitic Tweets. Ice Cube had posted a picture of the controversial Freedom For Humanity mural depicting businessmen – assumed to be Jewish – playing a board game that rests on the back of hunched, naked figures. He was one of several black celebrities criticised by Abdul-Jabbar, and responded on Twitter that The Hollywood Reporter had given the sportsman “30 pieces of silver” for his opinion. Elsewhere, seven years ago, rapper Scarface said the music industry was “so f-cking white and so f-cking Jewish", and although hip-hop royalty Jay-Z has stood against anti-Semitism and equated it to racism, his 2017 track The Story of OJ contained the lyric: “You wanna know what’s more important than throwin’ away money at a strip club? Credit/ You ever wonder why Jewish people own all the property in America? This how they did it.” Similar sentiments have appeared in the work of Mos Def and Lupe Fiasco. And earlier this month, celebrity TV host and rapper Nick Cannon was dropped by Viacom CBS for making anti-Semitic statements, prompting more furious anti-Jewish comments by rapper Jay Electronica in defence of Cannon. Do you see a pattern here?
