(this is the first draft of a long story, and the same post will update each day for 1-2 weeks, so when you get to the bottom of the article there will be an unfinished part)
At 11:23pm on 21/02/2021, I received a Twitter message claiming to be from Wiley
‘Hey brother, I would like to speak to you. 07XXX XXX XXX. Ring me in the morning’.
I replied ‘hahahahaa. I’m ringing now just to find out who this is. I know who it’s not’.
I call. Wiley answers.
‘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’ Jay Z, The Story of OJ
‘Maybe there was some kind of fiddling of the figures by the oligarchs who ran the TV stations (and who were mainly, as some lost no time in pointing out, of Jewish origin)’ Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, Seventy Two Virgins
‘What’s gwaning, Nan? Y’alright? Yeah, it’s Kylea, what’s gwaning, what’s gwaning?’ Wiley, Nan I Am London
Google ‘Wiley’ and the first result is a database to search scientific journal articles. Beneath that, the first question in the ‘People Also Ask’ section is ‘Is Wiley Trustworthy?’ This is again related to the Journal but is a question many fans of the rapper have asked for a long time.
The next result is a June 2020 interview from The Guardian on his very-temporary-retirement, Wiley on his final album: ‘I need to not let grime die on the way out’.
Then comes the Antisemitism story. Wiley’s Twitter was soon deleted, but screenshots of the offending tweets have been captured. It is clear from these what a struggle it was for CNN Business or The Campaign Against Antisemitism to capture the nature of the diatribe. There are crying-with-laughter emojis next to the Israeli flag emoji. References to black people being the original Israelis. Jewish people are called ‘cowards’. ‘Jewish people don’t care what black people went through they just use us to make money… a black boy who can entertain is like gold and diamonds to a Jewish man… they prey on us’.
But the newspapers never quoted this stupid, angry quote. Instead it became Chinese Whispers. Calls for Wiley to be banned from social media. Facebook, Instagram and Twitter all banning him. Reports on an antisemitic tirade from NME, Glamour UK, NBC News, The Sun, The Washington Post, Arab News, USA Today. PR Week magazine has given him their ‘Flop of the Month’ award. A petition condemning him has been signed by Niall Horan, Lily Allen and The 1975.
The scale that this story attained is most apparent in a follow-up story from the CNN Business website. It is bizarre how the most important American cable news network has written two long stories on a British rapper who is far from a household name. The only quote from what Wiley said, was that the Jewish community deserved to ‘hold some corn’. The Non-Governmental Organization. The Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA) translate this as being slang to ‘take bullets’. The CAA fail to mention the term can also just mean ‘looking for trouble’.
This story focuses on ‘A Virtual Twitter Walkout’ in protest of his comments. There is a hashtag involved, the clunky ‘#NoSafeSpaceForJewHate’. The Royal Opera House has announced their support. The article cites a quote by Home Secretary Priti Patel: “The antisemitic posts from Wiley are abhorrent. They should not have been able to remain on Twitter and Instagram for so long and I have asked them for a full explanation. Social media companies must act much faster to remove such appalling hatred from their platforms.” aid, was that the Jewish community deserved to ‘hold some corn’. The Non-Governmental Organization. The Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA) translate this as being slang to ‘take bullets’. The CAA fail to mention the term can also just mean ‘looking for trouble’.
I don’t know why I can quote Wiley in 34 words and transmit the nature of the story, while the BBC, CNN, Sky and The Campaign Against Antisemitism can only report on the reaction-to-the-tweets rather than the actual tweets, or misattribute the meaning of ‘hold some corn’, but this will be the centre of my argument. That reporting-about-a-story rather than reporting the actual story can only appear conspiratorial, Jews being conspiratorial is at the heart of all antisemitic propaganda. In an era where politicians are treated like celebrities and celebrities are treated like politicians, to understand the Wiley Antisemitism story it must be viewed from a variety of angles; cultural, sociological, in terms of mental wellbeing and political. Most of all, what does this mean to Cancel Culture? The term is often used as a modern day, ‘Political Correctness Gone Mad’, but here is an example of someone being as-close-to-cancelled as forseeable by Google, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, politicians, musicians and the global media.
The kind of behaviour Wiley expressed, an impotent and misguided rant, has become bizarrely trendy for a certain kind of rock n roll star. From the 70s punk scene we have John Lydon in his Trump MAGA hat. From 80s Indie, Morrissey’s anti-immigration talk. From 90s britpop Ian Brown (I know he’s 80s really, but I prefer the solo stuff). Wiley’s behaviour isn’t offensive to me, just as none of these others are. A lot of comedians talk about it being therapeutic, but I have been in comedy and therapy for over a decade each. Comedy makes you immune to shock value, and a barrage of drunk audience members coming up to congratulate you over the years makes you realise the general public are more unhinged than the average comedian. Therapy has taught me that as well as mental health there’s mental wellbeing – mental health can be bipolar, schizophrenia etc., but mental wellbeing is universal day-to-day instances like anxiety or stress management, and all of these examples are all at minimum deeply stressed. I also have a degree in Politics, and know how Politics not being on the school Curriculum means the general public, whether rich or poor, public, private or comprehensive educated, are deeply unaware. Also, I would rather have people say bad things than do them. This statement is an oversimplified generalisation, but my point is that Morrissey could never have committed the kind of crimes Bill Cosby or Jimmy Savile did, because he has never curried favour with the media. Details of personal abuse from him would elicit a 6-figure-minimum-sum to any major outlet.
The other aspect of the Wiley story that was entirely ignored or decontextualized by the media was not just that the tweets broke out after Wiley split from his manager John Woolf, but these two had had a very close relationship since the 2000s. Woolf himself compared it to a marriage, ironically in the Jewish Chronicle newspaper, years ago. Woolf seemed reluctant to even condemn Wiley’s comments as malicious rather than deranged. He had seen, particularly over the last year, Wiley’s ability to manufacture drama. Whether with Skepta, Ed Sheeran or Stormzy – Wiley had become a walking soap opera.
Jews have always played a small yet significant role in Hip Hop. From 1982-85, Rick Rubin co-founded Def Jam and produced seminal recordings by LL Cool J, Run DMC and T La Rock. He also produced the 20million record selling New York Jews, the Beastie Boys, who first achieved commercial success then hugely innovative in the sonic progression of Hip Hop. Two Jewish comedy-rap groups have achieved well-over-a-billion-streams-without-hyperbole by not taking themselves particularly seriously, The Lonely Island are led by Andy Samberg and knowingly-ridiculously-named Lil Dicky has recorded tracks with Snoop Dogg, Fetty Wap, Chris Brown and T-Pain.
In terms of British hip-hop culture, Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black must be considered the definitive British Soul Album. Mark Ronson, also Jewish, production and musicianship on both Back To Black (downbeat) and his solo work (upbeat) have been adapted by Grime to make the genre the 2010s equivalent of Britpop.
“N.W.A.’s song publishing royalties were always hefty because the band sold so many records … Ruthless took twenty-five cents out of each dollar of publishing royalties. Again, a fairly customary bite. Some labels take 100 percent. The other publishing companies involved (Cube included) also took twenty-five cents. Of the fifty cents left, the lyric writer took twenty-five cents, and the beat writer took twenty-five cents. Dre composed the beats for every song N.W.A. ever put out, so he always got that quarter out of every dollar coming in, less deductions for all his sampling. You wrote a lot of the words, Cube, so some of the time you took a quarter bite out of those dollars. There were quite a few times though, when you had to share with cowriters, such as Dre, Yella, the D.O.C., Eazy, or Ren. So you had to share your quarter … It’s not robbery. It’s not a Jewish conspiracy to rip off the poor artist. What it is, O’Shea, is mathematics — pure and simple. You received every single penny that was coming to you. If you say you didn’t, then you are lying”
It’s Friday 12th September 2019, 5:30pm, Camden High Street. I have just finished a day’s temping as a Kitchen Porter in Friend’s House in Euston, it’s a big square building opposite the tube station – I’d been washing 1,023 dishes, glasses and/or pans for the vegetarian cafe run by the Quakers. I was most of the way through a retraining programme as a Bookkeeper that was government funded, but the course was delayed by 6 months due to the owners being corrupt…… that’s another story. Due to Universal Credit, 67% of my earnings for that day’s pay came out of my benefits too… but let’s get to the point.
My plan was to visit a couple of record shops then go to my friend’s cocktail bar in Kentish Town before the evening rush, nurse a beer, be cheap in opulence. Camden High Street had police tape up, I asked someone who knew what had happened, there had been a stabbing, a fatality. In Out On The Floor records, it turned out the two staff members knew the victim, just a boy – nice, naive, stuck in the middle of a fight that wasn’t his.
By 9:30pm that night I had visited my friend’s bar, rambled, left quickly, wandered around and found myself at the intersection of Kentish Town Road and Regent’s Canal, just north of Camden Town Station. At the gates of the lock, where canal boats stop to level out the water, there is an isolated raised square, with a narrow path connecting it to the canalside. I saw three figures sitting there. I went and sat with them.
They were three Lithuanian kids, metal music fans, leather jackets, cartoonish English accents, offered me a beer. They were over to visit a friend, planning his stag do in Warsaw in the new year. ‘The whores give the best blowjobs there’, he said. This coming out of ten minutes of polite conversation, I wasn’t sure how to respond, but my rambling instincts took over ‘Just make sure…. do what you want… but know keeping secrets stays with you… ‘To live outside the law you must be honest”. He asked who said that, and I told him Bob Dylan. ‘Are you Jewish?’ he asked, I said ‘well, I shrug a lot…. yeah I’m an agnostic Jew’. His friend turned around and lowered the neck of his shirt, and there was a Swastika tattoo. Then he lifted his sleeve, and there was another symbol that he explained was the Lithuanian equivalent. I was too exhausted to feel that scared, drained, tired, listless from the news earlier. I told them that if I got angry or offended I would be giving them the reaction they wanted. As I got up to leave, one of them asked if I wanted to stay for another beer. The other two stared down, I declined and headed on.
Joshua Ross - cloud content for joshuaross.com 