Bangladesh: Songs of Subversion
“The U.S. government has observed the power of hip hop culture as a vehicle for expression, protest, and a political voice for young people,” Professor Sujatha Fernandes, a sociologist at the University of Sydney and the author of the book, “Close to the Edge: In Search of the Global Hip Hop Generation,” told MintPress News.
“Groups like the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and USAID earlier consistently chose Black cultural expressions from jazz to hip hop as a way of infiltrating those societies and trying to promote regime change,” she added.
One of those countries is Bangladesh. In 2024, longstanding prime minister Sheikh Hasina was toppled in a U.S.-supported revolution. Hasina’s relationship with Washington had seriously deteriorated over her friendliness towards China and her refusal to cede control of the strategically-located Saint Martin’s Island in the Bay of Bengal so the U.S. could build a military base there.
Just days after meeting with Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asia, Donald Liu, Hasina publicly warned that a “white skin country” had threatened there would be trouble for her if she did not grant it permission to build a base in Bangladeshi territory. Nevertheless, she remained obstinate; “I do not want to come to power by leasing out parts of the country or handing it over to someone else,” she said.
Three weeks later, nationwide protests erupted across the country. Specifically targeted at a controversial quota system that reserved 30% of government jobs for the families of those that fought for the country’s independence in 1971, the movement quickly expanded to include people from a wide swath of society. It also turned extremely violent: over 1,4000 people were killed before the military stepped in, forcing Hasina to ignominiously flee to India by helicopter.
Hasina was replaced by Muhammad Yunus, a longtime associate, mentor, and close friend of Bill and Hillary Clinton. One month after the affair, Yunus traveled to New York to meet with President Biden, who offered “continued U.S. support as Bangladesh implements its new reform agenda.” Yunus also spoke at the Clinton Global Initiative, where he revealed that the protests were not a spontaneous uprising, but an operation “meticulously designed” by young Bangladeshi leaders.
One of the leaders of the demonstrations was rapper and barrister Towfique Ahmed, who shot to prominence after he offered to provide free legal support to anyone arrested by Hasina’s forces.
Yet Ahmed had for years been on the U.S. government payroll, explicitly as an agent of change, the International Republican Institute (IRI) – a CIA front group – funding and promoting his music career far and wide.
A leaked IRI document published by The Grayzone shows that the organization’s expressly stated goal was to “destabilize Bangladesh’s politics.” To that end, they spent millions funding all manner of opposition groups and figures, including musicians like Ahmed, whom, the document notes, “are neither solely an artist nor solely an activist; instead, they are functioning as a hybrid agent of change.”
“If the public is more aware of current issues of government oppression, discrimination and shrinking space for political participation, then the Bangladeshi people will be more active to drive [a] power shift through social and political reforms,” it concludes.
As it was never intended to see the light of day, the report is unusually frank about the U.S. government’s explicit goals of regime change, and does not mask it with vague language alluding to democracy promotion.
The IRI produced a number of music videos for Ahmed, and helped spread his music far and wide. His song, “Tui parish” (You Can Do It) is a thinly-veiled call for regime change. As the IRI notes, “Tui Parish” “targets youth with a message of perseverance in difficult times and encourages those who are committed to strengthen democracy in Bangladesh in every possible way including protests and street movements.”
Another song, “E Daay Kaar” (Demand It!) the IRI states, was specifically “designed to reveal social issues in Bangladesh and build up disappointment and even dissent to government so as to call for social and political reforms.”
Ahmed’s music became an anthem of the protests, thanks in part to the IRI consistently promoting it, including on its own televised cultural program, that, it boasted, “reached over 79,000 households in Bangladesh.” In total, the IRI spent millions supporting a wide range of artists, musicians, dancers and actors, all with the goal of removing Hasina from power.
Today, Bangladesh and the United States are in the final stages of agreeing a new strategic military partnership that will grant the U.S. the rights to use a plethora of Bangladeshi ports and airbases for military purposes.
Senegal: The Revolution Will Be Organized
If Bangladesh was the perfect insurrection, Senegal was the blueprint. Western media called it the “Rap Revolution.” In 2012, enormous protests against President Abdoulaye Wade broke out. The 85-year-old leader was seeking a controversial third term in office, and was attempting to bring his son, Karim, into high office – a move many critics saw as Wade trying to establish a family dynasty.
The demonstrations were led by a rap collective called “Y’En a Marre” (Enough is Enough). Y’En a Marre capitalized on public discontent over corruption, blackouts, and economic stagnation, inflaming tensions and encouraged people out on the streets.
One rapper in particular had been sowing the seeds for action for quite some time. In 2010, Cheikh Oumar Touré, known by his stage name, Thiat, released the song with his group, the Keurgui Crew called “Coup 2 Guele” (Diatribe), in which he and his partner, Kilifeu, excoriated Wade and called for a revolution.
“Old man, your seven year presidential reign has been expensive,” “You cheated during the last elections,” “This lusty regime has wasted all our money,” he raps. “Let’s fight this buffoon who is stealing all our money” he tells his countrymen, while concluding that the people of Senegal must “act on our words in the same way we resisted Hitler and De Gaulle.”
Surprisingly, the Kergui Crew immediately released an English version of the song, suggesting their intended audience was not purely Senegalese. Thiat was elevated to stardom in the West, where he received a great deal of positive press, long before the protests even began.
Coup 2 Guele became the soundtrack to the struggle, and Wade was decisively beaten at the ballot box, as Western media applauded this innovative form of activism. Thiat and Y’En a Marre became known worldwide as “the rappers who took down a dictator.”
Many expected Thiat to formally enter electoral politics. Instead, however, one of his first major post-revolution moves was to announce that he had been appointed a Reagan-Fascell Democracy Fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).
The NED was explicitly set up as a front group of the Central Intelligence Agency.
In the wake of a series of public scandals that seriously hurt the agency’s credibility, the Reagan administration established the NED in 1983. It proceeded to act as a front group for the CIA, carrying out many of its most controversial regime change operations abroad, in an effort to give the U.S. some level of plausible deniability. The endowment interfered in the 1996 Russian elections to ensure U.S. puppet Boris Yeltsin remained in power. Six years later, it bankrolled a briefly successful coup against Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez. It has also funded and supported insurrections in Ukraine, Hong Kong, and Belarus, among other countries.
Although it is funded and staffed by the U.S. government and its officials, the NED is technically a private entity, meaning it is not subject to the same transparency laws and public scrutiny as a body like the CIA.
In their more candid moments, NED leaders are unequivocal about the organization’s role. “It would be terrible for democratic groups around the world to be seen as subsidized by the CIA,” Carl Gershman, NED president from 1984 to 2021, said, explaining why his organization was set up. NED co-founder Allen Weinstein agreed: “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA,” he told The Washington Post.
USAID – an official government body – has functioned in much the same way, acting as a CIA front group, spying on both enemy and friendly countries, and organizing countless coups around the world. When the Trump administration cut funding to USAID last year, it inadvertently exposed a global network of over 6,000 journalists and nearly 1,000 “independent” media outlets that suddenly faced immediate bankruptcy. In 2025, USAID and its activities were formally subsumed into the State Department.
It was this context that explains why so many were shocked when Thiat made his announcement, and led some to wonder how much the United States was involved in the seemingly spontaneous, grassroots uprising.
Certainly, the NED had been agitating in Senegal for years. In 2006, it funded a project whose public goal was to “strengthen understanding and advocacy for democracy among the urban middle class and youth in Senegal.” The NED’s local partners, it stated, would “lead a civic education campaign on democracy consisting of a series of published investigative reports on Senegal’s democratic development and training seminars for young people, civic organizations, and political parties.
Another 2009 NED project, entitled “Partners for Democratic Change” promised to “create a platform for dialogue between civil and military actors in Senegal,” suggesting that Washington was eager for its chosen activists to have closer ties to the military.
The Reagan-Fascell Fellowship gave Thiat an international platform, and allowed him to travel worldwide. The fellowship, the NED itself noted, provided him the time and resources to compose a new album.
Thiat, however, appears to dismiss any criticism or claims of U.S. involvement in Senegal. In a recent interview, he stated that, “We are showing that we can change everything without the intervention of other countries and without military interventions. And without the West, of course.” “Most African presidents are puppets of the West,” concluded the NED-funded activist.
Washington continues to fund hip hop artists in Senegal. In 2018, the NED’s sister organization, USAID, collaborated with political rapper, Last Under to produce an album, while in 2023, it partnered with Sister LB to release a track to promote “transparency and accountability” in the country’s extractive industries.
And if there is one Senegalese rapper that receives more effusive Western press coverage than Thiat, it is Babacar Niang, better known as Matador. “You can learn everything you need to know about the main challenges facing Africa today by talking to just two people in Senegal: the rapper and the weatherman” wrote Thomas Friedman in the pages of The New York Times, describing Matador as a “pioneer,” and the “voice of the voiceless,” and featuring him in his documentary, “Years of Living Dangerously.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, Matador is also closely connected to Washington. Africulturban, the multimedia center he cofounded, is directly funded by the U.S. Embassy in Dakar.
West Africa: Rage on Behalf of the Machine
Both Thiat and Kilifeu from the Keur Gui Crew also later participated in a much wider hip hop project bankrolled and overseen by the NED’s World Movement For Democracy. As part of a 2019 attempt to build bridges and links between “pro-democracy” (i.e. U.S.-backed) forces across Western Africa, the NED sponsored the production of a rap album, “Music as a Messenger of Democracy,” featuring a plethora of political artists from the region.
In addition to the Keur Gui Crew, this included Sengalese/Beninise rapper Moonaya, Awa Bling and Killa Ace from The Gambia, Nigeria’s Cill, Togo’s Elom 20ce, as well as Ami Yerewolo and Master Soumy from Mali.
Not only did the NED fund the production and promotion of the album, but it further supported the artists by hosting rap shows across the region. One example was a 2018 hip hop night in Dakar, Senegal, where, in addition to Thiat and Kilifeu, it flew in Elom 20ce and Killa Ace for the performance. Meanwhile, Cill spoke at the World Movement For Democracy’s Tenth Global Assembly.
Another West African hip hop act with a close relationship with the NED is DJ Switch, a popular Nigerian artist who collaborated with rap legend Busta Rhymes on a remix to her hit song, “So Tey.”
DJ Switch campaigned against police brutality, and even livestreamed the shooting of anti-government protestors, an act that jeopardized her safety in her home country. Only a few months after this incident, it was announced that, like Thiat, she had become an NED Reagan-Fascell Fellow.
For the United States government, the point of sponsoring huge numbers of individuals and organizations around the world is far less about training the shock troops who will lead a color revolution (although that certainly happens), and more about ensuring that a giant cadre of pro-U.S. agents exists in all countries and in all manner of influential fields, from politics and business to academics and the arts. This is so if the U.S. does decide to do something, there will be a loyal intelligentsia to support it. Rappers are merely a tiny piece of this puzzle.
One country, however, where hip hop artists are very much at the forefront of the U.S.’ regime change plans is Cuba.
Cuba: The Great Astroturfed Revolution
The United States has been trying to overthrow the government of Cuba since the Revolution of 1959. And in July 2021, they thought they had concocted the perfect plan. Washington spent enormous amounts of resources encouraging Cubans into the streets in an attempt to topple President Miguel Díaz-Canel.
America believed it had found the ideal figurehead in Yotuel, an aging rapper who left Cuba in the 1990s, and had released the anti-government song, “Patria y Vida” (Fatherland and Life) to great U.S. fanfare just months earlier. “For those new to the issue of Cuba, the protests we are witnessing were started by artists, not politicians,” tweeted Cuban-American senator Marco Rubio, “This song ‘Patria y Vida’ powerfully explains how young Cubans feel. And its release was so impactful, you will go to jail if caught playing it in Cuba,” he claimed, sharing a link to the track with his millions of followers.
On the same day as Rubio’s tweet, a huge swath of U.S. media outlets, including The New York Times, NPR, The Wall Street Journal, Rolling Stone, Voice Of America, and National Geographic, all simultaneously published articles profiling the song.
Collectively, this coverage identified “Patria y Vida” as the clarion call for a new generation, noted that it was a retort to the communist slogan “Patria o Muerte” (fatherland or death), and presented Yotuel as a crusading warrior of democracy. But none told readers that anti-government Cuban rappers like Yotuel had been sponsored, hothoused, and coached for years by the U.S. government for precisely this purpose.
The NED was, at the time, financing numerous schemes training Cuban rappers as agents of regime change. One project entitled “Empowering Cuban Hip-Hop Artists as Leaders in Society,” stated that its goal was to “promote citizen participation and social change,” and to “raise awareness about the role hip-hop artists have in strengthening democracy in the region.” Another, called “Promoting Freedom of Expression in Cuba through the Arts,” claimed it was partnering with local musicians on projects related to “democracy, human rights, and historical memory,” and to help “increase awareness about the Cuban reality.” This “reality,” as President Biden himself stated the week of the insurrection, was that the Cuban government is an “authoritarian regime” that has meted out “decades of repression” while its leaders only “enrich themselves.”
At the same time, USAID was offering $2 million worth of funding to groups that could use culture to bring about a color revolution in Cuba. The announcement directly referenced Yotuel as a model to follow, stating that,
“Artists and musicians have taken to the streets to protest government repression, producing anthems such as ‘Patria y Vida,’ which has not only brought greater global awareness to the plight of the Cuban people but also served as a rallying cry for change on the island.”
In the end, despite the impeccable coordination from the U.S. government, social media, the Cuban-American lobby, celebrities, and the press, all of whom came together to bombard the country with messaging telling them to get out on the streets, barely a few thousand people island-wide heeded their call. Moreover, they were dwarfed by far larger, pro-government counter-demonstrations (images of which, for some time, Western media often presented as anti-government marches).
The reality was that Patria y Vida’s supposed popularity was largely astroturfed. Yotuel had not even lived in Cuba for a quarter-century, and instead led a much larger sympathy demonstration in Miami. Days later, President Biden invited him to the White House for a special meeting.
Despite its failure, the U.S. government has evidently still not given up on Yotuel as a potential regime change leader. This September, he appeared at the NED’s 2026 Democracy Awards and performed “Patria y Vida” live to those in attendance.
This was not the first time that Washington had been caught using hip hop to overthrow the Cuban government. In fact, inside Cuba, the rap scene is notorious for being full of undercover U.S. agents. Gaining popularity in the late 1990s, local rappers had a considerable impact on society, helping bring to the fore many previously under-discussed topics. The United States saw their biting critiques of racism as a wedge they could exploit, and attempted to infiltrate their ranks.
In 2009, the U.S. government sent Serbian music promoter Rajko Bozic to the island with a mission: to recruit a stable of rappers to use as anti-government shock troops. Bozic was a veteran of Otpor, a CIA-backed political group that led the insurrection against Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic – the first successful color revolution of the century.
Bozic soon found willing partners in rap group, Los Aldeanos. With seemingly limitless funds for the operation, he immediately started aggressively promoting the duo, producing an anti-government TV show they starred in. Although it was not broadcast on television, Bozic and his team simply paid for it to be distributed around the country on DVDs and USB drives instead.
He also used Washington’s money and connections to get their music on the radio, and to bribe big Latino music stars into allowing them to open for them at their gigs, thus buying them more credibility and exposure. Los Aldeanos were even flown to Serbia for secret training, under the guise of playing at the Exit Music Festival.
Cuban authorities eventually exposed the scheme, however, and Los Aldeanos fled to Florida.
Being a hip hop fan in Cuba is fraught with difficulties. Without realizing, many Cubans are listening to albums, reading hip hop magazines, or even going to concerts secretly funded by the U.S national security state. The Caribbean island is without doubt where Washington has most concentrated its efforts in attempting to co-opt the rap scene.
Yet, for all its efforts, Fernandes told MintPress that the U.S. government has had little success. Cuba, she said, is a place with an organic hip hop movement built from the ground up, and rappers are “not trying to overthrow their government but to create more spaces for their demands of anti-racism and equality under an expanding market economy. They had little reason to collaborate with U.S. agencies.”
As Fernandes explained, being found to be in the pay of a CIA front group would be seen as something of a scarlet letter:
“Cuban artists are wary of working with any U.S. government agencies, because it would completely damage their credibility and compromise their own belief systems. That’s not to say there aren’t newer and younger artists who may be more willing to engage with the U.S. government. But among long-term and established artists, they realize that any such engagement would risk closure of their critical spaces and loss of their credibility.”
Funding a Global Medium
In the Republic of Congo, President Denis Sassou Nguesso has been faced with over a decade of opposition from the Ras-le-Bol movement, which, in 2015, coordinated the largest anti-government protests in the country’s history in response to his attempts to change the constitution.
Ras-le-Bol shares many similarities with Y’En a Marre in Senegal. For one, they were both co-founded by a rapper, in this case, Martial Pa’nucci. Pa’nucci noted that he took direct inspiration from Senegal. Indeed, Ras-le-Bol is a direct translation of Y’En a Marre, both meaning “enough is enough.” And like Thiat, Pa’nucci is a former Reagan-Fascell Democracy Fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy.
While at the NED, he used the time to produce “Music for a Democratic Future in Congo”, a 12-track album the NED describes as “denouncing the dictatorship and kleptocracy that undermines his country.”
Unlike in Senegal, however, Ras-le-Bol has been unsuccessful in dislodging Sassou Nguesso, who first came to power in 1979.
The U.S. government has also supported the career of Moroccan political rapper Youssra Oukaf, better known as Soultana. Soultana takes on issues such as patriarchy and sexism in her music, and has helped other women enter the arena. While finding no aid from her own government, she has found plenty from Washington. “For me, it’s so big. It’s not just support, it’s an honor,” she said of her U.S. backing.
In Jordan, a USAID audit reveals that the agency greenlit a project to produce a rap song “targeting first-time voters” ahead of the 2007 elections. The song, it claims, was “played by most commercial radio stations” and reached “more than 2 million Jordanians.”
The U.S. government has also sponsored rap projects on a smaller scale in Uganda, South Africa, Tanzania, Ghana, and El Salvador. These initiatives range from concerts in Haiti featuring Wyclef Jean, to small scale workshops aimed at youths.
For Fernandes, hip hop is such a powerful medium because of its history and its universality:
“[It] goes back to its origins at a time when the organized left/Black Power was under attack and in decline, and the culture provided a voice for Black youth in the U.S. and globally when so many other avenues were closed. That continues to be true today. But the other reason is its musical innovation and style – the rhythm and beats derived from African-American culture that caught on like fire in the diaspora and beyond.”
To this day, hip hop still maintains its rebellious spirit. But even counter-cultural art forms are not immune to being co-opted by the powerful.
Rap as a Pacifying Force
While successive American administrations have used rap as a wedge to divide populations against each other and heighten existing contradictions within societies, they have also used it as a uniting force in nations with friendly governments, tamping down tensions and papering over divisions.
That was the case in Colombia, a country ravaged by decades of brutal drug war and mass killings by U.S.-backed far-right militias. In 2020, USAID’s Alliances and Reconciliation Program created an initiative aimed at the country’s youth with a message of coexistence, truth, dialogue, and reconciliation.
It appointed local rappers, Melisa MC, and Ken Zingle, as ambassadors of the program. Together, the pair produced the song, “Rímalo” (Rhyme It), which served as the project’s anthem.
Later, USAID also developed an outreach program targeting youths in conflict-affected areas of Colombia (where it was often the United States itself supplying the weapons). The program aimed to channel young people’s anger and frustration into peaceful co-existence and music creation. USAID published one of these rap songs, “Queremos” (We Want) on YouTube.
At the same time in Kenya, USAID partnered with well-known rapper King Kaka to launch its #16BarsforPeace hip hop campaign, wherein it challenged Kenyan youth to submit videos of themselves rapping about peace and conflict resolution.
Hundreds entered the competition, with the winner getting to rap with King Kaka on his song, “Mbekse” (“Two”: an allusion to the two fingers used to make the universal “peace” sign). Also appearing on the track was U.S. Ambassador to Kenya Kyle McCarter, who delivered a short verse in Swahili.
From “Fight the Power” To Working For Power
The United States government has long understood the power of hip hop. Since 2001, the State Department has sent American hip hop artists, DJs, and beatboxers across the globe as cultural envoys to spread pro-U.S. messaging. Why would it do this? Mark Katz, the former director of the State Department’s hip hop diplomacy’s program explained:
“Hip hop is well known to be the product of young, marginalized Americans of color who insisted on being heard and seen and who reveled in their survival. As the embodiment of struggle and celebration, hip hop resonates deeply with young people around the world. It’s the perfect vehicle for promoting a more nuanced and positive image of the United States and for connecting with populations that our embassies rarely engage.”
In 2024, the State Department announced it was joining forces with YouTube to create a new “Global Music Ambassador” program. The initiative was directly modeled on Washington’s Cold War-era efforts to use the arts to inspire U.S.-backed regime change in Eastern Europe, and to use musical tours as covers that the CIA could use to assassinate foreign leaders.
A number of rap artists, including Chuck D and Armani White, are signed up to the program. Also participating is Lyor Cohen, the Israeli former head of the iconic Def Jam record label, and current head of YouTube Music. Cohen noted that YouTube would strive to help the U.S. government “leverage global events.” “We will utilize major international gatherings to inspire action,” he said. What kind of “actions” the State Department is interested in fomenting was not directly stated, and so is open to speculation.
Chuck D’s participation in the project surprised and shocked many. The Public Enemy frontman and writer of songs such as “Fight the Power” and “Rebel Without a Cause” portrays himself as Malcolm X with a microphone. And yet, he willingly volunteered for an endeavor that Cohen explicitly presented as a thinly veiled regime change project.
The CIA has long used music as a cover for overthrowing foreign governments. In 1960, it embedded itself on Louis Armstrong’s tour of the Congo, accompanying the jazz legend in order to secretly gather information on the movements of the country’s prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, whom CIA director Allen Dulles described as Africa’s Fidel Castro. Lumumba was assassinated later that year, plunging the country into decades of U.S.-backed dictatorship, from which it has never recovered.
The project continued until the successful overthrow of Communism and Eastern Europe; events in which the U.S. government played a significant role. There have long been credible rumors that the CIA wrote and promoted the Scorpions’ hit song “Winds of Change” as regime change propaganda. Meanwhile, David Hasselhoff – the American singer who has long been inexplicably popular in Germany – has strongly insinuated that he worked with the agency to bring down the Berlin Wall. His song, “Looking for Freedom,” became the unofficial anthem of the wall’s destruction, and he played it to a huge Berlin crowd in 1989.
More recently, in Venezuela, the NED funded and supported rock bands producing music aimed at destabilizing and overthrowing the socialist government. In 2011, for example, it was involved in approximately two dozen agreements for funding its performance and distribution. This included funding a national music contest, with the winners playing in Caracas. The documents, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, note that the project aimed to “promote greater reflection among Venezuelan youth about freedom of expression, their connection with democracy, and the state of democracy in the country.”
The NED got more than it bargained for, however, when the contest’s local organizers chose “Primates” – an overtly racist track that compared the (primarily Black and mixed race) government and its supporters as subhuman monkeys and gorillas – as its national winner. This sort of music was far less easy to support internationally than something like “Patria y Vida.”
Breakdancing With The Devil
The United States has been at war for 231 of its 250-year history. Its military spending rivals that of all other countries combined, and it operates a network of nearly 1,000 military bases worldwide. Its post-9/11 wars have killed at least 4.5 million people and displaced over 38 million more. Even by the most charitable metrics, it militarily supports three-quarters of the world’s dictatorships, and has launched nearly 500 foreign military interventions in its history. President Trump has bombed eight countries in the past 12 months, and has threatened military action against Greenland, Canada, Panama, North Korea, and Cuba.
It has also overthrown or attempted to overthrow the governments of more than 50 foreign countries, including some of the most vibrant experiments in democracy the world has ever seen. It does this through a network of institutions influenced, directed, or financed by the Central Intelligence Agency, including the IRI, NED, and USAID.
That is why it is so inappropriate and problematic for any individual or entity claiming to support democracy, freedom, and human rights to work with these agencies. Many of the musicians profiled here truly have put their lives in danger by opposing genuinely repressive governments. But their claims to be fighting for justice are undermined by their decision to liaise with organizations representing the most dangerous threat to freedom in modern history.
In short, while many of these rappers may have good intentions, if they have not realized this basic truism of human rights, they are either hopelessly naive and ignorant (and therefore unworthy of attention) or, worse, have chosen to become unofficial agents of the U.S. government, attempting to further extend Washington’s control. In either case, they should be heavily scrutinized. Even for genuine activists in extremely poor and repressive countries, where money and support are hard to come by, collaborating with the CIA and its cutouts should be a non-starter.
Hip hop grew out of Black struggles against oppression in America. As it flourished, both the artform and its message resonated with people worldwide. Aware of this, the U.S. government has attempted to hijack it, and use it for its own, nefarious ends. (Although, contrary to some more outlandish conspiratorial claims put forward by the likes of Joe Rogan, its involvement in the rap scene as a whole still remains marginal).
Nevertheless, what Washington has proven is that rappers can be regime change artists, too. Some rappers choose to fight the power. Others choose to represent it.
Alan Macleod
Alan MacLeod is Senior Staff Writer for MintPress News. He completed his PhD in 2017 and has since authored two acclaimed books: Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting and Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent, as well as a number of academic articles. He has also contributed to FAIR.org, The Guardian, Salon, The Grayzone, Jacobin Magazine, and Common Dreams. Follow Alan on Twitter for more of his work and commentary: @AlanRMacLeod.
