THE WILL TO POWER 100?

A bombshell New York Times report alleges that BMG signed a French rapper notorious for antisemitic and other racist messages, then tried to obscure its involvement with him.

The rapper, Freeze Corleone, was inked by BMG in 2021 despite his having earned opprobrium for lyrics like "I arrive determined like Adolf in the 1930s" and "Everything for the family, so that my children live like Jewish rentiers" (a Jewish-landlord stereotype common in French antisemitic lore) as well as shout-outs to "the Aryans." The artist had been dropped by his previous label, the French arm of UMG, on the grounds that he "amplified unacceptable racist statements."

BMG's $1m+ contract with Corleone, according to docs reviewed by the Times, stipulated that the company would have to approve all lyrics and would keep its name off his recordings "to mitigate the risk of possible controversy." Here we quote the story directly:

“No BMG logo anywhere on the release,” Dominique Casimir, one of the company’s most senior executives, emailed to a company lawyer and other executives.

She also demanded there would be no announcement heralding the deal. “No signing picture,” Ms. Casimir wrote. “Sorry to be this strict.”

This was not the first time the company allied itself with such beyond-the-pale content; it enjoyed success with a hit by Kollegah and Farid Bang that included such lyrics as “My body is more defined than Auschwitz prisoners” and “make another Holocaust, show up with a Molotov."

Ultimately BMG decided not to put out Corleone's album, but at a time when racist extremism is on the upswing (Ye's pro-Hitler sentiments being the most egregious recent example), there is more at stake here than "the risks corporations face when they seek to capitalize on the notoriety of pop-culture figures," as the Times piece rather charitably puts it.

You can read the whole story here, and you should.