Who holds hip-hop accountable? A civil lawsuit accused Jay Z of having raped a 13-year-old girl at an afterparty following the 2000 MTV Video Music Awards. Tony Buzbee, a lawyer who originally filed suit against Sean “Diddy” Combs in October 2024 and added Jay Z’s name (formerly listed as “Celebrity A”) in December 2024, has 20 other lawsuits going against Diddy. Jay Z denies all wrongdoing; Diddy remains imprisoned over separate sex trafficking charges; and the unidentified accuser revealed inconsistencies in her claims during a recent NBC News interview.
This being an op-ed, I personally believe in Jay Z’s innocence. But the allegations raised other questions for me: about intracultural accountability in hip-hop, the toxicity of the culture and how a reckoning in hip-hop would even look.
Two years younger than Diddy and Jay Z, I was the music editor at Vibe the year Diddy was involved in a shooting incident at Club New York with Shyne and Jennifer Lopez (see Hulu’s recent The Honorable Shyne documentary)—the same year Jay Z pled guilty for stabbing record exec Lance “Un” Rivera at Manhattan’s Kit Kat Club. I was there that night at Q-Tip’s album release party.
Hence, I was already active in media when the Hip-Hop Summit Action Network mediated beef between Ja Rule and 50 Cent in 2003, involving Minister Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam for conflict resolution. The Hip-Hop Summit Action Network was founded in ’01 as a coalition of rappers and music industry executives led by former NAACP executive director Dr. Ben Chavis. It’s the type of organization that might have fostered some accountability in hip-hop in 2024. Unfortunately, the nonprofit was co-founded by rap mogul Russell Simmons—who was accused of sexual assault by former Def Jam Recordings A&R director Drew Dixon and others in the late 2010s. Simmons currently lives in Bali, where he intends to stay.
I was fresh out of college when the Universal Zulu Nation intervened in another hostile situation involving Q-Tip of A Tribe Called Quest and the Virginia-based rap group Wreckx-N-Effect. The trio allegedly attacked Q-Tip after a NYC concert over a perceived dis from his partner Phife Dawg’s rap verse. During the golden age of hip-hop, the Zulu Nation was often relied upon for some self-policing accountability in the culture. Unfortunately, Zulu Nation founder Afrika Bambaataa has faced multiple allegations since 2016 of having sexually abused minors during the ’70s and ’80s. Long considered a founder of hip-hop, Bam was completely absent from year-long celebrations of the culture’s 50th anniversary last year.
Though other institutions exist that could conceivably weigh in on poisonous elements in the culture–the Temple of Hip Hop, founded in 1996, comes to mind–there’s a bigger issue at play. The toxicity in hip-hop reflects the overall toxicity of mainstream American society.
The current president-elect of the U.S., winner of both the popular and Electoral College vote nationwide, is a 34-count felon found liable for sexually abusing an Elle magazine writer. Sean Combs and other young Black rising moguls from back in the day arguably idolized the wealth, fame and power demonstrated by the likes of Donald Trump, Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein. The normalization of toxicity in this society has distorted the community building necessary for hip-hop to self-police the way it once did.
A problem with trying to become a real-life Great Gatsby is that the F. Scott Fitzgerald character was a disreputable phony and swindler. The late poet Amiri Baraka wasn’t the only one to call the American Dream a nightmare; not all this society’s values can be emulated without consequences.
A realignment with community should be something hip-hop strives for as we enter the potentially dark days ahead in general, especially given the divisiveness in today’s body politic. What would a call to action look like moving forward? Should Jay Z hypothetically be found innocent but Diddy guilty (Sean Combs currently has over 120 accusers), what does holding him accountable as a community look like? Barring his music from radio à la R. Kelly? Does that also include hits he produced for Biggie Smalls, Mary J. Blige, Mariah Carey, etc.?
Diddy’s possible prosecution may bring other wrongdoings to light across the board in hip-hop as more come forward in a wave adjacent to the #MeToo movement. As scores of victims finally receive justice, what’s the appropriate communal call to action? It’s something to think about sooner than later.