Last week, The Conversation commissioned me to write a piece on dis (or diss) records.1 The article, titled ‘A brief history of the diss track – from the Roxanne Wars to Megan Thee Stallion’ which can be read here. The request for this piece was triggered by Megan Thee Stallion’s recent release ‘Hiss’, which allegedly targets Drake, Tory Lanez, and Nicki Minaj. The Conversation were seeking a cultural history of diss records of sorts, and I was happy to oblige.
However, while I was writing the piece – and this is something I have been thinking about since I wrote Part 1 of ‘My Radio: LL Cool J, Dis Records and an Object-oriented Ontology of Hip Hop’ (published here last year and in Headz-zINe 2.1) – I found the thresholds between dis records and certain other thematics of rap songs not so simple to quantify.
The dis context is heavily focused on hip hop culture, and The Conversation article touches on the Roxanne Wars and The Bridge Wars among others, but it was during my research into The Beatles, Queen, Sex Pistols and subsequently Queen Latifah and Monie Love’s ‘Ladies First’ that the frame of the dis song opened up beyond other artists as targets and beyond the realm of hip hop. For example, all the aforementioned artists wrote songs aimed at record companies or the record industry as a complete whole. My mind then hopped from A Tribe Called Quest’s ‘Check The Rhime’ (“Industry rule number four-thousand-and-eighty / Record company people are shady”) to PE’s ‘Rebel Without A Pause’ (“Radio – suckers never play me”).
The capitalization of cultural capital, the industrial and commercial structures which control the majority of this capital, and the inherent ill treatment and poor judgements made against artists, is a broad and deep subject matter musicians write about; it has become a major theme in recorded music. Not least recently with so much counternarrative (and very welcome I add), and here I refer to the shots taken by a multitude of artists at digital streaming platforms. Certain global players in the music industry have vocalized their disproval with services such as Spotify, yet it is the thousands of other artists – from the lesser-known to the unknown – that have been publicly presenting their statistics: the critical metric of streams versus earnings, which makes for disappointing reading.
In 1971, British progressive band Yes wrote and recorded ‘Five Percent For Nothing’ – the shortest song they had written at a mere 37 seconds (and a superbly compound slice of progressive music) – aimed at their previous manager Roy Flynn who coyly negotiated five percent of the band’s revenues in perpetuity after he’d been sacked. And here, in 2024, this figure is drastically lower than recording and publishing royalties combined that Spotify pay out to artists. Without reducing this to a binary quantitative argument, or indeed, diverting away from the main theme of this article, it is clear how the infrastructure of the music industry has maintained its position as a target for dissing.
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