DJ Akademiks: Ringmaster For White Voyeurs Of Black Culture
DJ Akademiks rode his core base of cultural outsiders to become a cultural voice. His platform is a reflection of what suburban teenagers and corporations think of Black culture.
The Black people who call to “cancel” DJ Akademiks don’t realize that we weren’t the group he exploited to legitimacy. He admitted in April that “I got my come up from unknown Chiraq rappers and covering mumble rappers who were teenagers in 2014-2017.” The core fanbase for those so-called mumble rappers — and the spectators of Drill rap violence — are the young, white suburbanites who Complex wanted to tap into when they hired him to be an Everyday Struggle cohost in 2017.
Since hip-hop’s early ‘90s commercial explosion, the genre has fascinated sheltered white fans who enjoyed the vicarious thrill of hearing about Black communities they had no familiarity with. Pages like YouTube’s Chicago World News and Reddit’s Chiraqology, veritable gang violence wikis, have made it easier for this generation to get their spectatorial fix. Akademiks, as media veteran Star called him, is the PT Barnum of the circus, narrating hip-hop drama for white teens who don’t see their favorite artists as humans, but characters in a live-action saga.
Corporations like Complex have sought to capitalize on that audience, demonstrating their disregard for Black people by ignoring his past commentary in the name of views. In that transaction, they allowed him to ride his core base of cultural outsiders to become a cultural voice.
Akademiks won those fans via his The War In Chiraq YouTube channel, where he called Chicago a “cesspool of coons that live and breathe like cockroaches,” and advocated for gentrification because the young Black people lost in the gang epidemic “aren’t humans.” He’s also contended that “you can’t tell me the difference between ‘Chiraq’ terrorists and the ISIS terrorist group” in another video from the YouTube page, which currently has 378,000 subscribers despite the last video being posted in January of 2017.
The 29-year-old has tried to frame the page as “satire” in the past, but there isn’t much satirical flair to him punching down on the Black subjects of his videos as "coons” and “savages,” or condemning the city’s gun violence with the nearsighted punditry of a Breitbart commentator. Over the past five years, he’s pivoted to general hip-hop media coverage, becoming a leader of today’s sensationalist, ephemeral hip-hop media experience with Instagram and YouTube pages boasting millions of followers.
DJ Vlad and Adam22 of No Jumper, two white men, are similarly controversial rap media figures. Like Akademiks, they have a bizarre fixation with artists’ off-the-mic violence and nihilism. But unlike Akademiks, they operate primarily as interview platforms, shying away from inflammatory commentary or direct conflict with artists. Akademiks is a more caustic presence than both.
It’s true that people mature and unlearn, but the War In Chiraq videos are still online. He displays remnants of that conservative lens to this day on his live streams and Complex’s Everyday Struggle, making him one of the culture’s most reviled figures. He was recently in a war of words with rappers Freddie Gibbs and Meek Mill, the latter of whom he claims got him fired from Complex and banned from Twitch. But it’s likely that Akademiks is sarcastically “trolling” in order to drive home how futile Meek’s “cancel” campaign was. He’s not the first rapper to call Akademiks out.
Vic Mensa spoke for many Chicagoans when in 2017 he called him a “bitch” for The War in Chiraq channel. Mysonne has said that Akademiks is “no good” and “doing the devil's work” by perpetuating negativity. The late Nipsey Hussle called out Akademiks’ instigating tactics multiple times. In 2018, he rightfully concluded that “you got companies (like Complex) that add gas to them sparks for their own interest and then they sell advertising space and I don't like that shit. I'm clear on what that motto is." The motto is anything for a dollar, the tao of capitalism.
Meek should consider his late friend’s perspective while he’s calling for Akademiks to be “canceled.“ Even if he’s in fact fired by Complex and banned by Twitch, who recently suspended him for a spate of drunken tirades, someone will assume his position because the current market dictates it. Meek is complicit in sustaining that environment through his paper chase.
Unabashed capitalists like Meek want to make as much money as possible, but don’t want to acknowledge that their covetous pursuit necessitates patronizing consumers who engage with them as mere comic book characters.
Akademiks is a feedback loop for a suburban fanbase that doesn’t see the humanity of Black artists. Pop culture has fed sheltered white teens their limited scope of Blackness, and he contributed to the fragmentation by framing Chicago as a lawless badland of “coons” and “savages,” even referring to nine-year-old Antonio Smith, who was murdered in 2014, as a “mini pack (an “opp pack” is Chicago parlance for a deceased enemy).” Akademiks has broadened his “editorial” scope, but he’s resolved to predominantly cover conflict, pleasing a fanbase of teenagers learning to perceive Black culture as vapidity and adversarial entertainment.
Neither these kids nor Akademiks seems to care about the survivors of their faves’ abuses. 6ix9ine was filmed fondling a 13-year-old Black girl, but fans still spectate his antics. Trippie Redd pistol-whipped a woman in June 2018, but he’s still a favorite of Akademiks’ fanbase known as “chat niggas” (even if so many of them are non-Black). Kodak Black has an upcoming rape trial, but that’s never affected Akademiks’ coverage or how his fans view him. To this day, XXXTentacion’s stans harass the young woman that he brutally assaulted because she had the “audacity” to hold their hero accountable. Akademiks himself was accused by his ex-girlfriend of abusing her. Complex did nothing about those allegations, but he was recently suspended from Everyday Struggle for two days for calling Chrissy Teigen the b-word multiple times. Curiously, the outlet did nothing when he called SZA an “Amazon b*tch” in 2017.
It was abuse that initially connected Akademiks and 6ix9ine. The media personality was the only person willing to interview 6ix9ine about his sexual abuse allegations in 2017. The two became fast friends after that interview — even after Jezebel exposed that the documented details of the case contradict 6ix9ine’s interview statements. Akademiks continued to stay on the lucrative 6ix9ine beat.
He became the chief narrator of 6ix9ine’s yearlong antagonizing of Black artists in 2018. He giddily posted about all of the Brooklyn rapper’s conflicts — even the ones that could have wound up with someone incarcerated or dead. He stirred the pot in the conflict between 6ix9ine and Chief Keef, which culminated in 6ix9ine putting a hit on Keef which thankfully failed. After 6ix9ine and some of the Nine Trey Bloods he associated with were charged in a 2018 RICO case, it became clear that all along they were willing and ready to solve 6ix9ine’s conflicts with gun violence. Akademiks gained his visibility by wagging his finger at violence, but he sustains his fame by instigating it.
And while one could propose that Akademiks is simply fulfilling a civic duty of reporting the news, it’s worth questioning who’s watching him and why. What is the material value of knowing about an artist posting guns on Instagram, or two artists threatening each other on Twitter? Do these developments edify or caricaturize? Who does sensational news bytes serve, beyond corporations who cash in on ad revenue and voyeuristic fans ogling artists giving them bonus content of outside-the-booth menace?
6ix9ine, like Akademiks, was diabolical enough to exploit that fanbase with his violent music and antagonistic social media presence. His proximity to actual Bloods made him a hero to the kids who could star in a Malibu’s Most Wanted reality show. And even when he snitched, they didn’t care, because it’s all a charade to them anyway.
When artists go platinum or accrue hundreds of millions of streams on a video, they’re being supported in part by this cohort of fans. It’s hard to achieve mass appeal without them. While previous generations weren’t privy to how suburbia engaged their work, Akademiks has corralled all of them in one place, projecting their interests in a digital wasteland. When celebrities call to cancel him, they really mean that they want to detach their consciousness from the reality that some of their fans view them as jesters instead of geniuses.
Hip-hop gatekeepers are long gone from mainstream hip-hop. Corporations control the circus, and massive metrics are the price of admission. DJ Akademiks is a trojan horse representing the interest of suburban teens enamored with Black culture. Complex saw fit to make him a voice of the culture — a lasting indictment of their journalistic credibility.
His legacy is the nexus of white curiosity, gun violence, and the cult of celebrity — all exploited by capitalism in a 24-hour news cycle. So many of his followers, like him, grew up as basement-dwelling Davids — but collectively, they’re Goliath, and it may be too late for anyone to get rid of them.
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Venmo: Andre-Gee
Holy sh#t. This is spot on, thank u.
A couple questions, I guess:
1 - why did hip hop gatekeepers fall to the wayside? Was it a natural outgrowth of the internet or was that already happening around the massive popularity of rap?
2 - which folx (currently/formerly) properly cover black art on the ground level?