Illuminati Youtube: How Anti-Blackness Changes Our Perception Of Media

In 2012, Kanye West released the music video for Mercy, the lead single off of the Good Music label’s album “Cruel Summer”. That summer, I started workouts for high school football and I vividly remember turning the song on and rapping along to 2 Chainz verse until a friend of mine looked me in the eyes and told me I’d be going to hell. He then showed me a youtube video that in theory was breaking down all of the hidden and cryptic messages in the music video and especially in the vocal sample used in the song. 

The ideas in the video stemmed from one place, the forefather of the Conspiracy TikTok’s that claim Beyonce killed Aaliyah, Illuminati Youtube.  A side of Youtube formed in the late 00s and early 2010s  loosely united by conspiratorial thinking and a strong belief in the Illuminati. For the uninitiated, the beliefs about who or what the  Illuminati is, can vary between vague satanic mysticism, garden variety anti-semitism, misogynoir, but basically the concept is entertainers (typically Black musicians) are members of this all powerful secret society that is convincing you and all who are entertained by their work to become more devilish or letting us know about their existence? The goal can be a bit nebulous but the point stands that this video was enough to convince my friend that I was eternally damned. 

To be clear, these beliefs are not just inherent to the Black community,  reactionary movements in predominantly white parts of  America in particular have sought to use all types of media as harbingers of impending doom including World of Warcraft, Pokemon, really any slightly mystic entity ripe for demonization. The reason I am looking into the distinct impact of Illuminati Youtube is because the ways its legacy has affected us has a much more corrosive lineage as we have much more  stacked against us. This leads us to the question: how much has the influence of Illuminati Youtube spilled into mainstream discourse and what does that mean for our ability to engage with the art we produce? 

 A good place to start is with the song Mercy itself, circling back to the vocal sample, it is from a song named Dust a Sound Boy  and the intro is done by Fuzzy Jones.  In the YT video the sample is claimed to be a demonic retelling of Matthew 8:12 because of the “weeping and gnashing of teeth” line that is also present in the verse. Unfortunately, this reading of the sample stems from white supremacy. If you look at the context of the original song Jones is using the line to basically say when this song comes on people will go crazy. But, because of preconceived and quite frankly bigoted notions about Blackness its is easy to paint his excitement  as something else entirely. The demonization of the many  religions and culture practices with origins in Africa comes directly into play here. As both victims and beneficiaries of Western Chauvinist attitudes we Black Americans can often fall into perpetuating these harmful stereotypes that only serve to other us further not to mention the impact on the believers and practitioners of the aforementioned religions.  

It is this mixture of sensationalism and anti-Blackness that hinders us from substantive critique of the art but also keeps us from engaging with the real world harm some of these artists do and have experienced themselves. When a predator like Diddy is brought down for horrific crimes, we aren’t able to process that with the degree of seriousness and care required for actual analysis, instead we spend months saying “No Diddy” anytime baby oil is brought up. On the same token when a Black woman like the Meg thee Stallion suffers one of the most blatantly obvious cases of domestic violence known to man, it becomes an alleged industry wide conspiracy by Roc-Nation to bring down the 11th most popular R&B singer of  2019. 

This may not come as a surprise but to me the actual issue that is being avoided throughout all of this is Capitalism. By the early 2010s many artists were aware of the swirling online rumors of the Satanic Cult they’d all apparently joined and while a few artists played it for laughs,  many more understood that attention on their music and videos could be harnessed to increase revenue. A triangle here, a pentagram there, and any lyrics about losing your soul and you could easily have the next video on Youtube with a million views (that meant something at the time). For those inside of Illuminati Youtube the explosion of interest and “evidence” in these videos served as more of a reason to continue down the rabbit hole. 

This symbiotic relationship eventually spiraled out of control and shape helped the mess of the media environment we have today where profit can be derived simply from making up as ridiculous a lie as possible. Tales that were typically reserved for supermarket tabloids can dominate conversation online for weeks without really any consideration of the legitimacy of the claim.  And yet somehow with all of this noise the conversation almost never loops back to the predatory and deceptive practices done in the music industry to monetarily benefit from the pain and trauma of Black entertainers and non-celebrity Black people alike. 

The reality is we as Black people have a hard time grappling with the influence of our artists in our community because of how often they have been used against us. As Malcolm X said “Show me in the white community where a singer is a white leader…,  These aren’t leaders. These are puppets and clowns that have been set up over the Black community by the white community and have been made celebrities and, usually, they say exactly what they know the white man wants to hear.” But with that being said even Malcolm understood the importance of outspoken Black celebrities later on in his relationship with Muhammad Ali.  Our artists are important to us but the hard part is deciphering between legitimate expressions of Black culture and repackaged falsehoods sold back to us, and sometimes there is none at all. 

The best description of what actual control of media looks like comes from Michael Parenti in one of his most important texts “Inventing Reality: The Politics of News Media”  in which he says”Power is always more secure when cooptive, covert, and manipulative than when nakedly brutish.”. A sentiment that stands in stark contrast to the idea that  most popular artists in the world are openly leaving messages for us to find in the chorus of the top charting songs in the country. 

It is this influence by exclusion that haunts us today. It is very often what we aren’t focusing on that looms far larger than any secret society ever could. The ways we choose to engage with our art have been harmed by these distractions but perhaps not irreparably.  With Black culture being America’s one true export the way we choose to critique it matters. Without substantive and understanding our culture and by extension our Blackness can be used by America here and abroad as soft power and white wash any number of horrific crimes. A culture that we develop and mold free from those external pressures is possible and necessary for us as a people.