2005_08_01_archive

Diamonds are forever.....

This column was supposed to be in this month's Urban Spectrum, but

it's not. I really don't know why, I wasn't informed of why it wasn't

going in, so I'm posting it here because if they decide to print it in

September, it would be dated and mad old. Or if they decide not to

print it at all, here it is....

Q's Views

Hip-Hop Tackles Diamonds

By Quibian Salazar-Moreno

For years, hip-hop artists have lauded the life of the rich and

famous. Along with expensive cars and large homes, jewelry has always

been a hot topic. From gold chains in the `80s to platinum and diamond

jewelry today, getting the most "ice" has been a priority for artists

on their way up the ladder of success. But in the past couple of

years, some artists have come out shedding light on where some

diamonds are coming from and where the profit from those diamonds are

going.

Most recently, artist Kanye West spoke out on the subject. In the

remix to his song, "Diamonds from Sierra Leone," he takes on "conflict

diamonds" (also called blood diamonds), which were mined in unstable

African countries such as Sierra Leone and Angola. Profits from the

smuggled diamonds were used to fund the Angolan UNITA rebels and the

Sierra Leone Revolutionary United Front rebels.

In Sierra Leone, the rebels fought for more than a decade in a war

that took the lives of approximately 200,000 people. Children were

recruited as soldiers and threatened with death. They were forced to

fight and commit violent and disturbing acts of war. Some of those

children are now war veterans at age 15 and 16. At the same time,

other children were mining diamonds and losing arms and legs in the

process.

The war in Sierra Leone ended in 2002, at the same time the U. N.

declared that the sale of conflict diamonds financed armies fighting

against legitimate governments and perpetrating human rights abuses.

Sierra Leone is now on a path to peace but is facing an uphill battle.

Millions of dollars worth of diamonds are still smuggled out of the

country every year, corruption is rampant, and thousands of

commissioned soldiers are out of work and have nothing to do.

In the remix to "Diamonds from Sierra Leone," Kanye spits:

"Good morning, this ain't Vietnam still/

People lose hands, legs, arms, for real/

Little was known on Sierra Leone/

And how it connects to the diamonds we own...

See, a part of me sayin', "Keep shinin'"/

How? When I know what's a blood diamond/

Though it's thousands of miles away/

Sierra Leone connect to what we go through today/

Over here it's a drug trade, we die from drugs/

Over there they die from what we buy from drugs/

The diamonds, the chains, the bracelets, the charmses/

I thought my Jesus piece was so harmless/

'Til I seen a picture of a shorty armless..."

"I wanted to do whatever I could to learn more and educate people

about the problem," West told Billboard about the song.

One of the first artists to touch on the subject was Ms Dynamite, in

2001. In her song, "It Takes More," she says, "Who gives a damn about

the ice on your hand, if it's not too complex / tell me how many

Africans died for the baguettes on your Rolex?" When I talked to

Dynamite, she said she was surprised that more people have not spoken

out.

"I think it's cool to see my fellow brothers and sisters on the TV

talking about what they've accomplished and what they have, whether

it's materialistic or whatever," said Dynamite. "It's cool for me to

see people better themselves, and I totally appreciate that. But I do

think that the constant overload of people in the music industry

talking about what they own, and specifically diamonds, isn't cool. I

don't understand why someone hasn't said it before. Because it makes

perfect sense. It's like this whole thing of Black people dying while

we get up on the stage and promote the things that killed them, or

injured them, or a business that has enslaved them. It doesn't make

any sense to me, so I had to say something."

Brooklyn rapper Talib Kweli tackled the topic in 2004 on his song,

"Going Hard," from his album, Beautiful Struggle. In the song, he

said:

"People ask me how we wearing diamonds/

When there's little kids in Sierra Leone/

Losing arms for crying while they mining/

Probably an orphan who's momma died of AIDS/

He built a coffin working often but he never paid/

Forever slaving in the world that's forever cold/

Becoming the man of the house at 11 years old..."

One of the first artists to dedicate an entire song to the subject was

Baby Blak with his song, "Diamonds (Diemons)" from his 2003 album,

Once You Go Blak. In the song, he criticizes the people who value

diamonds more than life.

"You wear the blood of your people on your neck and your wrist/I said

the blood of your people/Ain't no love for your people/South African

government put slugs in my people so ya platinum chain can have a stud

you can see through ...." Blak said that it was something he had to

let people know about and is a topic that is important to him.

"Basically, that song is about anybody who advocates or glamorizes

diamonds," Baby Blak told MVremix.com. "They really don't know the

facts on how they accumulate the diamonds or the civil war going on in

Africa. People don't have clean water or a good food supply. They

fight over land. They have coal mines and people's hands are

amputated. They die. People fight over the diamonds we glamorize and

use as a status symbol. I'm not really feeling that. That's just my

personal opinion. Austrian diamonds are cool but all the war and

genocide from other countries is something that I cannot advocate."

The diamond industry says that nowadays only legitimate diamonds are

traded in the open market. With the help of the U.N., the diamond

industry introduced a `certificate of origin,' which helps stop the

sale and trading of conflict diamonds. The industry believes the