It is no wonder Ice-T excels as a talking head in this three-part docuseries on how the dastardly music industry has exploited Black artists. His 20 years in the rap game and 25 seasons acting as a street-hardened sex crimes detective on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit have supplied him with apt insight. “I always call it a pimp business,” he announces in the opening moments. “It’s like: ‘OK, you have what I need, we’ll sell it, we’ll take the majority of the money.”
This is as good a summary as any of how things go, but it isn’t the first time the injustice has been noted. In 1975, James Baldwin wrote about “the terrifying economics” lived by his friend Billie Holiday, observing: “The music industry is one of the areas of the national life in which the blacks have been most persistently, successfully and brutally ripped off.” It is not that the record business has a monopoly on American racism, of course. Nor are Black artists the only ones being exploited. But racial factors do deepen the inequities, in ways that Paid in Full comprehensively lays out.
