Everybody Gets Rich Off Black Culture Except Black People

The viral Quavo & Takeoff AI trend is another reminder that Black culture keeps creating value for platforms, brands & technologies we have no ownership in.

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Takeoff has been dead for almost four years. There was a period in hip-hop where it seemed like every month there was another young rapper dying, whether from violence or drugs. We would post about it, all the Instagram blogs would make their headlines & then a week later, of course, the world moved on. Maybe the artist got a spike in streams. Maybe a posthumous album followed. But mostly, it felt like they were forgotten shortly after.

In Takeoff’s case, I just don’t feel like he ever got his just due in respect or flowers, even after his death. If you pull ten hip-hop fans into a room & ask them who the best Migo was, I’d bet Takeoff’s name comes up more than anybody else’s. His style brought the group together & helped give Migos that distinct sound; generally, I just think he was a better rapper than his counterparts. I gotta be honest though, although I’m happy to hear his iconic verse on “Hotel Lobby” getting so many spins, something about what’s going on gives me bad vibes & I can’t shake it. That verse felt iconic when it originally dropped, & this recent revival has only cemented it further in hip-hop, but the way it’s being revived is what bothers me.

Of course, I’m talking about the recent AI trend. If you’ve been on Instagram or TikTok lately, you know exactly what video I mean. Two people standing in that orange room, rapping & moving exactly like Quavo & Takeoff did during their COLORS performance of “Hotel Lobby.” Except every time you see it now, it’s almost never the original because somebody has swapped them out. LeBron & Jordan. Penny Proud & Dijonay. Martin & Gina. Cartoon characters. Somebody & their homeboy. I’ve even seen people put themselves in it.

I can’t lie, some of them are funny. I’ve watched them, sent them to people & wanted to make one myself. Matter of fact, I did make one with me & my dad. That’s why the trend works. You see one good version & immediately start thinking about who you could put in yours. It’s fun. Maybe yours even goes viral. More importantly, once you make it, everybody starts asking the same question. How you did that? Right there is where somebody starts making money.

Higgsfield is one of the AI platforms people are using to recreate the trend through its Genjutsu tool, although it isn’t the only one. Complex identified Starrd, Summrs & CapCut among the tools being used as the meme spread across TikTok & X. There are tutorials everywhere now showing people how to make their own version. So think about what just happened. Quavo & Takeoff made a song, then performed that song for COLORS in 2022. COLORS gave us that simple orange room, the hanging mic & a performance recognizable enough that you can see one frame of it & know exactly what you’re looking at. Four years later, that same performance has basically become an unofficial commercial for generative AI.

Nobody has to explain motion transfer to you or convince you that character replacement is cool. They don’t need some boring ad where a dude in a black turtleneck tells you AI is about to revolutionize creativity. You see yourself standing where Takeoff was standing & you get it. So you ask what app made it. You download something. You make an account. Maybe you use the free version. Maybe you burn through the free credits & eventually pay. Then you post yours, somebody underneath your post asks what you used & now they’re downloading it too. Whole time, Quavo & Takeoff are doing the marketing.

I’m not saying Higgsfield sat in a conference room & plotted on Migos. There’s no evidence I’ve found that Higgsfield created the trend, & several AI platforms are benefiting from people wanting to recreate it. I’m not even particularly interested in making Higgsfield the villain here because, really, we’ve seen this movie before.

Black people make something cool. We make it funny. We give it language. We give it music. We give it a look. We make everybody want to be around it. Then somebody with considerably more money than us comes along, puts some infrastructure around it & figures out how to charge admission. Then we get told how influential we are. Influence is cool; ownership is better.

Black Twitter might be one of the greatest examples of this because Twitter never invented Black Twitter. We did. There wasn’t a separate app. Nobody at Twitter headquarters coded a Black people button. Black folks got on there, found each other & turned that website into something completely different. The jokes were ours. The conversations were ours. The language was ours. The hashtags were ours. Something would happen during an awards show & before the commercial break Black Twitter already had the jokes, screenshots, nicknames & discourse ready.

Eventually you could almost watch the internet move in real time. Black people would start saying something; a few hours later everybody on Twitter was saying it. A few days later brands were saying it. Then your local news station had some anchor using the phrase wrong. André Brock, who has extensively studied Black digital culture, has written about Black Twitter as a distinct cultural formation created through Black users taking the mechanics of Twitter & making something of our own inside them. Twitter still owned the building, though. We just made the party worth coming to.

TikTok gave us another version of the same thing. By 2021, Black TikTok creators were tired of creating dances, watching those dances blow up through bigger white creators & then seeing those creators get the followers, opportunities, television appearances & money. So when Megan Thee Stallion dropped “Thot Shit,” Black creators basically said bet, dance to it yourself then. They went on strike.

That protest hit because everybody suddenly got to see what TikTok looked like when Black creators stopped supplying one of the things the platform had become known for. Jalaiah Harmon had already watched the Renegade become one of the biggest dances on TikTok before most people knew the 14-year-old Black girl who created it. Keara Wilson created the “Savage” dance. The pattern kept repeating until Black creators decided to make everybody notice the labor by withholding it. Because yes, culture is labor; we just don’t treat it like labor when Black people are doing it.

Nobody clocked in before making the dance. We didn’t send Twitter an invoice after creating the jokes. We never signed a licensing agreement before some phrase left Black Twitter & became something a corporate social media manager was typing underneath a hamburger. These companies sell attention though; we help create attention & somebody is making money. Peaches Monroee learned that lesson off two words.

“On fleek” came from Kayla Newman, a Black teenager from Georgia describing her eyebrows in a Vine in 2014. The phrase went crazy. Celebrities said it. Musicians said it. Forever 21 used it. IHOP used it. Taco Bell used it. Eventually “on fleek” became one of those phrases everybody knew without knowing where it came from. Everybody knew the product; barely anybody knew the manufacturer. Years later, Newman talked publicly about watching corporations use something she popularized while she received basically none of that money. By 2017, she was crowdfunding the beauty company she hoped could finally turn some of her cultural influence into something she actually owned.

At some point we have to stop acting surprised. We’ve gotten so used to this happening that we almost treat it like the natural life cycle of Black creativity. One of us makes something. We pass it around. Everybody else discovers it. Somebody realizes they can sell something with it. Eventually the Black person who started it becomes trivia. “Did you know a Black girl actually invented that?” Yeah. Somehow it’s always something like that.

Fashion has done it. Music has done it. Advertising has done it. Social media almost built a business model around it. Something can be ghetto when we do it on Monday, then fashionable when somebody else packages it correctly by Friday. Now AI gets a turn, except AI makes this whole arrangement feel even crazier because it doesn’t have to stop at copying what we made. It can copy us.

Look at the Hotel Lobby trend again. Quavo & Takeoff supplied the song. They supplied the performance. They supplied the movements everybody recognizes. Their chemistry is part of why the original clip works in the first place. Then AI comes along years later & basically says cool, move them out the way. That’s the trick. You need Quavo & Takeoff badly enough that everybody recognizes what you’re recreating, but the entire point of the technology is showing how convincingly you can replace them.

And one of those men is dead. Takeoff was killed in 2022. He can’t tell us whether he thinks any of this is funny. He can’t repost his favorite one. He can’t say leave me out of this. He can’t call his lawyer. He can’t negotiate a licensing agreement. He can’t decide that if his body, movements & performance are helping somebody demonstrate a product, maybe his estate should get a piece of that money. Takeoff can’t participate in the marketplace anymore, but Takeoff can still work in it.

His image can work. His music can work. His movements can work. His cultural relevance can work. This man can be dead & still generate economic activity for people he never met, using technology he never agreed to participate in. That should bother us at least a little bit, & apparently it does. Complex documented fans expressing discomfort specifically about Takeoff’s posthumous likeness becoming AI meme material. Other people raised questions about consent & what it means when somebody who can no longer speak for himself can nevertheless keep appearing in new digital performances.

Now, I’m not finna sit here & act like Quavo or Takeoff’s estate gets absolutely nothing from this because the song is moving. Third-party Spotify tracking from Kworb listed “Hotel Lobby” at about 196,545 daily streams on September 20. By September 27, it was around 327,720. That’s roughly a 67 percent increase during the same week the AI trend was spreading everywhere. I can’t prove everybody pressed play because they saw an AI video. Nobody can. Music moves for a hundred different reasons. But come on. Quavo himself reposted the original COLORS performance on September 23 with two words, “The Original.”

So yeah, there’s value flowing back toward the music. People are rediscovering the song. They’re watching the original performance. Some teenager who barely remembers Migos might be hearing Takeoff rap for the first time because they saw somebody turn LeBron into Takeoff. Good. I actually want that to happen. But there’s another pot of money here, & that’s the one I’m interested in.

If the trend sends somebody to Spotify, the people connected to the rights of “Hotel Lobby” participate in whatever royalties that listening generates. If the trend sends somebody to an AI platform, convinces them to create an account, shows them why the technology is worth using & eventually turns them into a paying customer, where does Quavo get a cut of that? Where does Takeoff’s estate get a cut? Where do we get a cut? These companies definitely understand that promotion costs money.

Higgsfield has a creator program where people can accept promotional campaigns, make content for the company & receive guaranteed payouts with additional money tied to performance. Forbes reported earlier this year that influencer marketing has been a major part of the company’s growth. So they know. Of course they know. They know a person making cool content with their product can make somebody else want the product. They know attention converts into users. They know users can convert into subscriptions. They know enough about that relationship to put dollar amounts on it. So what happens when an entire cultural moment does the promotion for free?

That’s why I keep coming back to this idea that Black culture functions like free venture capital. A venture capitalist gives a company resources because they believe those resources can help the company become more valuable. If they’re right, they own a piece of the upside. Black people have been investing resources too. Our music, language, humor, aesthetics, dances, creativity & attention have helped make entire platforms feel alive. We make things cool before companies can figure out why they’re cool. We create the language their marketing departments eventually copy. We make the jokes their brand accounts eventually run into the ground. Then the company grows & somebody tells us how influential we were. Okay. Where the equity at? Influence is a funny consolation prize when everybody else owns stock.

That doesn’t mean Black people never make money from Black culture. Obviously we do. Black musicians become millionaires. Black influencers get brand deals. Black designers build companies. Black creators turn audiences into careers. Jay-Z exists. Tyler Perry exists. Fenty exists. We know Black ownership is possible. I’m talking about the infrastructure underneath the culture we keep feeding. Who owns the platform we’re making interesting? Who owns the technology everybody suddenly wants to try? Who collects the subscription? Who owns the model? Who gets acquired? Who gets the billion-dollar valuation? And who gets called influential? Those ain’t the same thing.

AI should make Black people especially alert because this technology is forcing everybody to argue about who owns human creativity in the first place. Writers want to know what books trained these models. Artists want to know whether their work was scraped. Actors want control over their faces. Musicians want control over their voices. Meanwhile, Black people have centuries of experience watching other people discover monetary value in things we created. We might want to pay attention.

AI can accelerate the process beyond anything Twitter, Vine or TikTok could do. A person can steal your dance; a machine can reproduce the dancer. A person can repeat your slang; a model can learn patterns from enormous amounts of human language. Somebody can imitate an aesthetic; a generator can spit out a thousand versions before lunch. The distance between us creating something & somebody else figuring out how to monetize it is getting shorter.

I’m not saying stop making anything. Not at all. Black culture became Black culture because we kept creating under circumstances where we had every reason not to. You can’t preserve culture by putting it behind glass. I’m saying we need to stop confusing everybody wanting what we have with us owning what we create. Virality ain’t ownership. Credit ain’t ownership. A tag ain’t ownership. Getting invited to the company headquarters after the fact ain’t ownership. Everybody acknowledging that Black people started the trend ain’t ownership. Even getting a check ain’t ownership; ownership means when the thing gets bigger, your piece gets bigger too.

Companies understand the value of Black cultural production just fine. They understand it enough to pay influencers to manufacture cool. They understand it enough to spend millions trying to make advertisements sound like us. They understand it enough to hire people whose entire job is figuring out what young Black people think is next. Then when we start talking about owning some of what our culture helps build, suddenly everybody wants to have a philosophical conversation about how culture belongs to everybody. Man, please.

If Black culture can help build the brand, Black people deserve to be somewhere in the ownership conversation. If our creativity is valuable enough to attract users, sell subscriptions, move products & keep platforms culturally relevant, its value doesn’t disappear because the transaction happened through a meme. The Hotel Lobby videos are funny. Make yours. Post it. Send it to the group chat. I already made mine. Just know what else you’re looking at.

Somebody is getting streams, views & users. Somebody is getting subscriptions. Somebody is collecting data & somebody is building a company. We keep bringing the music, the language, the jokes, the style, the people & the party; then somebody else owns the building. It’s time we stop being satisfied with getting in free.