Ice-T is giving Swizz Beatz his support for his Hip Hop Founders Fund idea, which would serve to financially assist the aging trailblazers of hip hop. Earlier this month, Swizz spoke to Joe Budden about the OGs who paved the way for hip hop, and noted how many of them, now entering old age, are not financially stable despite how prosperous the genre has made some of the more recent rappers. Swizz then proposed the idea that these newer rappers should contribute toward financially supporting these hip hop icons, considering how much they’ve done to allow artists today to succeed and make money off rap.
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Ice-T, a man who’s been part of the rap game a long time, agrees with Swizz’s proposition, and believes it would be possible with donations. “I’ve always looked out for people like Caz and Mel—those have been my friends,” he told HipHopDX. “I don’t have a problem with it. I don’t expect the young kids to be involved in it, but then you do have enough people like myself and Swizz and people who have been very successful, you know? There’s no retirement for rappers. There is nothing. A lot of them have fallen on hard times.”
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“I mean, if it was a fund, it wouldn’t be an individual person giving it to them,” he continued. “I think what they’d have to do is create a board of people—maybe like the Universal Hip Hop Museum — that would be able to handle the funds and get it out to people in need. I think that’s very honourable that Swizz Beatz would bring that up and say that. I think it’s cool. I think it’s just very technical about who they feel deserves that. There’s so many people, and it goes back…The first generation of rap is unrecorded rap. It’s before records. So all the hip hop that happened in the streets, it was only on cassette tapes. That’s the first generation. By the time people heard Melle Mel, [Grandmaster Flash &] the Furious Five, Sugarhill Gang, hip hop was already a culture. So, how far do you go back? I mean, Run-DMC was like the first rap group to get paid.”
“I think there should be some kind of an insurance plan something people can donate to,” he proposed. “See, certain people from that era are OK. Like, I’m OK, Chuck D’s OK. Russell [Simmons] is OK. Jay-Z’s OK. Puff’s OK. LL’s OK. There’s a lot of people that are OK, but a lot of people aren’t. It’s worth investigating. I would be part of it. I definitely would donate.”
