Intro – a Note on Intent
This article does not seek to take a definitive stance on whether music is halal or haram. That is a matter for scholars and sincere seekers of knowledge. Rather, this is a witness statement. A tracing of what happens when art-be it voice, rhythm, or expression-is torn from its spiritual roots and offered at the altar of capitalism. It is a story about distortion. About how even sacred expression can be disfigured when reduced to commodity. And yes, even for Muslims. The point is not whether music is permissible-but whether what we call “music” today still serves its original purpose: to reflect truth, elevate the soul, and resist oppression.
I. Capitalism Doesn’t Touch – It Consumes
There is a pattern. Capitalism doesn’t merely absorb, it corrodes. Whatever it touches, it empties. Land becomes commodity. Education becomes transaction. Health becomes industry. The sacred becomes spectacle. And art-perhaps the most vulnerable of all-is transformed from divine spark into market-ready distraction. It wraps its fingers around culture, creativity, rebellion, and even religion. Not to nourish. But to strip, rebrand, and resell.
Capitalism never wanted truth. It wanted performance. It never wanted soul. It wanted profit. And music-one of the deepest expressions of the human soul-was no exception.
There was a time when music meant something. When a blues note bent not for pleasure but for pain. When bars in a verse carried more truth than the mouths of politicians. But that art is dead. Not gone, no. Worse-repurposed, digitized, market-tested, and resold in the shape of rebellion without its soul. Capitalism didn’t just exploit music. It performed a slow, surgical assassination.
II. The Blues: Sold Pain in 12 Bars
The rot began when the marketplace learned how to monetize human feeling. Take the blues-the spiritual child of pain, forged by Black Americans under the weight of slavery’s afterbirth. The blues wasn’t a product. It was a cry. A form of survival. On the plantations of the American South, enslaved Africans, stripped of their names, languages, and families, poured their grief into rhythm and song.
They were whipped until skin split. Worked to death in the heat of sugar fields. Children were torn from mothers. Men were castrated and lynched for looking up. Women were raped, daily, their screams absorbed into the soil. The only freedom left was sound. And through this hell, they sang.
They sang through chains. Moaned through whip lashes. Hummed laments that made the sky listen.
“I got the blues so bad, it hurts my feet to walk…”
I went in the room, I looked in the bed…
Saw my brother laying there, he was dead…
Ooh Lordy, my trouble so hard…
Don’t nobody know my trouble but God
“Sometimes I feel like a motherless child…”
These weren’t songs. They were funerals stretched into melody. Every note stretched into the air like a prayer hurled into the sky by someone who had nothing left to give. The blues was never entertainment. It was pain and rebellion in slow motion.
Yet as early as the 1920s, record executives realized they could bottle that pain and sell it. Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues” opened the floodgates-not because her voice mattered to white America, but because they saw dollar signs in her sorrow. Blues got compressed, trimmed, softened. The wild, groaning, haunting field cries of the Delta were replaced by stage-ready smiles and segregated recording sessions. Robert Johnson’s deal with the devil at the crossroads was more than folklore-it was a metaphor for the Black artist’s fate in white capitalism: sell your soul, or die in obscurity.
III. Rock and Roll: From Gospel to Glitter
Then came rock and roll, the rebellious lovechild of the blues and Black gospel. And like clockwork, the machine swooped in. What was born in Black churches and juke joints was whitewashed into palatable packages: Elvis, the Beatles, the Stones – helping the industry siphon Black music into white profits. It wasn’t about truth; it was about branding. By the late ’60s, the revolution was televised – then sanitized. Jimi Hendrix died a misunderstood poet. Janis Joplin overdosed on heartbreak. Jim Morrison drowned in his own myth. And yet the system survived, because capitalism is a shape-shifter. It wears the dead like fashion. These dead artists were immortalized and repackaged into special collectors albums and merchandise that sold more than when they were alive.
IV. Hip-Hop: Bought, Branded, Broken
By the time rap arrived – raw, uncut, born in the Bronx from the ashes of urban neglect-it dared to speak about the real. It was the CNN of the streets, as Chuck D said. Grandmaster Flash told you about the “Message”:
“It’s like a jungle sometimes / It makes me wonder how I keep from goin’ under.”
N.W.A shouted, “F*** the Police” not as clickbait, but as lived reality. Tupac bled on every track:
“Cops give a damn about a negro? / Pull the trigger, kill a n**, he’s a hero.”**
Biggie rapped about hunger-not for gold, but for survival:
“Either you slangin’ crack rock or you got a wicked jump shot.”
But again-capitalism waits. Patiently. Silently. Watching.
And then, it swallowed hip-hop whole.
Today, rap is dominated by brands, not bars. Gold chains over chains. Beats sponsored by vodka labels. Lyrics as product placement. Storytelling replaced with strip-club anthems, grief replaced with greed. Ask yourself: when was the last time you heard a chart-topping hip-hop track that didn’t boast of money, sex, or power? When did hip-hop, once the heartbeat of the voiceless, become a TED Talk for billionaires in training? The revolution was sold back to us-with auto-tune.
