Rupert Murdoch steps down, hip-hop femmes shine in the Dream Hampton produced docuseries ‘Ladies ...

from KCRW I'm Kim Masters and this is the business dream Hampton has been kind of bored with hipop for years it resonated with her when she was in her 20s but her love faded with the passage of time still Hampton felt compelled to Executive produce the Netflix documentary series ladies first I didn't want to have this kind of sanitized version of a music and a genre that had never been clean I didn't want it to all a sudden get shiny in it's like Museum phase dream Hampton talks to Eric degins about giving the ladies the spotlight they deserve and why she didn't hesitate to call out misogynists by name in the documentary series but first we banter stick around it's the business from KCRW I am joined by my companion and banter Matt bellany hello Matt hi there so we're going to just touch on the strike and we're in one of those moments where we are speaking as things are happening literally as we speak the heads of the studios or at least most of them Bob Iger Donna Langley David zazo Ted Sandos are meeting with writer Guild negotiators and the fact that it didn't blow up right away like they met before we are now speaking we will take as a somewhat encouraging sign I'm told at CNBC report that this thing is going to be wrapped up end of day as we are speaking again is a little premature but everybody of course hopes that we will get to a fair resolution for all parties and that everyone in the industry can flourish let me pivot to another news item rert Murdoch has announced that he is stepping down he's 92 years old this guy had a long and storied career a lot of the story is not very positive from union busting in London when he was running the newspapers there to the more recent problems that they've had I'm going to reference of course the Dominion lawsuit which was hugely embarrassing and revealed the inner thoughts of the certain hosts that were very different from what they were spreading on Fox News uh they had to settle that one for almost $800 million it was quite an upheaval Tucker Carlson was fired their highest rating person so the departure of rert Murdoch I mean it's been clear that he's been getting gradually frailer as one would expect as a 92-year-old his son laan will continue to run things so on some level I don't think we can expect much of a change but I hear you've gotten hold of this new Michael Wolf book about the drama at Fox and it's kind of dishy and U maybe provides you with some insight on whether the departure of rert in fact means anything he said to the staff you know you will hear from me even though I've technically stepped away so people are going to be getting some of those rert emails yeah and it's an interesting one um obviously the Michael Wolf book is not a very flattering portrait of the Fox News inner workings there's a lot of dysfunction there's sort of a leadership vacuum after Roger alses left James Murdoch and Lan Murdoch uh the two sons are actively feuding with each other James is hoping that when rert dies that there will be an opportunity to take over Fox News and turn it into what he calls a quote Force for good I'm not sure what that means in the James Murdoch context but it means something probably very different from what from what Fox News is currently and that's why you know when I look at this move by rert as with everything in the Murdock you have to kind of read between the lines and it says to me that he is trying to boost Lachlan here and set Lachlan up as being the overseer of the Murdoch Empire the clear air apparent the one that everybody should look to for the future and that's very deliberate because when rert passes away the terms of his trust are such that the shares pass equally to the four adult siblings there's James there's llan there's Elizabeth in London and there's Prudence Prudence the daughter that no one remembers but is in Australia and is in fact the oldest of the siblings right and she's not involved in the business but the terms of the trust due to the divorce from his second wife Anna are such that they all get an equal share so there's going to be an allout War among the siblings to Curry favor with each other and try to win over the others and try to get a majority because there's no tiebreaking mechanism you have what is this reminding me of this is reminding me of something I know it's almost like they should do a TV show about it yeah but what this is and I think this is rert telling the siblings Lachlan is the guy he's in charge this is what I want so get in line when I'm not here anymore but I don't know that James and Elizabeth won't team up against llan because I don't know that either of them are all in on Dad's conservative if you want to call it that point of view and I don't know that Lan has ever been considered the one likeliest to succeed rert uh no but he has been positioned in recent years that way and you know there was a bit of a bake off so to speak between James and Lan laan clearly won on that front and Elizabeth I think seems to be the vote here because she has a relationship with both James and Lachlan and Prudence isn't really involved at all so the thinking at least in Murdoch land is whatever Elizabeth decides whoever she sides with Prudence will probably go along with that and there's the three votes that you need so it's kind of a battle between James and Lain to win over Liz and obviously the implications of changing Fox News would be gigantic I mean this is a network that throws off billions of dollars in profit still they don't seem to have much of a digital strategy for the future but that audience and the carriage fees that that Network generates still are fueling this company and if James gets power and decides to change Fox News to the point where it alienates that fox audience the ratings go down that's potentially billions of dollars in Lost revenue for the family and the shareholders of both Fox and News Corp yeah we have to imagine that factored into Rupert's thinking when he chose Lachlan over James they still have the smartmatic lawsuit coming which is bigger than the Dominion lawsuit so that could be again a major blow and I want to ask you Matt since you've read this book what is in there about the Tucker Carlson of it all yeah there's a long segment of this book that's devoted to The Saga of Tucker Carlson and how he got fired and essentially the implication is that it was not necessarily written into the contract between dominion and fox that settled the lawsuit but there was a 7-Day period after which the settlement was announced and it needed to be filed with the court and the Tucker firing happened six days into that period the implication being that Dominion wanted a big head to roll at Fox or else it wasn't going to file that settlement and they cut off the biggest head they had they cut off the highest rated host they had and it's very clear from the book that this was a shock to Tucker Carlson in the call with Suzanne Scott the CEO of Fox News he didn't even understand what was happening at the time when she fired him and the press release went out minutes later yeah I think Suzanne Scott was worried about her own job but she managed to survive so far uh I hate to go back to succession because it's almost a cliche but blood sacrifice right that's that's absolutely and somebody had to take the fall and ultimately via din the general counsil of fox ultimately got fired as well because as the book relates he was telling the murdocks up until near the trial that this was no problem they were going to go all the way to the Supreme Court on this they didn't really need to worry and they were basically like dude this is almost a billion dollars we're going to have to pay In fairness I think to the New York Times They had reported the role of viin after the settlement soon after the settlement and I think I tweeted at that point don't be surprised if he sees the undercarriage of a bus in the short time from now and that's pretty much what happened let me turn to the changing landscape in Hollywood because there is so much going on Sports remains one of the things that people want to watch live in real time fox has FS1 channel uh now we're seeing the streamers they've started to get in Amazon was already in with Thursday Night Football uh but Max has a lure they're they're baiting the hook to get sports fans in on the streaming service yeah Warner discovery which obviously owns Turner which has a lot of sports properties like the Major League Baseball playoffs and NBA games and March Madness they are going to offer Sports on Max it's going to be free starting in October which is a big Sports month and then you're ultimately going to have to pay $10 a month on top of your max fee to get sports but this is an interesting development because it's yet another chipping away of the Cable Bundle because people subscribe to the bundle mostly for sports and this is yet another thing you can get on streaming and you do not have to have your bundle and one by one these Sports properties start falling and it's going to hit a Tipping Point where people realize that most of what they want they don't have to have a cable subscription for yes and that will be a big shift for the entire industry part of the reason we're seeing this unrest and and that particular issue was Central to the dispute between Charter and Disney and Charter ended up with the right to put Disney Plus in some of its tiers so that's kind of like the interim keeping the bundle Al live step before Armageddon yeah it's interesting what Warner Discovery had to do to get the right to do this because I'm sure the cable providers didn't love that Warner Discovery was taking the most valuable property in the channel bundle and putting it on streaming as well I mean this is all coming down to a D-Day when Disney decides to take ESPN over the top Bob Iger at Disney has not said when that's going to happen but the day when ESPN is available without a cable subscription is probably the day when the bundle hits the point of no return it's not going to disappear of course but it will be significantly harmed and there could be a downward spiral from there and then we'll have new bundles to figure out I'm just going to say that I hope next time we convene that we will have Labor peace in Hollywood that may be hoping too much but certainly it would be the best thing for everybody thank you Matt thank you that's Matt felony founding partner of Puck news regular listeners to the business may remember our 2020 interview with dream Hampton about problematic depictions of police on TV shows we also interviewed her about her peab buddy award-winning documentary series surviving R Kelly which revealed the horrifying reality of the R&B singer criminal conduct Hampton is back today to talk about executive producing ladies first a Netflix documentary series that sets out to be the definitive history of women in hip-hop black women are crushing it in hip-hop right now dominating the charts being the ultimate influences of the culture we all winning at once in different aspects there's so many fire women right now like what none of this came easy we have come through a lot we have stood backed up and we'll always keep standing back up Eric Dickens spoke with dream Hampton about ladies first and the current state of hipop so I got to say I mean I was interested in ladies first but when I saw your name amongst the executive producers I said okay now I gotta watch this so I don't know if it feels like an extra layer of sort of responsibility that your name brings credibility to these kind of projects now but it certainly does oh well thank you I mean I'm trying to choose carefully and this is one I resisted yeah I wanted to ask you about that because I heard yeah when they first approached you you weren't sure you wanted to do this right no I was sure I didn't want to do it I've spent a good 20 years trying to like get people to stop associating me with hip-hop because I don't a deep connection I did in the last century when I was in my 20s I haven't had one for a long time and I just know that there are um young journalists who are super passionate about it and that was my kind of like advice to the team at Culture House Carrie and Ray came to me before they set it up at Netflix when it was just an idea of course I had lots of notes and things that I think that they should cover but I just thought that I'm just not in it like I once was and there are people who are but I it turned out that I did have something to contribute and that was just a little bit just mostly yeah to bring I I directed episode three and so as you can see brought the darkness but that was always my note like this team was so young and and so like excited to tell a triumphant story about women in Hip Hop and I'm like ah well see now that's what I thought when I first heard that you were hesitant to sign on I thought maybe you were concerned that it wasn't going to be incisive enough yeah I mean I think that growing up in Detroit I grew up when Motown was in its review stage you know so you could have like The Temptations but only one temptation is or the Four Tops right it was anniversary time you know I can vividly remember as a kid like the 25th anniversary of mtown event where Michael Jackson did the moonwalk like being like this major like moonlanding event right yeah um in my household and so the idea that hip hop is now like in its Amber phase where we're like looking back on it you know and and it was the same thing like you didn't hear about the drama in The Supremes you know when it was time to like do the 25th anniversary of MOT toown but I was thinking about that as we were making it about the fact that you know Method Man and Mary J blage this you're all I need to get by it's sampling Tammy Terell who died from intimate partner violence um for those who know like partnered with another mtown star and so now that's what I didn't want to happen I didn't want to have this kind of sanitized version of a music and a genre that was rarely sanitized right was clean I didn't want it to be shiny this genre that had never been clean I didn't want it to all of a sudden get shiny in its like you know Museum phase coming up after the break dream Hampton talks about why she didn't feel any hesitation to critic ize abusers in Hip Hop and name names in the Netflix documentary series ladies first you're listening to the business from KCRW this is the business and I'm Kim Masters Eric Diggins is talking with dream Hampton about executive producing the Netflix documentary series ladies first which puts a spotlight on the key role of women in Hip Hop it's interesting because I mean you point out during ladies first that there was sanitation going on of certain kinds of things and the first episode almost kind of feels like a primer on uh women in Hip Hop and I'm wondering what do you think people don't understand or didn't understand maybe before this docu series came out about what women contributed to hip-hop's Genesis and its ongoing success I mean I learned so much you know it wasn't until reading Kathy andali's book that I even knew the story about Cindy Campbell like this anniversary that we just celebrated that's marks the 50th anniversary of Hip Hop it's not a completely arbitrary day it means something and it is the day when in the Bronx on Sedwick Avenue cool herk DJ to party and MC's wrapped you know there had always been dancing there had always been be girls and B boys but in her book God saved the queen she tells the story that no party was actually his sister's party Cindy Campbell and she got her little brother to DJ she was doing a back to school kind of fundraiser for herself to get a a school wardrobe and she booked the recck room in her public housing building and and that is like what's considered the birth day or night of hip hop right and Cindy is completely erased from that story and so learning that alone speaks to how not just there we were from the beginning as an audience but Cindy now calls herself Hip Hop's first promoter right right as well she should exactly and so you know there are whole industries that have sprung up around this kind of organic thing that women were doing from the beginning and obviously and and I say Obviously but you know once you get a couple of generations away from an origin story story it gets lost that's so easy to do right to lose the threat on something and so syvia Robinson like retelling that story that when Serita Gates says we would not have an industry like a hip-hop music industry that looks like it does if it weren't for Sylvia Robinson putting out the Sugar Hill Gang This crossover song that you know irked a lot of like New York's early rappers because it was like so crossover y know um but so accessible I can tell you as a kid living in Detroit that I totally understood every one of those lyrics of course I was in Indiana but same thing same thing exactly totally accessible and so that's syvia Robinson it's not Russell Simmons it's not Rick Rubin it's not puff or P Diddy or love or whatever he's calling himself these days it's not D Dash and Jay-Z like the first like you know business person in Hip Hop is Sylvia Robinson this woman yeah yeah so I was a pop music critic at a newspaper in New Jersey in the 90s I actually went to that Source awards ceremony where Shug Knight accepted an award and then D Diddy or whatever he's calling himself and and everybody would had no idea what was GNA jump off and I only say that to say that I remember a time when even giving certain rappers a negative record review could be seriously dangerous they might come after you physically and here you've created a docu series where you're seriously incisive you're talking about a lot of situations where women were erased or assaulted and naming the male rappers who did it to them and I'm wondering has something changed where there's room to have this kind of criticism without so much fear or has it changed is there concern about bringing this up now and how some people might react to it well it hasn't changed for me I named Dr Dre when he assaulted D Barnes you know back in 1990 991 and then Dre went on you know with Eminem to make a record that made a joke about the fact that he assaulted D Barnes if you've seen episode three you'll see that nwaa went on MTV News and um said that she should get beat down again so in some ways this is all in the public record you know so I I certainly put it in the record you know back when I was a 20-year-old journalist and then Eminem put it on record record you know so that's that Tory Lanes is currently in jail for shooting metallion so there wasn't any hesitation on naming names I mean a part of like being partly raised by this music I'm old enough that I had other musical influences The Cure the pesh mode you know Michael Jackson and Prince right I didn't grow up on a 100% hip-hop diet but even Prince you know that fearlessness is what I want to get to you know that fearlessness that they named names and so there was never a question of whether or not we were going to name names and even back then I never had a fear and you're right I'm not saying that it wasn't like dangerous and that there weren't actual lives loss and there weren't journalists who were assaulted but I can't imagine doing the work that we do in fear you know there you go there you go besides you know any kind of physical danger I remember from those days too a hesitancy to criticize hip hop because you didn't want to look like you were on the side of people who were using the criticisms of rap to criticize black culture and to criticize black people and it also feels like maybe we're kind of past that too are we are we past that too do we feel a little Freer to be honest about where the the art has fallen short I I felt that way again back in the 90s uh it was such an insul conversation it was such I don't think you realize like how pioneering you were there were a lot of people who were not that Fearless back then yeah I mean I think that what was resonant about hip hop back then in particular was how it never reached for the euphemism it wasn't I mean there were metaphors sure and all kinds of you know allegorical Tales I think of Slick Rick right but there was also like this literalism this naming of names that I thought was essential and I don't think of it as a culture I know that it's called a culture often I was at a magazine for 18 months the source that you know was a big part of codifying that conversation about being a culture I think the culture requires food but whatever I'll let the anthropologists have that conversation but even as a genre of music even as a genre of music the fearlessness was everything to me and the truth telling was everything to me when it could Muster that you know um when it wasn't like hiding behind its own posturing and it was important you know particularly for the women who were writing about it myself Joan Morgan Karen good marble um back then she was Karen good K Mayo Shea Lester it was always important for us to take those issues on the posturing the misogyny um the cartoonish misogyny often um you know the hypocritical nature I mean I don't have a problem with Snoop you know I actually love Snoop you know he called me about sometime during the pandemic and asked me to do him a favor I couldn't do but um you know we have him in there being a hypocrite we have him you know giving some interview about how women shouldn't be making songs like and our editor were able paa princess and we had this great post team also women and they were able to you know find this clip of this song where Snoop is saying the exact same thing that Meg and cardi are saying and the hypocrisy is that the problem is when women say it you know when they have like bodily autonomy and they're in charge of of the nasty right right so I I heard initially that it wasn't the easiest thing to find a TV outlet that would be willing to even take on this docy series and I was wondering do you have any insight into whether that was true and and why it might have been tough to find somebody before Netflix got involved you know I'm not sure how many places culture I told Culture House no thank you and then they came back and said all right we set up with Netflix would you please reconsider and then I was like okay I'll do this okay so I don't know what the journey was with culture house and pitching but I do know that jam at Netflix when she first started at Netflix her dream was to do this project so we had a huge Ally and Jamila Farwell at Netflix and she was in our Corner throughout this process which was protracted we began shooting during covid so it took three years instead of a year wow wow um one of the things that also struck me your own career has covered so many bases and encompassed so many different kinds of Journalism and storytelling I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about your early roots and documentary what initially sort of got you interested in this work and my sense was that you know this was something you were looking into while you were also working as a journalist covering the industry right well yeah I was in film school I came to New York to go to Tish School of the Arts where I was a double major in cinema studies and ugf TV and so my next project is actually me looking back at my archives from 93 being like a embedded in that what would known to be yeah it's called I used to love you as our working title and so um it's evidence that I've always been shooting and that was actually for my documentary class you know I consider myself a filmmaker the first thing that I did after film school was a scripted short called I amalei it went to Sundance and when it comes to documentaries I usually find myself in the documentary space because of this activism Gene that I have that I can't turn off there's usually some story that I feel like really needs some advocacy and documentary feels you know not that different than a particular kind of advocacy and that's how I've used it and that's how I got into the space it's my not so much my journalist bone or Gene but my activist Jean has me doing um documentaries but it's not the only thing I want to do I really admire the career of someone like Liz garbis you know who when given a chance really knocked it out of the park you know directing episodes of handmaid's tale and different things and even though you know the industry likes to think of her until that moment as a documentary filmmaker but the industry thinks of you as as one thing until you do the other thing and then they have to think of you that way but as artists we have to think of ourselves we have to know who we are and what we want to do and just work to do that and Endeavor to do that that makes so much sense dream Hampton co-directed and executive produced ladies first the documentary series is now streaming on Netflix dream Hampton thank you so much for joining us on the business thank you and that's the business Joshua farum produced and edited today's program with help this week from John Meek who mixed the show you can stream the business as well as other great KCRW shows on kcrw.com or wherever you get your podcasts I'm Kim Masters we'll see you next week on the business you're tuned into cas crw during our fall pledge Drive donate right now you'll get a whole year of member perks including member exclusive events invitations to intimate artist sessions plus the option to send meals to those in your community when you choose the food bank in place of a mug or t-shirt set it up now at kcrw.com if you enjoy the banter why not throw us a tip any donation amount makes you a member and gets you perks think about it this way you listen all the time for free so 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