Ice T co-signed Swizz Beatz's idea of creating a Hip Hop founders fund to financially help the pioneers.
"I want to raise a million dollars for each icon that started Hip Hop," said Swizz earlier this month while speaking to Joe Budden. "Kool Herc on down. The fact we’re not paying taxes on who started Hip Hop shows we don’t f*cking really love Hip Hop. The fact that we don’t pay taxes as artists to those icons that paved the way, took the lower cut for the music that allow us to feed our family."
Ice spoke to HipHopDX about the idea.
"I don’t have a problem with it," he said. "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."
"I think it’s just very technical about who they feel deserves that," he added. "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.”
What do you think about Swizz's idea?