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The New-Age Minstrel: Part 1
Interview by: Melanie J Cornish
 Twenty Four years young, Kareem Edouard, the Miami based film maker who has been promoting his short documentary Bling: Consequences and Repercussions; has a lot to say on the topic of the conflict diamonds. It is not just about innocent lives being taken in the Western African country of Sierra Leone, nor is it about the way the reigns on the diamond industry are held by one in particular diamond digger; the point that he is making with his story is that hip-hop is allowing itself literally to be pimped out to further the continuation of such atrocities depicted in his short documentary.
Granted, it isn’t just the hip-hop culture that encourages the illegal diamond trade to continue its tirade, but with hip-hop being the impressionable marketable commodity it has grown to be, what better market to aim this at before going after the other cliques who adorn themselves in diamonds that may have possibly cost a child, a woman, a man, an arm or a limb or even a life.
This isn’t a problem that has just materialized over the last couple of years, this predicament has always been present, just one of those topics that may have hit a little too close to home for a serious portion of the population to see with their own eyes. As the old saying goes, ‘Out of sight, out of mind,’ is more than apparent for many countries when dealing with negative issues surrounding something that we enjoy, something that promotes wealth and success. This documentary however if you choose to educate yourself, will break down the reality of just how the majority of conflict diamonds have made it into the mainstream, have encouraged the demise of many, encouraged financial gain of some and allowed control for rebels and De Beers.
NOBODYSMILING.COM : What encouraged the making of Bling?
 Kareem Edouard : Bling comes down to this. I was cooling out with an Emcee called Afrob, I was building with him in Germany as I was working on another documentary called “To be Continued” which was looking at Hip-hop from a world perspective, looking at the true heart of hip-hop, you know catching cats free styling in Chile and Brazil. I was with him in Stuttgart and then a couple of months later he decided to come to the United States to start writing his new album and we linked up and we were on 42nd Street and we were right by the MTV building where they have the huge billboards and there was a picture of Dame Dash throwing up the rock with the jewels around him.
NOBODYSMILING.COM : How long ago was this?
Kareem Edouard : I would say this was a year or two after the track Bling Bling had dropped. Diamonds and platinum weren’t too strong just yet, but they were on the come up and Afrob said ‘Kareem, do you see what he is wearing?’ and I was like yeah ‘he is rocking the rock,’ you know at that point it was more about platinum but not about diamonds just yet. But there was diamonds in the piece and he started telling me a story about the diamonds, about a young boy who was working in the diamond mines in Sierra Leone and he was about six, the whole family working in the mine, obviously being so young this boys lungs weren’t fully developed and him taking in all the coal air wasn’t good for him. He had walked out and asked the over-seer if he could get a moment and that had been fine. He had gone to sit down and as he turned around, they had shot him in the back of the head. When I heard that I was shook. Afrob explained the atrocities that were happening in his land. This was two years before Kanye had even met Dame Dash and been signed to the Roc and the reason I say that is because there is no way ‘Diamonds Are Forever’ encouraged this. Everyone thinks that this conflict diamond problem in Sierra Leone is happening recently, it hasn’t
NOBODYSMILING.COM : Well America has a tendency to ‘protect’ people from reality, which often means we don’t hear, see or read about such things.
Kareem Edouard : Well that is why I have the young girl in there that I met with her Father, her Mother is someone from Sierra Leone and she didn’t know what a conflict diamond was. We had gone crazy over this and decided to make (the documentary) it happen. Being that I was still fresh and green in the industry, I really didn’t have much clout as I had been building with cats in Europe, I decided to write the treatment and then start working on other projects, like music videos and as I started building I could start sneaking this project in.
 [ NOBODYSMILING.COM : So was this how you connected with Chuck D, who narrates the documentary?
Kareem Edouard : What happened was I was working on the ‘To be Continued’ documentary and I was interviewing Prince Paul and when I was talking to him and when the interview ended I asked him who else he thought I should interview for the documentary and he said Chuck D. So he gave me Chucks managements info and I emailed them, basically explaining what I was trying to do and they emailed me back and said let’s link. So we met and there was a nice bond there. After the conversation happened with Afrob I called Chuck and told him my new idea and he was with it. Chuck invited me on his radio show, Air America Radio and I went on there with Liz and Chuck and we did a whole segment about diamonds and we talked about the film, what I was trying to do. Chuck always said he wanted to be a part of it and get it out as one thing we always agreed on is that diamonds are the ‘new age’ minstrel. You have a lot of cats that show that they have risen from the Hood or from oppression, the hustling; the grime is to show on you physically that you have beaten something and diamonds are the quickest way.
NOBODYSMILING.COM : Yeah but back in the eighties it was gold when you refer to the Hip-hop culture.
Kareem Edouard : And even before that you know it didn’t start with emcees. Hip-hop borrowed this from everybody else, you had the Southern Belles. You know you had the white kid who said that rappers are black and they have a responsibility to the Africans that are dying overseas, that hit me in my stomach because it’s true.
NOBODYSMILING.COM : Well I felt that as it was the closing statement in the film, it had been of great significance to you.
 Kareem Edouard : What I want to make totally clear in this interview is the N word. When that word is used amongst our peoples it is a term of endearment, but now with hip-hop it is also used as a term of endearment from the white side, but the older generations use it as kind of shaking a finger at you. The reason I am saying all this is because bling is now the way of saying that hip-hop shit or that tacky hip-hop shit. When Julia Roberts, Hollywood elite, twenty million a movie gets a diamond from Harry Winston, it is called a diamond, but when Ja Rule gets the same diamond from Harry Winston it is called bling. You have politicians, Fox news presenters, everyone across the board say ‘bling’ and to me it is mockery, it is mocking you. It’s like ‘you know what we want to be like you but you know what we know that what you are wearing is tacky.’ I was watching the ‘Making of Grillz’ on BET’s Access Granted and I saw Jermaine Dupri basically say that ‘grillz are the new things for us coming up out of the hood showing that we are doing something and we are holding it down.’ I was thinking about this and thinking about a kid from Nebraska and his Mom sitting there watching this, they have got to be thinking ‘look at the buffoonery, look at what they are doing now, they can’t even close their mouth and on top of that they are wearing crap diamonds.’ Bling for me is just a mockery and kind of making fun of us as people and it is back to the whole ‘minstrel’ thing, you know its just people cracking jokes. The word ‘bling’ is used so much on TV now, and it is not just MTV or VH1, it’s on MSNBC because you have the reporters who want to be cute and funny for the moment, you know they go from talking about people dying in Iraq to Paris Hilton’s new piece of ‘bling’ to change it to a comical sense. Hip-hop is the number one marketed culture and we look at all this as though we are being acknowledged but what I am saying is ‘they are making fun of us.’ More importantly people are dying; people are loosing arms for every time Missy Elliot buys a new piece of ‘bling’ someone is dying. In Sierra Leone its not just now about the conflict diamonds, you have people becoming slaves again as they are working 10-18 hours a day and making maybe five cents, being given a cup of water and some rice every nine hours. What appalls me as a person is Ludacris, he had his song with Bobby Valentino ‘Pimping All Over the World’ with Bobby Valentino where his video starts off in Africa doing the whole thing, but on the MTV awards the man had a huge diamond African pendant. You know back in the eighties people wore the leather Africa, but to see that sickened me. You know people in the industry had to have heard the song Kanye West did and have been aware of the content, but to come out on National TV wearing a big African diamond pendant is careless. Any emcee right now that is flossing ice and doesn’t know what is going on is careless.
NOBODYSMILING.COM : And those emcees that are still rocking diamonds and know what is going on, what do you have to say to them?
Kareem Edouard : There are so many alternatives to dealing with the conflict diamond issue, Canada has legal diamonds. But it’s like what you see in the documentary, it is hard to trace diamonds as to what happens from when they leave the earth and then end up in the consumer’s hands. The hip-hop culture is the largest marketing culture there is, Harry Winston, Tiffany’s all of them are using us, we are walking physical billboards.
NOBODYSMILING.COM : You seem to have omitted the name De Beers there.
Kareem Edouard : De Beers has a vault with six million gems in it, you know they mined what they needed. My thing is this, Chris Rock made a joke, ‘there are rich people and there are wealthy people, rich is being Shaquille but the person who signs his check is wealthy.’ For the emcees that are out right now they are just rich and I just call it ‘Nigga Rich’ as that is all it is. It is just spending this money that you don’t actually have and De Beers is using this, they want Missy Elliot, they want Jay[Z], they want Ludacris and Nelly and Paul Wall, they want that because the top of the market will get the best cut diamonds. But see all the crap diamonds that come to the flea markets, the diamond exchange dealers at your local malls and stuff, all those diamonds are from somewhere. Granted Oprah Winfrey is not wearing something that has come from the heart of Sierra Leone, but not everyone can afford the fifteen million dollar diamond. People go for the cheaper diamonds.
> Next: The New-Age Minstrel: Part 2
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