First broadcast on 30 September 2023
Who is the single most powerful person in the music industry today?
Certainly a contender for the title would be Sir Lucien Grainge, the CEO of Universal Music Group. In 2019, he was believed to have earned more than £123 million from the role. That was believed to be more than all UK songwriters put together in the same year.
Grainge was pictured happily next to Kanye West in the infamous picture of him donning the Make America Great Again Donald Trump hat. While West got significant backlash for wearing the hat, Grainge received zero scrutiny.
However, close inspection of Grainge and his family members reveals a political orientation.
Universal CEO Lucien Grainge was pictured in November 2016 at a fundraiser for the Israeli occupation forces in Beverley Hills, California.
It is highly unlikely that a man of his prestige would attend such an event without donating.
Grainge is very close friends with former Israeli soldier and prolific Zionist lobbyist Haim Saban. So much so that Grainge recently appointed Saban as a director of Universal Music Group. Over the years, Haim Saban has raised hundreds of millions for the Israeli Occupation Forces and other Israel lobby groups too. Saban also funds the Democrats and has been described as "scripting US President Biden's policy on Israel."
Lucien Grainges wife Caroline Lewis is a trustee of the Bernard Lewis Family Charitable Trust. The family’s assets are held by the Lewis Trust Group, which is controlled by an offshore company registered in the tax haven of the Cayman Islands. The trust has property holdings worth over £1 billion pounds, including 13 hotels in the Zionist entity. Through her role at the trust, the wife of Lucien Grainge, Caroline Lewis, has funded the Zionist Federation, the Mossad-trained Community Security Trust, the Conservative Party, the Islamophobic Henry Jackson Society, and one of Israel's national institutions, the United Jewish Israel Appeal.
Universal Music Group has a huge amount of cultural power; for the highest-ranking figures in the company to have these political connections to the Zionist entity should raise more than eyebrows.
The other figure featured in the infamous Kanye West MAGA hat controversy is Lyor Cohen.
Cohen, described by Mos Def as the "tall Israeli that runs rap," currently sits as the global head of music at Youtube.
Born in New York City to a father by the name of Elisha, who had been part of the Haganeh terrorist group, specifically as part of the Harel Brigade involved in the Plan Dalet campaign to ethnically cleanse Palestine in 1948, As a child, Lyor Cohen spent years living in the Israeli settlement of Kfar Haim, which was named after Haim Arlosoroff, who negotiated with the Nazis in Germany, as was the policy of the Zionist Movement at the time.
Elisha, the father of Lyor, was later employed as security at the Israeli Consulate. At the same time, his mother, Ziva Sirkis, was an assistant to the Israeli Representative at the UN, Abba Eban.
Lyor displayed an industrious attitude. A childhood friend refers to Lyor's running of a lemonade business in stark terms:
"Lyor became like a slave driver."
When asked why he became so deeply involved in hip-hop, Cohen said:
"My mother went to work, and my black nanny, who shared a room with me, always sang me ‘black songs.’”
Lyor was involved with the iconic hip-hop label Def Jam, where he expelled Professor Griff from the political outfit Public Enemy. Among other things, Professor Griff expressed support for the Palestinians. Through his work there, Cohen became a key figure at Universal Music, where he grew very close to Jay-Z, of whom he later remarked, "I would’ve married him; the problem is, he’s a man.”
When Edgar Bronfman Jr., the son of Israel lobbyists and nephew of the founder of Birthright, bought Warner Music, he asked Cohen to work as his right-hand man. While at Warner, Cohen was reported to have blocked the album release of pro-Palestinian artist Lupe Fiasco.
Cohen sits at the helm of the most-viewed video service in the world and is very close friends with Universal Music heads Lucian Grainge and Haim Saban, who are personally invested in Israeli settler colonialism in Palestine.
Within a year of Cohen being appointed to Youtube, Israel lobby group the Anti-Defamation League was selected to be a trusted flagger on the platform
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