I don't think the mass media conglomerates really care about defining blackness. If anything, it is the opposite. They want to move hip hop away from being a "black" form of expression and into being a music for everyone. They aren't trying to profit off of blackness, they are trying to erase it. While people think the best examples of this are Elvis and Eminem, I think better examples are in pop music. Maurice Starr came out with New Edition, who did well but not huge. Then he added less talented white performers and all of a sudden the phenomena of New Kids on the Block came out. Look at Usher compared to Timberlake.

The Queen of Co-opting is Madonna. In the beginning it was the fresh pop sound, then it was the club beat, then it was techno. Madonna has been around so long because she has no 'style'; she steals whichever is about to blow up.

I believe in multiculturalism as well but nobody ever truly practices it. We always have diversity of race but rarely, if ever, is diversity of thought ever promoted. Possibly the only turly multicultural pop album in the last few years was Santana's Supernatural because everyone brought a piece of themselves to the music. When Timberlake and Timberland have a collabo it isn't multicultural, it is Timbo showing Justin how R&B works, and Justin giving input from what he's learned.

The mass media will always co-opt the popular media from other cultures. Just look at film: if there is ever a good foreign film, it is bought and remade as an American movie (ala The Ring, Vanilla Sky, etc.) As in music, the remakes are never as good as the original.

The key for the originators is to make sure that they stay true and do not change their ways in order to fit in with the co-opted version of their music. At the same time (and here is the hardest thing about being an artist), you also can't settle into what you were doing well, because your audience will tire of it. There's two problems: a) selling out and b) settling into your formula and getting left behind by your audience.