Spike Lee says expensive for music artists to speak out

US director Spike Lee says music artists today are not as politically active as they were in the 1970s, because doing so is going to “hurt your pocketbook.”

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“With so much money being made by artists, their record company or their management, if you speak out, it’s going to hurt your pocketbook,” he said after the premiere of his film “Highest 2 Lowest.”

In his new film, veteran star Denzel Washington plays a music mogul who faces a moral dilemma. It is a loose adaptation of Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 “High and Low,” a classic following a wealthy businessman who believes his son has been kidnapped.

Cinema bible Variety has called Lee’s version “a soul-searching genre movie that entertains while also sounding the alarm about where culture could be headed.”