NO SCAPEGOATS: The other side of Hip-Hop
JRoot
861 Posts
Editorial in today's LA Times by Jeff Chang and Dave Zirin. It addresses the post-Imus rap backlash a lot better than we morons on the internut.Enjoy, suckers.JRootLink to the LA Times Article. Full Text below.No Scapegoats: The Other Side of Hip-hopBy Jeff Chang and Dave ZirinApril 23, 2007MUCH OF THE criticism of commercial rap music - that it's homophobic andsexist and celebrates violence - is well-founded. But most of the carpingwe've heard against hip-hop in the wake of the Don Imus affair is morescapegoating than serious. Who is being challenged here? It's not the media oligarchs, which twist anart form into an orgy of materialism, violence and misogyny by spendingmillions to sign a few artists willing to spout cartoon violence oncommand. Rather, it's a small number of black artists - Snoop Dogg,Ludacris and 50 Cent, to name some - who are paid large amounts toperpetuate some of America's oldest racial and sexual stereotypes.But none of the critics who accuse hip-hop of single-handedly coarseningthe culture think to speak with members of the hip-hop generation, who aresupposedly both targets and victims of the rap culture. They might besurprised at what this generation is saying.In his recent PBS documentary "Beyond Beats and Rhymes," filmmaker ByronHurt made clear that rap music can be as sexist and homophobic as it can bepositive and enlightening. Marginalized young women and men have foundtheir voices in hip-hop arts, gathering to share culture at b-girlconventions around the world or reading for each other in after-schoolpoetry classes. Hurt's film pointed the finger where it needs to be pointed- at American popular culture, which has trafficked in racist and sexistimages and language for centuries and provides all sorts of incentives foryoung men of color to act out a hard-core masculinity.If all the overnight anti-hip-hop crusaders really cared about thegeneration they want to save, they would support the growing Media Justicemovement led by hip-hop pioneer Afrika Bambaataa and such outspoken womenactivists as Malkia Cyril and Rosa Clemente. The group contends that suchmedia powers as Emmis Communications and Clear Channel have corruptedhip-hop radio.The critics would engage young public intellectuals like Joan Morgan ("WhenChickenheads Come Home to Roost"), Gwendolyn D. Pough ("Check It While IWreck It") and Mark Anthony Neal ("That's the Joint!: The Hip-Hop StudiesReader"), who are defining what they call a new hip-hop feminism. The gap between the programming on Viacom's MTV and BET and young people'sinterests seems never to have been bigger. According to the Black YouthProject, a University of Chicago study released in January, theoverwhelming majority of young people, especially blacks, believe rapvideos portray black women negatively. That's one reason rap music salesdeclined 20% last year and remain down 16% this year. Yet sales are a poor indicator of what is really happening in hip-hop.Local hip-hop scenes are thriving. Great art is being made not just inmusic but in visual arts, film, theater, dance and poetry. It can be seenin the works of Sarah Jones, Nadine Robinson, Rennie Harris, Kehinde Wileyand Danny Hoch. Hip-hop studies is a rapidly growing and popular field atcolleges and universities, with more than 300 classes offered. In hip-hopafter-school programs, voter registration groups, feminist gatherings andpublic forums, the future of hip-hop is under discussion. These hip-hopthinkers want to take the culture that unites many young people and channelit toward political engagement. In 2004, voter registration campaigns usinghip-hop to target youth produced more than 2 million new voters under theage of 30. To confuse commercial rap made by a few artists with how hip-hop isactually lived by millions is to miss the good that hip-hop does. Ifhip-hop's critics paid attention to the hip-hop generation, they wouldlearn that the discussion has already begun without them and that theymight need to listen. Then a real intergenerational conversation couldbegin.JEFF CHANG is the editor of "Total Chaos: The Art and Aesthetics ofHip-Hop." DAVE ZIRIN is the author of the forthcoming "Welcome to theTerrordome: The Pain, Politics and Promise of Sports." Contact Zirin at[email]edgeofsports@gmail.com[/email]
Comments
Yes but to the average LA Times reader this is not obvious stuff.
I don't think it's so obvious--at least not "obvious" in the sense that it's clearly correct.
I find a lot of what they're saying quite distasteful ("Look! It's been legitimized by the academy!"). Plenty of the "young public intellectuals" they're urging engagement with are clowns that just happen to have letters beside their names.
I really don't care for any defense of rap (yes, rap) that relies on distinctions between the "good" rap with morally defensible content and the "bad" rap that is sexist and homophobic. Any worthwhile defense of the form has to embrace it all, particularly since a lot of the most aesthetically interesting stuff has long explored socially reprehensible themes. Chang/Zirin aren't quite there, but they're also not so far from the "You just haven't heard Talib Kweli!" type jokers.
My mom was tellin me I should peep Oprah for that silly summit. GTFOHWTB.
"Blame A Brother" bullshit.
Agreed--I keep saying this; there's no reason to be having a public conversation about rap in the wake of that incident.
BUT WHAT ABOUT THE CHILDREN???
"WU-TANG IS FOR THE MUTHAFUCKIN CHILDREN!!!!"
File under "Rap is something you do...."
I don't disagree with their assessment of the current backlash against popular rappeurs but... I don't think anyone is served well by the kind of rhetoric that follows.
Imus Is Out, But Whitey Execs Get the Last Laugh
By Matt Taibbi, RollingStone.com
http://www.alternet.org/story/50744/
"Ultimately, the fact that rappers are now being held accountable for something Imus said shows the bias many people have against hip-hop culture. Hip-hop is often the scapegoat of everything gone wrong in America, but hip-hop didn't slander the Rutgers women's basketball team, Don Imus did, so let's stay on point here. ... The point is, hip-hop didn't invent cursing, slurs, bad language, sexism or misogyny, though hip-hop like so many other fictional forms of the culture uses this type of language as a form of expression, however problematic it might be. This expression represents the way people in the streets talk. It might not be pretty or politically correct, but it is a unique form of fictional expression that emerges from the minds and mouths of young black men." -- Dr. Todd Boyd, professor of critical studies at USC, writing for ESPN.com
The most annoying thing about the Don Imus fiasco? The instant it blew up into an absurdly overdone national controversy, we all knew exactly how everyone was going to play it -- or overplay it, as it were.
We all knew that the angry-white-guy columnists of the Townhall.com ilk were going to turn even the previously-hated liberal Imus into a martyr of the political correctness age ("Imus, Political Correctness, and the end of America" was Douglas McKinnon's not-at-all-hysterical offering). We knew Al Sharpton would show up, business card in hand, at the back of the ambulance, offering his services. We knew campus feminists would surface en masse to paint Imus as a hatemongering symbol of the old-boy white male power structure that secretly still insists on its power and privilege in American society, his show a daily vulgar wink to fellow members of the Matrix. And we knew -- or at least I knew, since I've personally been through a couple of these media ass-whippings before -- that virtually every editorial denouncing Imus would include a line in there that would read something along the lines of, "And the worst thing is, his so-called 'jokes' aren't even that funny."
Canny observers of the cultural issues underlying the Imus controversy could have also made a few other predictions. The first is that the angry-white-guy crowd would try to turn the tables on Imus's accusers and point the finger at the hip-hop culture that introduced old white liberals like Imus to use words like "nappy-headed hos" in the first place. The second is that black intellectuals like the above-quoted Dr. Todd Boyd of USC would use their advanced degrees to find a way to split the necessary rhetorical hairs to repel these attacks, dismissing Imus as a worthless bigot on the one hand while upholding rap and hip-hop as a "unique form of fictional expression" deserving of the broad indulgence we grant to true art forms.
They're all full of shit, all of them. With very few exceptions almost everyone who jumped onto the Don Imus pigpile was a shameless opportunist whose mind was made up years before this incident even happened, and used the occasion of a radio jock stepping in shit to robotically jerk off his constituency for a cheap buck. First of all, let's just get this out of the way: the idea that anyone in the media world gives a shit about the dignity of women, black or white, is a ridiculous joke.
America's TV networks have spent the last forty years falling over each other trying to find better and more efficient ways to sell tits to the 18-to-35 demographic. They make hour-long prime-time reality dramas these days about shopping-obsessed sluts hitting each other with pocketbooks, for Christ's sake. Paris Hilton, a dumb, rich slut with a cock in her mouth, gets her own primetime show. MTV, the teenie mags, the pop music industry, they're basically all an endless parade of skinny, half-naked brainless whores selling makeup and jeans to neurotic, self-hating, weight-obsessed little girls.
The idea that NBC -- the company that proudly produced 241 episodes of Baywatch, a show whose two main characters for nearly a decade were Pamela Anderson's tits -- the idea that that network was "offended" by the use of the word "ho" is beyond preposterous. Until this incident, I would have wagered very good money that "Ho" would be in the title of at least one NBC-produced reality pilot within the next ten years. You can't see that? Trivia-battling sluts in Ho-llywod Squares? An irony-for-irony's-sake callgirl-improvement show called Pimp My Ho? Would you bet real money that the Paris-and-Nicole vehicle The Simple Life wasn't originally called Whore Acres at some stage of the pre-production process? I sure as hell wouldn't. Programming decisions of the The Bachelor ilk aren't spontaneous mid-show farts by an aging drug-battered brain like the Imus deal -- they're wide-awake decisions, forged in the crucible of number-crunching corporate reflection, to use reactionary images of cheap brainless skanks to sell Fritos and pickup trucks.
The race question is even more ridiculous. Dr. Todd Boyd notwithstanding, there's just no way to talk about the Imus incident without talking about hip-hop and rap culture. Let me just say right up-front that I listen to a lot of rap music. I'm one of those revolting well-off suburban white kids who grew up on PE and NWA and privately mourns the fact that he looks like an idiot in a Starter jersey. I love rap music, always have. But as an adult white male I also know a minstrel show when I see it, and that's what rap has turned into.
Satan himself couldn't have designed a more effective vehicle for marginalizing black culture than modern hip-hop. In the early days rap music was scary social commentary, it was raw and real and it vividly described a violent street culture that white people didn't know about and didn't want to know about. But very quickly rap turned into a multibillion-dollar industry in which the same corporate behemoths who sold us crap like Garth Brooks and boy bands and Britney Spears made massive profits selling a stylized, romanticized version of black misery to white kids in the suburbs.
That was bad enough, but even worse was the way black politicians and black intellectuals so easily bought into the idea that these endless video images of gun-toting, ho-slapping black men with fat wallets, rock-hard tattooed abs and fully-accessorized rides were positive living symbols of "black empowerment" and "black manhood." Like Tupac was the next Malcolm or something.
Yeah, right. Seriously, how dumb do you have to be to not see through this shit? Here you've got the modern-day version of The Man signing big checks to back your record deals and cheering along as all the artistic talent from the black community starts walking around in public wearing childlike one-word stage names like strippers or animal actors, writing song lyrics featuring preschool-level spelling, and primping endlessly for the cameras with their gold teeth and swimming pools and pimped-out cars -- all of them absurd caricatures of the capitalist wealth fantasy, only the black heroes of these videos are too stupid to buy land or influence or industry stock with their money, they've gotta blow it all on the first shiny ring or phat ride they see. How exactly is any of that that different from the minstrel show, the conk and the zoot suit? The black man who can dance and sing, but can't control his urges, can't resist pussy and just can't get enough of what Whitey is selling, can't stop preening in his Caddy ... that's innovative? That's empowering?
Bullshit. Rap was real once, but once it became an industry it turned into the same con white people have been playing ever since they set foot in this country. It's a bunch of shiny trinkets for the isle of Manhattan. Here's your Hummer and your bitches, knock yourself out. You need us, we'll be buy ing the African grain market. Oh, and, thanks for the cap, my kid loves it, he wears it sideways just like you ... No matter how catchy the music is, on a deeper level, that's what big-money rap acts amount to now. And the longer the black community eats it up, the more time Whitey is going to have to laugh all the way to the bank, like he always has.
Pop Quiz: where did the practice of calling all black women, and especially black women who are not actual prostitutes, Hos begin? I seem to remember a line from Boyz N The Hood where some girl complains to Ice Cube about his habit of calling all women bitches. "Oh, I'm sorry, ho!" is the answer. Laughs all around. When the Imus thing hit, we heard Snoop Dogg explain that the difference between rappers using the word "ho" and Don Imus using it is that unlike "old-ass white men" like Imus, rappers are "not talking about no collegiate basketball girls who have made it to the next level in education and sports. We're talking about hos that's in the 'hood that ain't doing shit." Oh, I get it, Snoop -- you were satirizing the hos and bitches. You obviously checked the crowd to make sure nobody had a degree when you did your "So all the niggaz and the bitches, raise your muthafuckin hands in the air!" act. And it was satire when Ludacris did his thing:
but hos dont feel so sad and blue
cuz most of us niggaz is hos too
People say that Don Imus isn't funny, but let's face it, there is a joke in all of this. It's a joke on the black community. And the joke is this: white people don't even have to call black people niggers and bitches and whores anymore. They do it for us. You throw a couple dozen talented black artists mid-level stockbroker money and they'll be ho-calling bitch-slapping modern Bojangles acts till the end of fucking time. From Whitey's point of view that's a hell of a punchline. The mistake Imus made was saying it out loud.
As for the people who say there's no connection between hip-hop and what Imus said, they're out of their minds. Without Ludacris and 50 Cent and "We Luv Deez Hoez," Don Imus doesn't even know what a ho is. The unspoken truth about the Imus story is that there is no difference at all between what Imus does and what Snoop Dogg does. They both get paid to make ethnic slurs. In this case they both use the same one, one stealing from the other. The only difference is that Snoop doesn't know the joke is on him, too.
That is a dark and ugly truth and I suspect that its very ugliness is what so many people were hiding from when they pretended to be "outraged" by Don Imus. Because everyone knows that the issue with Don Imus isn't what he said, but who said it and in what context.
We've got a TV entertainment industry that ritualistically demeans women, a recording industry that makes billions cartoonizing black culture, and a radio and film comedy industry that lives almost exclusively off lowbrow racial stereotyping. Guys like Carlos Mencia even use the same jokes over and over, changing words here and there to fit the different stereotypes. (Mencia did "That's like going to Compton and finding the only Hispanic teenage girl who isn't pregrant" and he also did "That's like going to a NASCAR event and finding the only white girl who doesn't have a black eye.") Every comic in America does this shit. It's gone so far that we even make jokes about making jokes about ethnic groups (Sarah Silverman's song about "I love you more than Asian people are good at math" comes to mind). And we get critics to bail out these comics by saying things like "He/she mocks bigotry and stereotypes by ironically embracing them" (the Voice's Michael Musto has used that one before) but deep down inside we all know that's bullshit. I dare anyone to watch tape of Richard Pryor doing his impression of a stuttering Chinese restaurant owner and then tell me with a straight face that Pryor is "mocking Asian stereotypes by ironically embracing them."
Of course he isn't. He's laughing at stuttering Chinese people. And the way Richard Pryor does it, it's funny. If Pryor were still alive and coherent today we'd put him on HBO, where he'd do huge ratings with the very same people who are pretending now to be appalled by Don Imus. Because we love our black jokes, we love our Jew jokes, we love our redneck jokes, and we love our misogyny -- we just don't want it all on the wrong network in the wrong time-slot, coming from a white guy, in whose mouth it might very well sound like the bigot in all of us. And when it does pop up in the wrong place, coming from the wrong person, we've got to pull the "I'm shocked, shocked" act and pretend it's a criminal aberration. Because that's much easier than facing the truth about what we just heard.
Matt Taibbi is a writer for Rolling Stone.
My problem with these "hip-hop studies" types is that they rarely if ever accept rap music on its own terms. They have to define it within the parameters of academia and try to "validate it" somehow. It's annoying as hell.
Whether it was Pat Hare singing "I'm Gonna Murder My Baby" or NWA doing "F*ck Tha Police", they both reflected a certain time and place, albeit a real but violent one.
Music has always been used to tell tales, some happy, some sad.
Corridos was/is a South American version telling tales of murder, drug dealing and other crimes as a way to "report" on the criminal underground.
So I have no problem acccepting the fact that Rap doesn't create social problems it merely reflects them.
But let me ask you all this question....
Is it possible, that in 2007, with the state of our Media and society, that rap can go from reflecting a lifestyle to creating one??
As if when Robert Johnson lamented about selling his soul to the devil, instead of the listeners shivering in fear at the thought of such an ordeal, they saw it as the "hip" thing to do??
Is it possible that music can go from reflecting and reporting on crimes to promoting them?
I'm not stating it is, I'd just like to ponder the concept.
Hence the whole orgy over trying to shoehorn hip-hop into postmodern theory.
i find it equally distasteful, but at the same time im glad to see people mad at rap music again. fuck all those old bitches.
The distinction between "good" rap with morally defensible content and the "bad" rap that is sexist and homophobic can be stated another way, in reference to its market position: the "good" rap that doesn't sell and the "bad" rap that does. The minute the word "conscious" reaches critical mass in reviews of a rap record is the minute it might as well be pulled from the shelves. Outside of a very small minority of folks, folks who actually like listening to lyrics that reflect their own value system (in whose number I count myself - I like ZION I
Of course the distinction between "good" and "bad" rap is not one that is always easy to draw. Jay-Z, for example, might wind up on the "bad" list, especially if the list is made by the Tipper Gore types, but if you listen to a lot of the cuts on the Black Album, it's practically down with Jimmy Swaggart - his mom appears on the record, he makes peace with his dad on the record. Kanye West, similarly straddles the line between the "good" and "bad" rap, and his shit sells like twinkies at the hostess thrift shop. Ghostface would almost surely wind up on a lot of folks "bad" list, but when he gets to reminiscing about his parents and his childhood, that is some "family values" talk, but it's when I find myself most endeared to him and his music.
There's a lot of complexity in this marketplace that makes it worth exploring. And the hip-hop activism of folks like the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights is great. Too bad a lot of the academic stuff that looks at rap is totally lame.
Peace,
JRoot
PS As a father of a daughter, I find a lot of the sexist stuff very hard to take. Rape and sexual violence is real, and a lot of the "bad" rap is not helping to move the society to a place where the risks women face are less. It's not rap's responsibility, but that doesn't make it any less counter-productive. And the homophobic shit is just stupid.
Well, I agree with almost all of this--particularly with the idea that the distinction between "good" and "bad" rap is largely illusory since rappers are people and, like most people, usually offer some "good" and some "bad".
I don't really agree that the idea that the "good" rap doesn't sell, though. I think that emerges as a bit of a straw man when you look at some of the success stories of recent years. Like Kanye--as you noted--or like Ludacris's "Runaway Love" (an execrably bad, but "conscious" track) that's proved to be a lot more durable than the first, club-oriented, single off his album and that has helped propel his album to platinum. Or Jay-z's foray into neuter rap, which benefitted from what was probably last year's biggest marketing campaign and came at a time when his overall public profile was higher than it's ever been previously. It clearly can sell and, what's more, I think there's an unthinking embrace of it on the part of a lot of media outlets. I'm not mad at that--I don't care, really--but I don't think it's accurate to complain that its impossible to get airtime with rap that isn't about pushing coke, shooting people, or selling women.
Out of line. What is it about these people that turns you off so much?
More importantly, what are your credentials?
stating hyptheses as fact?
Ride for those academics, son!
I caught that too. Correllation = causality = laziness.
LOL @ aaronbobo attempting to question my credentials.
Ambitionz as an M.A.-Holda revealed!
Now answer the questions!
Not really. I mean, it's not unique to this era in history. Popular culture creating images or representations for a consumer base disconnected from the producers of said culture goes back (in America) as far back as minstrelsy but its roots are centuries old. What you're describing is simply what form it takes in an era of late capitalism but the phenom itself is old as as the notion of "the exotic" itself.
Robert Johnson never lamented selling his soul to the devil. Nor did he sell his soul to the devil. Nor did he try to sell his soul to the devil.
This stupid blues revivalist romanticism of Robert Johnson and the devil is the equivilent of rap is evil.
NEW YORK (Reuters) -- Prominent U.S. hip-hop executive Russell Simmons Monday recommended eliminating the words "bitch," "ho" and "nigger" from the recording industry, considering them "extreme curse words."
The call comes less than two weeks after radio personality Don Imus' nationally syndicated and televised radio show was canceled amid public outcry over Imus calling a women's basketball team "nappy-headed hos."
Simmons, co-founder of the Def Jam label and a driving force behind hip-hop's huge commercial success, called for voluntary restrictions on the words and setting up an industry watchdog to recommend guidelines for lyrical and visual standards.
"We recommend that the recording and broadcast industries voluntarily remove/bleep/delete the misogynistic words 'bitch' and 'ho' and the racially offensive word 'nigger,' " Simmons and Benjamin Chavis, co-chairmen of the advocacy group Hip-Hop Summit Action Network, said in a statement.
"These three words should be considered with the same objections to obscenity as 'extreme curse words,' " it said.
"Ho" is slang for whore and commonly used in hip-hop music while "nigger" is among the most highly charged insults in American culture. The slur "nappy," used by Imus, describes the tightly curled hair of many African Americans.
Monday's statement changed course from another one by Simmons and Chavis dated April 13, a day after Imus' show was canceled, in which they said offensive references in hip-hop "may be uncomfortable for some to hear, but our job is not to silence or censor that expression."
The Imus controversy stoked a debate in the United States about how to deal with inflammatory words that are widely considered highly offensive but at the same time commonly and casually used in youth culture.
U.S. black leaders such as Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson have led the charge to suppress offensive words while many artists have argued for freedom of expression. New York City declared a symbolic moratorium on the so-called N-word in February.
"Our internal discussions with industry leaders are not about censorship. Our discussions are about the corporate social responsibility of the industry to voluntarily show respect to African Americans and other people of color, African American women and to all women in lyrics and images," the statement from Simmons and Chavis said Monday.
The network recommended the formation of a Coalition on Broadcast Standards that would consist of leading executives from music, radio and television.
Copyright 2007 Reuters. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Reuters with the
don't clown. I suspect many soulstrut posters were greatly enlightened by that.
PS you shoulda come out Saturday fool. that UFC schitt was over way too early for it to be an effective excuse!