Marquis



// Don’t Blame Hip-Hop  // // By Kelefa Sanneh  // ~hip-hop has been dismissed as noise, blamed for concert riots, accused of glorifying crime/sexism/greed/Ebonics ~Don Imus characterized the Rutgers ’ women’s basketball team as “some nappy headed hos” which led to his firing and a discussion about the crude language some rappers use ~this hip-hop controversy does not have a villain or a villainous song ~Oprah Winfrey organized a two-show “town meeting” on what is wrong with hip-hop and how to fix it   ~Russell Simmons appeared on the show and promised to take action…then a press conference was canceled with no explanation ~Monday Simmons and Ben Chavis (leader of Hip-Hop Summit Action Network) released a statement suggesting that all albums be censored ~on 60 Minutes hip-hop culture was criticized for popularizing an anti-snitching ethos ~rapper Cam’ron said cooperating with the police would hurt his professional reputation and run counter to “the way I was raised”…when asked what he would do if he was living next door to a serial killer, he shrugged and said he would move ~this is not a debate about freedom of speech; it is about hip-hop’s vexed position in the American mainstream ~hip-hop is promoted by major corporations which leads to a double standard in the media ~rappers are trying to negotiate a culture in which the boundaries of public and private space keep changing…so are the standards that govern them ~mainstream culture seems to be becoming more crude and it is getting harder to keep the sordid things on the margins ~consumers have learned to live with all sorts of censorship, including the film rating system, the F.C.C.’s regulation of broadcast media and cable networks ~hip-hop fans have come to expect their favorite songs on the radio to have curses/epithets/drug references/mention of violence deleted ~the African-American oral tradition known as toasting is one of hip-hops origins…those toasts are full of the three major words considered offensive ~many rappers are corporate entertainers who act like outspoken mavericks; they are paid to say private (sometimes offensive) things in public ~the current situation of hip-hop having a more light-hearted and clean cut sound, suggests that hip-hop could shift from touch talk and crude jokes to playful club exhortations and still be popular