Misstropolis

Wednesday, May 02, 2007

Hip Hop Says No to Ho

by Wally Holland

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The media frenzy du jour surrounding Don Imus’ on-air slurs (and subsequent firing) quickly dissipated in the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings. We should be grateful for that; the Imus affair wasn’t enlightening enough to merit prolonged coverage (nor entertaining enough for puff-piece treatment).

In fact, the media’s focus on Imus was a(nother) distraction from a broader discussion about racist language in the entertainment and music industry. And Imus’ remarks about the Rutgers women’s basketball team…

That’s some nappy-headed hos there. I’m gonna tell you that now, man, that’s some - woo. And the girls from Tennessee, they all look cute, you know, so, like - kinda like - I don’t know.’

…were just the kind of distraction even ‘well-meaning’ audiences crave.

On nationally-syndicated radio, talk like that’ll get you canned (but probably won’t permanently damage your career; Imus will be back). Spoken over a beer at the bar, it’s...what? Harmless banter? Calling ‘em like you see ‘em, maybe? Those are excuses we’re invariably given for everyday racism.

But his bigger sin was professional: Imus’ remarks were most likely evidence not of any xenophobia, but rather of a poverty of wit. The job of the ‘shock jock,’ is, after all, to serve as a pressure-release valve for Joe and Jane Listener. Why were people surprised at Imus’ stupid ‘jokes’ about the appearance of a team of black women? That’s what they pay him for. In fact, the Imus uproar illustrates the way talk radio (like political punditry) outsources coarseness, allowing the audience to try out, ‘criticize,’ and share such unutterable notions through a proxy – guilt-free.

If corporate media players were serious about firing bigots there’d be no talk radio at all… Thoughtful obscenity has a proud history, but the button pushing of Lenny Bruce, Bill Hicks, or Dave Chappelle is a far cry from Imus’s ignorant babble.

In the wake of the Imus firing, Russell Simmons and other music industry types met to talk about racial epithets in pop music. A couple days later, Simmons put out a public statement through his Hip-Hop Summit Action Network calling for the removal of the words bitch, ho, and nigger from ‘clean’ (radio broadcast) versions of hip-hop tunes. Bravely, none of the industry execs associated themselves with the statement. Hip-hop radio sticks to ‘clean’ releases, but that simply means a gaping hole in the vocals where an obscenity was. When substitutions are made, they sometimes improve the song (2005’s deplorable ‘Let’s Get Retarded’ by Black-Eyed Peas became the merely boring ‘Let’s Get It Started’), but not often.

Simmons’ defensive self censorship was purely gestural, of course. Publicity like this might keep would-be Lynne Cheneys at bay, but doesn’t speak in any way to the cultural influence and colossal business of hip-hop in the U.S.; after all, Simmons’ biggest moneymaker was current Def Jam president Jay-Z. The word nigger means one thing coming from a craggy white radio host and his ilk, and another from Jay-Z or Fabolous. That should be obvious by now.

The problem isn’t that Imus used the words ‘nappy-headed hos’ - it’s that millions of listeners didn’t notice. It’s not terribly worrisome that the word ‘bitch’ appears in the music of opportunistic misogynists like Snoop Dogg; it’s worrisome that so many of hip-hop’s fans continue to sing along.

We don’t need even cleaner ‘clean’ radio singles, we need an audience able to see what ‘dirty’ words can do. There are some things that simply needn’t be heard - ask the newsmen who aired Cho Seung-hui’s deranged suicide message - but the Imus/Russell Simmons sideshow prevents a meaningful conversation about racism from taking place.  Let’s shift the discussion away from Big Media’s overemphasis on racist vocabulary and syntax and look around us to see if we can change about not only what we say but what we do.