by Ben Shapiro
That’s easy: Someone who understands that this gangsta art form is crap. There’s no other way to put it. The overwhelming bulk of rap music has no artistic value, and nearly every rap song has a negative social value. The gangsta culture embodied by rappers and their posses is not worthy of imitation or even exposure. It demeans women, degrades sex, and glorifies criminal behavior.
To portray rap as vital to black culture, as Kerry did, is a subtle form of racism. It assumes that violence and misogyny are integral to the black lifestyle. They aren’t. Black culture has contributed hugely to American society: The civil rights movement brought meaning to American notions of equality and freedom; black contributions to politics, science, music, and art have helped enrich all of us. To demean these accomplishments and contributions by listing rap among them is to demean black culture as a whole. Even the Reverend Al Sharpton made that very point during his presidential campaign, stating that the “music” is “desecrating our culture; it is desecrating our race.” Civil rights marchers didn’t march so that a rapper “has the right to call your mama a ho,” he told a black business group in Richmond.6
Truthfully, Kerry probably had no idea what he was talking about. I wonder if Senator Kerry could name even one rap “song” he finds enlightening, a solitary cut that illuminates life as it is. Maybe he meant “Hotel,” a single by Cassidy and accused child pornographer R. Kelly, which hit number five on Billboard’s Hot Rap Tracks list the week of Kerry’s appearance on MTV7: “Girl you wanna come to my hotel, baby I will leave you my room key. / I’m feelin’ the way you carry yourself girl. / And I wanna get with you ‘cuz you’s a cutie . . . Well if, mami is with it then, mami can give it then, mami a rider, I’ma slide up beside her. / I got a suite, you can creep on through, I know you tryin’ to get your freak on too, / I’ll do it all for that (lady), yeah I ball for that (lady), hit the mall for that (lady), keep it fly for them (ladies), keep my eye on them (ladies), hot tub for them (ladies), pop bub’ for them (ladies), I got love for ma (ladies), yeeah!”
I’m feeling the social energy, Senator! But maybe I’m being unfair. Let’s try 2004’s Billboard leading rap single, “Lean Back,” by the aptly named Terror Squad8: “I don’t give a f—’bout your faults or mishap-penin’s, / Nigga we from the Bronx, New York . . . s—happens, / Kids clappin’ love to spark the place, / Half the niggas in the squad got a scar on they face, / It’s a cold world, and this is ice, / Half a mil’ for the charm, nigga this is life.” Other assorted curse words include multiple “s—[s],” a “faggot,” and one “mo’f—ers.”
Now this is more down Senator Kerry’s alley. It’s a reflection of street life, wherein life sucks and crime is the only way. Now that we’ve listened, can we call the cops on these social degenerates?
Stick with Rap Masta’ B-Shap for just a bit longer. Here’s Billboard’s number three hot rap single for 2004. This one’s called “Freek-A-Leek,” by Petey Pablo.9 Parenthesis indicate background “singers” (wannabe porn stars with breathy voices). Anything outside the parenthesis is my homeboy Petey. “(How you like it daddy?) Would you do it from the front? / (How you like it daddy?) Can you take it from the back? / (How you like it daddy?) Fyna break it down like that! / (How you like it daddy?) 24, 34, 46, good and thick, and once you get it she’ll work wit it. / Pretty face and some cute lips, earring in her tongue and she know what to do wit it . . . And she know why she came here, and she know where her clothes suppose to be (off and over there). / Sniff a little coke, take a little X, smoke a little weed, drink a little bit. / I need a girl that I can freak wit, / wanna try s—, and ain’t scared of a big dick. / And love to get her p—- licked, / by another b—-, cus I ain’t drunk enough to do that.”
This verse, by the way, was broadcast live from the MTV Video Music Awards. Because of that horrific FCC censorship Senator Kerry condemns, the audience heard a series of silences where the lyrics call for obscenity.10
It isn’t as if Petey ain’t willin’ to give a ho some good, clean fun in return: “Tell me what you want, do you want it missionary with your feet crammed into the headboard? / Do you want it from the back with your face in the pillow so you can yell it loud as you want to? / Do you want it on the floor? Do you want it on the chair? / Do you want it over here? Do you want it over there? / Do you want it in ya p—-? Do you want it in ya a—? / I’ll give you anything you can handle!”
Petey sounds like the kind of young man a girl would want to bring home to father. That is, if her father is a drug-dealing ex-con who gets his kicks from stringing out schoolgirls and then pimping them out to his friends.
On the other hand, I’m grateful to Senator Kerry for having pointed out to me the social utility of these songs. Petey Pablo is the black Byron. Terror Squad is urban Tennyson. Cassidy and R. Kelly are the Walt Whitmans of da ‘hood. The importance of these lyrics is surpassed only by Winston Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech in the pantheon of important social statements of the last century. Censorship of this sparkling artistry would be the equivalent of banning Renoir.
The sad part is, this kind of language isn’t even the most extreme—it’s the mainstream. Literally millions of children are hearing this kind of garbage every day. Almost 25 percent of CDs sold in the US in 2003 was hip-hop or R&B; hip-hop is the second-biggest music genre, according to the Recording Industry Association of America.11 You can’t pull up at a stoplight anymore without hearing a booming subwoofer thumping with the sound vibrations of rap.
The rap culture is a real cancer for the black community. According to Professor Edmund Gordon of Yale and Columbia and chairman of the National Task Force on Minority High Achievement, many black males have adopted the culture of the rappers they see on music videos, and are neglecting their academic performance in order to perform rap and hip-hop. 12 Rapper Chuck D of Public Enemy told students at UCLA, “At the end of the ‘hood is jail and death. And we’re gonna put it to the music? That’s vile.”13 A June 2003 survey by Black America’s Political Action Committee (BAMPAC) found that 52 percent of black voters believe rap music is a negative influence on children, and 60 percent would support banning minors from buying sexually explicit music.14
The rap constituency crosses racial lines as well: Soundscan, a sales-tracking company, estimated that 70 percent of rap music consumers are white kids from the suburbs.15 The rap culture has infested the porn generation, through and through, regardless of ethnicity. As Lori Price of the Dallas Morning News writes, “We—I’ll say, since I’m a black hip-hop fan—demanded that nonblacks taste the raw rhythmic style and ebonic-infused, misogynistic lyrics of rap music. Accept this art form as legitimate, with its ugly epithets for women. Drink in its culture, which includes daily use of the N-word. Mainstream society accepted the invitation with a vengeance, to the point that some white fans and artists are using the same language and copping the same attitude.”16
Walk into any high school in the United States, and you can see teenagers—black, white, Hispanic, whatever—in baggy pants, doing the “pimp roll.” They imitate the dress style and the bad grammar, using phrases like “fo’ shizzle my nizzle.” The common high school greeting is “‘Sup, biotch?” These are ridiculously stupid phrases popularized by criminal/thug/rapper/actor Snoop Dogg. Here’s Snoop Dogg’s explanation of his babblings: “Fo’ shizzle: This has many different meanings. It means for real, for sure. I’ll use it in a sentence to let you better understand, check this out: ‘Doggy Fizzle Televizzle’ is gonna be off the hizzle, fo’ shizzle.”17
Thanks, Mr. Dogg—that clears everything up. David Letterman put it best: “I have no idea what the fizzuck I’m talking about.”18
Celebrating the dregs of society
One of the most important record labels in rap was “Death Row Records.” Responsible for the rise of rappers Snoop Dog, Dr. Dre, and Tupac Shakur, the Death Row logo depicts a blindfolded black man strapped into an electric chair. The logo is emblematic of the sometimes fictional, sometimes all too r
eal track of the rap industry: thugs rap, get famous, make money, and then kill someone or are murdered. Of course, it isn’t the criminal justice system or the media giving rappers a bad name—it’s the fact that they’re criminals.
Rap is an “art form” more appropriate to the prison yard than the school yard. Snoop Dogg, the most famous rapper on Earth, stood trial for the murder of twenty-year-old Phillip Woldemariam;19 he’s also a former pornographer and a long-time druggie.20 Tupac Shakur was murdered 21 after being convicted of sexual assault.22 Shakur’s rapping rival, Notorious B.I.G. (a.k.a. Biggie Smalls), was also murdered.23 Death Row Records founder Suge Knight associated openly with the brutal Bloods gang in Los Angeles.24 Known for “mixing business with violence,” Knight is a convicted felon.25 Bad Boy Entertainment founder Sean “Puffy” Combs (a.k.a. P. Diddy) was arrested in December 1999 and charged with gun possession and bribery. Victims testified that Combs had shot them, although Combs was acquitted of all charges with the help of his attorney, the late Johnny Cochran.26
Those criminals/rappers who are dead are often heralded as saints in the rap world and beyond. Tupac Shakur became the subject of an obsequious documentary, Tupac: Resurrection. “Already the most posthumously marketed music celebrity since Elvis & Jimi, rap star Tupac Shakur gets perhaps the definitive authorized-portrait-cum-sanctification treatment,” Variety wrote.27 The Hollywood Reporter lauded the movie, saying that it was “so full of his passion for life that it plays not as a grievous saga but an anthemic, inspiring example, however bittersweet,” and praising Shakur’s “unwavering fury over injustice.”28 Michael Medved commented cuttingly on the canonization of Shakur: “His puzzling posthumous popularity... reflects the degrading and ultimately racist notion that criminal violence represents an essential and authentic element of African American identity.”29
Rap is inextricably linked to thuggery. We’re not talking about a series of troubled artists who contributed great art to society while fighting their own demons. We’re talking about a bunch of thugs who talk about their thuggery for money. As “The Boondocks” creator Aaron McGruder states, “the gangsta image has ingrained itself so deeply into the youth culture that it just became taken for granted . . . [it’s about] living the life you can live once you’ve committed all these horrible crimes.”30
They’re thugs with regard to violence, and they’re thugs with regard to women. “Make as much money as you can and have as much sex as humanly possible,” explains Consuela Francis, assistant professor of African American Literature at the College of Charleston.31 Sex is never an expression of love, but instead an expression of lust, with rappers acting as though they’re dogs in heat.
In the rap view, women are all bitches and hos, and men are pimps. It’s a repulsively misogynistic view, and one that affects both boys and girls. Boys learn that it’s okay to treat women like dirt; “these contemporary buffoons, vulgarians and misogynists are defined as the purest black young men, the ones who are ‘keeping it real,’” in the words of New York Daily News columnist Stanley Crouch.32 Girls learn that boys want strippers and prostitutes, and act accordingly; “women are defining themselves in reaction to what men want, rather than what they want,” says Touré, pop culture correspondent for CNN.33
The most popular rappers on earth are misogynists. Chart-topping rapper Ludacris raps dirty in “Area Codes”: “I’ve got hos, in different area codes . . . I just pick up the muthaf——’ phone and dial / I got my condoms in a big-ass-sack / I’m slaggin’ this d—like a New Jack, biotch.”
50 Cent, who won several “New Artist” awards for his first album, has several songs focused on sex. In “Candy Shop,” a sex-obsessed tune which spent more than six weeks as America’s number one music video on MTV, he intones to his prostitute girlfriend: “I take you to the candy shop / I’ll let you lick the lollypop/ Go ‘head girl, don’t you stop/ Keep goin ‘til you hit the spot . . . I’ll break it down for you now, baby it’s simple / If you be a nympho, I’ll be a nympho . . . Got the magic stick, I’m the love doctor/Have your friends teasin you ‘bout how sprung I gotcha . . . I’m tryin to explain baby the best way I can/ I melt in your mouth girl, not in your hands.”
Rapper Nelly, one of the most famous “artists” of his genre, has songs entitled “Pimp Juice” (“She only want me for my pimp juice”), “Thicky Thick Gurls” (“Lookin like a lolli-pop waitin for the lick girl”), “Wrap Sumden” (“Weed is actually a medicine for me, you know”), and “Tho Dem Wrappas” (“F—a b—- and some clothes / I gotta get rich, go platinum and do shows”), among many others.
For this wonderful contribution to society, Nelly won Favorite Male Singer at the 2004 Nickelodeon Kids’ Choice Awards.34 Yes, he’s a kid-friendly scumbucket!
Essence, the most popular black women’s magazine in the country, finally let loose with its frustration over the horrific depiction of women in rap in its January 2005 issue. The editors wrote:We are mothers, sisters, daughters and lovers of hip-hop. And today we stand at the forefront of popular culture: independent, talented and comfortable with the skin we’re in. We are really feeling ourselves. Perhaps that’s why we’re so alarmed at the imbalance in the depiction of our sexuality and character in music. In videos we are bikini-clad sisters gyrating around fully clothed grinning brothers like Vegas strippers on meth. When we search for ourselves in music lyrics, mix tapes and DVDs and on the pages of hip-hop magazines, we only seem to find our bare breasts and butts . . . The damage of this imbalanced portrayal of Black women is impossible to measure. An entire generation of Black girls are being raised on these narrow images. And as the messages and images are broadcast globally, they have become the lens through which the world now sees us. This cannot continue.”35
Of course, when confronted with female rage, male rappers claim that the demands of the marketplace give them license to do whatever they will. Ludacris protested his innocence to Essence: “I don’t mean to depict women in a certain way. The ones who want to shake what their mama gave them are going to do that whether they’re in videos or not. As artists, we explore our creativity through videos. Who sees those videos on BET, or whatever music channel is showing it, is not always up to us.” Similarly, Nelly refused to take any blame for his portrayal of women: “I accept my role and my freedom as an artist. I respect women and I’m not a misogynist. I’m an artist. Hip-hop videos are art and entertainment.”36
If a bad childhood is no excuse for awful behavior, neither is a willing market. There’s no doubt that there are plenty of druggies willing to buy cocaine through dealers, but that doesn’t make dealers morally blameless. Rappers need to get over their obsession with their own genitals, and start working on changing their perverse views of women, or there’s no end to the damage this destructive culture can create.
The “wiggers”
“Nobody white would be allowed to get away with selling such a product,” wrote New York Daily News columnist Stanley Crouch about the vulgarity and misogyny of rap. “It’s about time we started seeing some equality.”37
Well, we’re starting to see some equality. This time, it’s the white community doing for “equality” in rap what the feminist community did for “equality” in sex. The standards have been lowered for everybody—deviancy has been defined down. Young white men are so eager to take part in the rush toward musical and moral oblivion that they’ve begun imitating the gangsta lifestyle. Such suburban yuppies-turned-bruthas are often termed “wiggers”—white niggers. “Seriously, the clothes, the caps, the doo-rags. I’m told some whites even prefer to use black hair products, like Afro Sheen and Murray’s Pomade, because it controls their tresses more securely than products intended for naturally straight hair,” details Askia Muhammad of the Washington Informer.38
At my Orthodox Jewish high school, many of my classmates knew scores of rap lyrics by heart. There is very little on this planet weirder than watching a white suburban kid driving an SUV, putting on a bad “nigga” accent, pumping up
the subwoofer until the car shakes—and then walking into school to study Hebrew. The closest these teens will ever come to pimps and hos is watching Pretty Woman, and the closest they’ll ever come to “bustin’ a cap” will be paintball.
Kyle Jones, a white suburbanite from Newton, Massachusetts, told FOX News “I don’t want you to see me as that I’m trying to be black or I’m trying to be, like, too hard. Or I’m a white kid. I just want you to see me as me.” He then proceeded to rap for the camera.39 Adam Schneider of Great Neck, New York, explained, “It’s what I am. I can relate to it. I know exactly what they’re saying. It’s just what it is.”40
The New York Times ran a 6,597-word piece on one “wigger” who had to battle his inner white demons. The piece is worth reading simply for its tragicomic quality. “Billy Wimsatt was twenty-seven, still clinging to the hip-hop life,” sniffled the Times. “He didn’t look terribly hip-hop, and not because he was white. He was balding and brainy-looking, with an average build and an exuberant nature.... Like many young hip-hop heads, he regarded hip-hop, with its appeal to whites and blacks, as a bold modern hope to ease some of the abrasiveness between the races.” Wimsatt even penned a piece for the hip-hop magazine the Source, critiquing “wiggers” for diluting the hip-hop culture. “Yes, Billy Wimsatt seemed about as authentically hip-hop as a white guy could get,” said the Times. But, the Times concluded, “As you got older, holding onto your hip-hop values seemed a lot harder if you were white.”41
So why are white teenagers picking up the sick stylings of rap? Selwyn Hinds, editor of the Source, elucidates the issue: “Black culture has always been the well of coolness. You know, if you wanted to be cool, if you wanted to be perceived as cool, you would always grab, you know, your cup and run to that well and take a drink. And in the last twenty years, that well of coolness has been hip-hop.”42 But what is cool about heavy syncopation, lack of melody and harmony, and perverse lyrics? “[W]hite kids embrace hip-hop because it’s got phat beats, yes,” posits Knight Ridder writer Jim Walsh, “But it also distances them from their parents, and in some sense, serves as a rejection of their parents’ culture and their race itself.... Like no generation before it, the hip-hop generation recognizes that identity crisis as its own. It is the first generation to live and breathe diversity and multiculturalism, not just study it.”43
