Word: rappings
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...prominence of African-American organizations as critics of gangsta rap is a new element in this year's version of the culture wars. In his new campaign against Time Warner, Bill Bennett is allied with C. DeLores Tucker, head of the National Political Congress of Black Women. After a woman working at radio station WBLS in New York complained last year about the lyrics of one rap song, management established a committee to screen the playlist. For station head Pierre Sutton, who is black, it's simply a matter of "not in my house you don't.'' Says Sutton: "Artists...
Though advertisers haven't banded together yet, some citizen groups are trying it. Dennis Walcott, president of the New York Urban League, organized a protest last week at radio station wqht in New York to persuade the station to stop playing Shimmy Shimmy Ya, a rap song that the protesters say encourages sex without condoms. "I'm not asking for censorship,'' says Walcott. "I'm asking for corporations who make money from these things to think about content and message...
...also not as easy as it sounds. Some decisions by media companies may seem like no-brainers. How many rap songs about slicing women's throats does the world really need? But most other judgments of taste are more difficult calls. Both of the films that Dole deplored, Natural Born Killers and True Romance, happen to have been written by Quentin Tarantino. He's also the explosively gifted director of Pulp Fiction, the great cockeyed movie where that guy quotes from the Bible and the gun goes brrrr and some younger viewers think it's cool-lots of older viewers...
...think there is no question but that he has. Not so much because he has positioned himself better with the cultural right, but because, as Americans across the political spectrum realize, he is right -- just as President Clinton was right a few years ago when he castigated rap singer Sister Souljah for saying that blacks have killed one another long enough and that it was time for them to start killing whites. When you glamourize murder, as Natural Born Killers does; or glorify violence against women, as does 2 Live Crew; when lyrics are anti-Semitic, as Public Enemy...
People like pop culture -- that's what makes it popular. Movies drenched in sex and gore, gangsta rap, even outright pornography are not some sort of alien interstellar dust malevolently drifting down on us, but products actively sought out and beloved by millions. When fighting to abolish the NEA and other government support for the arts, conservatives are quick to condemn "cultural alitism" and exalt the majority tastes served by the marketplace. So how can they turn around and blame entertainment corporations for following the money and giving mass audiences what they want? Talk about alitism...