Archive for July 17th, 2007

Y’all know who you are.

Batman vs. Spider-Man.

I’m rollin’ with Pete.

(from okp)

On the recommendation of Stanley Crouch, I bought the book, Pimps Up, Ho’s Down by T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting (and I still hate seeing the plural of “ho” as “h-o-’-s”!). It could’ve been a couple dollars cheaper, but it’s definitely informative. I read it all in one sitting, but it’s pretty dense, so I wasn’t really able to narrow down my (relatively minor but still significant) points of contention to anything I can easily talk about. I’m going through it again, though, so PU,HD may be a source of material for a good minute.

At any rate, to get us started, I’m gonna give an unadulterated quote and we’ll see what we can make of it.

Hip hop culture is no more or less violent and sexist than other American cultural products (think Playboy, prime-time news and television, the flourishing Hooters restaurant chain and now-bankrupt airline, The O’Reilly Factor, hard rock, country music, the blues, or Abercrombie and Fitch catalogues). However, it is more dubiously highlighted by the media as the source of violent misogyny in American youth culture.

That sounds perfectly logical to me…in fact, I’ve said it here (well, here and at the old Stereo) a couple hundred times. Only thing is, as true as it may well be, there is no market for that kind of truth. Meaning this: stories that get traction are the ones that create controversy or conversely, re-tell widely-accepted truisms. Hip-hop’s selling the most? X, Y, and A are prevalent in hip-hop? It must be responsible for the occurrences of X, Y, and A in the world. Only it’s not. X, Y, and A are there, have been there, and would be there if rap had never evolved as a genre. Which is not to say that it has no impact.

Like I said a couple days ago, I don’t know that it’s really possible to listen to certain songs all the time and not be impacted by them. That’s why, for as much as I think of the production on Niggaz4life, I really can’t listen to it a whole lot. Songs like “To Kill A Hooker” and “One Less Bitch” are the types of records that can stain your soul, and I want them to stay in that category. If I listened to them all the time, even if I never acted on them (which I probably wouldn’t) the way I see the world would probably change a little, and that’s a view I don’t wanna appropriate.