Debate resumes over use of words

The rap community is divided over what's appropriate language in the art form.
By TERESA WILTZ and DARRAGH JOHNSON
WASHINGTON POST
WASHINGTON -- At first blush, it seemed as if the latest furor over misogyny and racism in rap had died down, eclipsed by more tragic headlines. Shock jock Don Imus, in the wake of uttering his now-famous two-word slur, got the sack while a victorious Al Sharpton declared that "more people need to get this message." But two weeks past its news expiration date, the debate seems to be gathering renewed strength.
Today, rap is both an art form and an industry under intense examination, both from within and without. Perhaps the late DeLores Tucker, who began railing against rap's "pornographic filth" in the early 1990s, was onto something after all.
On Monday hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons, who just two weeks ago was arguing for the rights of rappers to express themselves as artists, did a seeming about-face and called for the voluntary banning of "bitch," "ho" and the N-word from the lexicon as "extreme curse words." He called for a coalition of industry executives to "recommend guidelines for lyrical and visual standards." Then the NAACP on Tuesday unveiled an initiative to halt racist and sexist imagery in the media, aimed at the record and television industries, recording artists and the African-American community. And on Thursday, in a belated benediction, a civil rights group honored Tucker, the leader of the National Political Congress of Black Women who initiated a national crusade against gangsta rap and took the recording industry to task for putting profits ahead of social responsibility.
Times are changing
Rap, facing sluggish record sales, is at a cultural crossroads. A University of Chicago study released in February said that 62 percent of black teens think rap music videos are degrading to black women.
"I don't see rap in a crisis," Simmons said Tuesday. "This happens every 10 years. People are blaming rap for all of society's ills."
His call for the removal of the unholy trinity of rap insults came as a response to "public outrage," Simmons said, but he remains wary of encroachments on the First Amendment. "It's the potential for us to head off a nasty discussion that promotes censorship."
Rappers, he said, are "going to make poetry no matter what anyone says." And no matter how hard-core their expressions, a segment of the buying public seems to want it.
"I don't think it's going to have a significant impact," Geoff Mayfield, director of charts at Billboard magazine, said of Simmons' recommendation. "A lot of broadcasters will be cautious anyway. I believe that those standards are already adhered to. I don't know how often you would hear the B-word on the radio."
In the music business, decisions are driven more by commerce than ethics, he added, and sales of unedited albums far surpass sales of the "clean" versions. "I don't see that changing."
Backlash?
Tucker's boycotts of hard-core rap and the stores that sold it didn't stop the industry from churning out more and more explicit recordings. Back then her quest seemed quixotic, schoolmarmish and finger-wagging. (On a 1999 release, Snoop Dogg mockingly dedicated his CD to the people "who say gangsta rap is dead: [Expletive] y'all.") While her efforts made headlines and seemingly pushed Warner Bros. to offload the Interscope label, gangsta acts such as Snoop and Tupac Shakur sold well.
But the Imus incident recharged a debate that never really went away. "This is what you would call a perfect storm. Hip-hop was already going through a purging process and self-examination," said Davey D., a hip-hop historian and journalist in the San Francisco area. "The debate around hip-hop being dead brought many of those issues to the forefront. People have grown weary."
To Tucker's husband, Imus' slur "brought about a revival of the struggle she waged, literally, by herself for the past 14 years -- she struggled against this, and speaking out against lyrics and how they demeaned and defamed women," said William Tucker, vice chairman of the Bethune-Dubois Institute, which is honoring his wife, who died in 2005.
There was a time when the rap heard over commercial airwaves was an art form preoccupied with the issues of the day, from Melle Mel's haunting classic about ghetto life, "The Message," to Public Enemy's chanting "Fight the Power." Even for the most devoted hip-hop heads much of rap is hard to take these days, given the same old beats and raggedy rhymes about pimping, loose women, guns and money. (So-called "conscious rap," as embodied by the likes of the Roots and Mos Def, remains forgotten in this debate.)
"Rap is not a perfect art form. I don't know an art form that is," said Danyel Smith, editor in chief of Vibe magazine. "Rap gets a lot of blame, fairly and unfairly, for misogyny and violence, while people tend to forget American cinema, for the last 100 years, has explicit misogyny and explicit violence in Technicolor. Which frankly is what lot of rappers, gangsta and otherwise, are influenced by."
Falling fast
The rap genre has been reeling commercially, with album sales plummeting by 27 percent between 2004 and 2006, according to Nielsen SoundScan. (Album sales across all genres were down 11 percent for the same period.) The genre's free fall has continued this year, with album sales down by more than 33 percent during the first quarter, according to Nielsen SoundScan.
"Hip-hop is a dog at this point. It's not a terrible dog, but records aren't selling," said Felicia Palmer, editor of SOHH.com, a leading hip-hop site. "If I were a record label person, I'd use this as an opportunity to turn things around by taking the proactive approach and putting out a different type of product. If hip-hop is declining, it behooves us to bring it back to where it should be. ... I'm glad this is happening and that the finger is being pointed back at us. Don Imus has taken a major fall, and he's not going down by himself."
The question of hip-hop's culpability in the Imus issue is one that some rap-industry figures appear reluctant to address. Label executives and radio programmers on both coasts repeatedly declined to comment for this article. Will the renewed focus on rap's responsibilities bring a revival of socially conscious rap?
"We can't continue to embrace the 'Do as I say, not as I do' mind-set. It never works. ... We need to turn the mirror back on ourselves and see if we're participatory in our oppression," said Asha Camille Jennings, a New York University law student who three years ago, while a student at Spelman College in Atlanta, organized a protest against Nelly for his negative images of black women, including a video depicting their bodies as credit card machines.
"It starts from within. Whether Snoop calls me a ho or Don Imus calls me a ho, I don't care," she said. "I'm tired of us blaming other people. Nobody held a gun up to 50 Cent's head and said, 'Call that woman a ho!' He wrote the lyrics and he presented it to the record label."