Word: rappings
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There's an acrid tang in nearly every area of modern American pop culture. Heavy-metal masters Motley Crue invoke images of satanism and the Beastie Boys mime masturbation onstage. Rap poets like N.W.A. and the 2 Live Crew call for the fire of war against police or the brimstone of explicit, sulfurous sex. Comedians like Sam Kinison and Howard Stern bring locker-room laughs to cable TV and morning radio. On network television, sitcom moms get snickers with innuendos about oral sex. In movies, the F word has become so common, like dirty wallpaper, the industry's conservative ratings...
...powerful places. Senator Jesse Helms fights to force artists to forswear any unwholesome intentions before receiving Government support. Alfred Sikes, the new chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, leans on radio disk jockeys to clean up their acts. No less than the FBI sends a warning letter to a rap group. Susan Baker (wife of the Secretary of State) and Tipper Gore (wife of the Tennessee Senator), founders of the Parents' Music Resource Center, lobby for proscriptive labeling of certain albums. John Cardinal O'Connor, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of New York, inveighs against an Ozzy Osbourne song whose theme...
...makers of the new pop do not ignore this rage. They embrace, exploit and transform it. As the California rap group N.W.A. announces at the start of its album Straight Outta Compton: "You are now about to witness the strength of street knowledge." What they know from the street may not be what the heartland wants to hear. The message may be cleansing or hateful; the lyrics and limericks may expand or debase the language. And if X-rated pop adheres to writer Theodore Sturgeon's useful rule that "90% of everything is crud," most of it may be awful...
Whatever heavy metal can do to provoke censure, rap can outdo. Whereas metal is mostly suggestive, this urban-black music is often politically or sexually explicit. N.W.A. (Niggers With Attitude) won an admonishing letter from the FBI for their song FTha Police, in which the singer warns the ghetto's occupying force: "Ice Cube will swarm/ On any m f in a blue uniform . . ./ A young nigger on the warpath,/ And when I finish it's gonna be a bloodbath." Another group, Public Enemy, has been charged with anti-Semitism in their lyrics and statements to the press. But their...
...rap group is declared obscene. Comics get condemned by pressure groups. Serious movies garner X ratings. A Cardinal of the church blames a rock singer for teen suicides. In a four-letter world, what's a citizen to do? See it in perspective, and take it in stride. Another view: Entertainers should censor themselves before the state does it for them...