Rap is poisoning our children

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Two articles in the past two days talk about rap and its descent:

The first is by Martha Bayles in today's Opinion Journal: Heedful Hip Hop

Bayles describes rising anti-rap sentiment in black communities and on a wider scale. The best part is watching feminist academics try to wiggle their way around criticizing rap music's blatant degradation of women.

At the University of Chicago conference, "Feminism and Hip Hop," the focus was on "crunk," the Atlanta-based style of rap that casts black men as pimps and black women as strippers and "ho's." Some speakers--notably Ms. Bailey from Spelman and Joan Moore from Essence--used the language of morality when describing how crunk degrades women. But when the academic feminists weighed in, moral revulsion got bracketed as naive, and we groundlings were instructed to view "Tip Drill" as part of a "hegemonic intertextuality" in which "the structures of racism, patriarchy, heterosexism and advanced consumer capitalism" are "embedded" or "inscribed" (I forget which).

This sort of thing may sustain graduate students through long Chicago winters, but it is not going to advance the anticrunk cause. For one thing, academic feminism rejects something most people hold dear, the traditional family. As one earnest graduate student put it, the late Tupac Shakur was a true artist because his lyrics "cut against the grain of the normative family," an institution she clearly regarded as the root of all patriarchal evil.

Anything is OK, you see, as long as it fights against the system.

The second touches only slightly on hip-hop in a broader attack on the sexualization of childrens' everyday environments.

In Monday's National Review Online: an excerpt from Gil Reavill's book, Smut: A Sex-Industry Insider (and Concerned Father) Says Enough is Enough.

I'm not particularly interested in the book, but this excerpt is a pretty sobering look at what unsupervised children encounter on a daily basis. Also, since certain societal elements refuse to listen to "religious nutjobs" when they raise questions about the culture, maybe they'll listen to a pornographer.

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This page contains a single entry by Papa-Lu published on April 28, 2005 7:03 AM.

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