January 03, 2005

Women Oppose the Misogyny in Rap Music

For over a decade, rap music has used lyrics praising hostility of all different kinds—drive-by shootings; drug-dealing; cop-killing; and many kinds of hostility toward women. Anyone objecting has been told that they are violating the rappers’ freedom of speech. This has always been a disingenous argument. No one wants to make it illegal for people to say obnoxious things. They have the legal right. But others have the equally legal right to ask them to stop being unpleasant.

Finally, a group of people is speaking up that cannot be intimidated by the spurious freedom-of-speech argument. Essence Magazine is opposing the attacks made by rap music on women:

The most successful black women’s magazine, Essence, is in the middle of a campaign that could have monumental cultural significance.

Essence is taking on the slut images and verbal abuse projected onto black women by hip hop lyrics and videos.

The magazine is the first powerful presence in the black media with the courage to examine the cultural pollution that is too often excused because of the wealth it brings to knuckleheads and amoral executives.

...At a listening session that Weathers and the other staffers had with entertainment editor Cori Murray, “We found the rap lyrics astonishing, brutal, misogynistic. ... So we said we were going to pull no punches, especially since women were constantly being assaulted.”

...Essence has a year-long strategy that includes a town meeting at Spelman College in February.

Things are getting hot. This is a beginning that has been a long time coming, and it is good to see it all forming naturally with the women in the lead.

Kerry in 2008? Newsweek discusses the possibility of Kerry running for President next time:

He never quite came out and said it, but Kerry sounded very much like a man who was running for president again. He has a mailing list with 2.9 million names and an organization in every state. His moneymen have not backed away. By and large, Kerry has not been blamed for the defeat, at least not the way former vice president Al Gore was after the 2000 election. Some of Kerry’s followers are already plotting how Kerry can defeat Hillary Clinton in the Iowa caucuses in 2008. The conventional wisdom, already congealing before Bush’s second Inaugural, pictures Kerry and Clinton as the early Democratic front runners.

I remember the same talk about Gore after the 2000 election. As late as 2002, a CNN poll found that “two-thirds of the public thinks Gore will be the likely Democratic nominee in 2004”.

The Newsweek article concludes:

As this reporter left his house in November, Kerry called out and followed him down the street. He wanted to show a letter from a schoolgirl that had been left on his stoop. The letter read, in part, “John Kerry, you’re the greatest!” Kerry looked into the reporter’s eye. “The pundits have never liked me,” he said. “Is it the way I look? The way I sound?” He seemed vulnerable for a moment, then caught himself, smiled and walked home to his empty house.

He’s still thinking the way to win an election is to make superficial changes in the way he looks and sounds, rather than in what he says. I doubt he’ll be a strong contender for the Democrat presidential nomination in 2008.