One of the things to come out of the Don Imus fiasco is that why should a guy be fired for saying things that are very tame in relation to what hip hop artists say in their music or project through their image. While there is some validity to that train of thought it doesn’t really fit into any definite context (just like racism in general). The main problem with this argument is that there is no direct correlation between Don Imus and hip hop and that’s a pretty tough hurdle to clear right off the bat.
Don Imus carries no weight in the hip hop world and, I suspect, very few (if any) people in the hip hop world attach any reciprocal weight to Don Imus. That’s the first point. The second point revolves more around what hip hop was and has become and, more importantly, what people want it to be.
Hip hop essentially started out as an extension of dance music but relied more on storytelling than just being constructed solely around beats and choruses. What made songs like “Rapper’s Delight” become a zeitgeist throughout black communities in the early ’80′s was that the story being told was being told in a new form and, more importantly, being told to a very static group of people who could relate immediately to it. White people may have been attracted to the music but few could relate directly to the stories being told. We simply did not have the same set of idioms and expressions in our everyday life. That last sentence is important because it has a lot to do with what hip hop would ultimately become.
Because white people (mostly teenagers and college students) didn’t have a universally cool set of cool idioms, hip hop became a mesmerizing influence. Like blues, country, and rock music before it hip hop started branching out to a style that confronted its listeners with stories of harsher realities; stories that mainstream America was either unaware of or consciously decided not to listen to. Issues that were raised in a creative and less blatant manner from artists like Grandmaster Flash were brushed aside by artists like Public Enemy who confronted the listener with very specific messages and ideas.
Then, N.W.A. released Straight Outta Compton.
Straight Outta Compton polarized listeners, both black and white. A large majority of white people were scared for obvious reasons—you had black people spouting out intense messages about police corruption, selling drugs, and gang violence but what really scared the white people was that the white kids were eating it up. So, on the white side you had people who were just plain scared and lobbying to have the music removed or severely censored. On the black side, however, there was a sense of empowerment—a license had been created which allowed people to create music that both scared and pissed white people off while gaining extra favor within their own community by reaching a new level of reality in artistic expression. Following Compton, black artists seemed to embrace en masse the idea that they could construct a very volatile and contradictory image and movement—the “n word” could be used freely, but only in context with other black people; success became more and more predicated on street credibility, even though most consumers were white and far removed from the streets that were being described; women were objectified not only in a lyrical sense but with a song’s corresponding video as well. And on and on.
Ayn Rand advanced the idea that contradictions could not exist in a rational world and I believe that these contradictions are at the very heart of why hip hop is in the predicament it’s in. It wants to be seen as a realistic prism of inner-city plight yet quickly downshifts in to “we’re all just artists here and this part of our act” when people take certain parts of their world to task.
To be sure, the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin were no saints and they certain objectified women, both in song and in real life with groupies in their heyday (see: legendary Led Zeppelin story about a groupie and a shark head). And, because of this, it’s suddenly very easy to say that white bands (or, more specifically, white rock bands) get a pass and black hip hop artists don’t. The blinding difference between the two? While white rock bands will surely never run out of ways to write misogyny into their lyrics, there is rarely ever an aggressive image associated with the song or the act. Most rock acts don’t incorporate women on stage or in video; whereas the hip hop arena will sometimes tap in to the stripper arena to find women for its videos and concert settings. It’s one thing to speak about morally questionable behavior; it’s quite another to package it as part of the whole multimedia experience. This is why high-level executives, athletes, and celebrities have certain rumors around them suppressed merely as rumors.
If rumors started coming out tomorrow that Peyton Manning had a stripper problem and that members of his entourage were suspects in a couple of nightclub shootings, 98% of the nation wouldn’t believe it at first (even if it turned out to be true). Why, because he’s white? I’m sure some would say that but the most critical element at play is that there’s no empirical evidence that would suggest this could be true. If the same story came out about Snoop Dogg or Young Jeezy? How many people would think it to not be true? Manning didn’t cultivate an image based on entourages, objectifying women, or prison culture so it would be counterintuitive to believe anything like that in regards to Peyton Manning the public persona.
Has any of what I’ve wrote so far conjure up any image or correlation to Don Imus? Anything at all?
In the book Blink, Malcolm Gladwell points out a very interesting study in regards to how people react without thinking in daily life and how this correlates to autism. People with autism have no real ability to focus on human interaction. Autistic children and adults typically do not respond when their name is called, nor can they follow simple human interactions such as people pointing to one another or be able to pick up on most human emotions that most of us take for granted such as anger or sarcasm. In one study, an autistic man in his forties was asked to watch Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? while wearing a special hat equipped with sensors that tracked his eye movements throughout the movie.
In one particular scene, Elizabeth Taylor’s character is blatantly flirting with a male dinner guest while her husband looks on. She touches his leg. Suspense begins to creep in as you can see her husband in the background looking more and more angry at her actions. The man watching this part of the scene fixated on none of the characters as a light switch became the primary focus of his attention. Later on, her husband grabs a shotgun and looks as though he’s going to kill her except when the trigger is pulled an umbrella unfolds instead of a bullet being shot. To you or I, this scene would have a sense of drama and we would pick up on facial features and reactions and believe that the husband was going to kill Elizabeth Taylor. To the man in the study, the scenes held no inherent value and when the umbrella came out of the gun he laughed because the whole time his attention was on objects. And an umbrella shooting of a gun is funny if you subtract all human interaction from those scenes.
For those who don’t have autism, they can pick up on very subtle things such as a person’s facial expression or an inherent (but ultimately indescribable) ability to just know when something is right or wrong. Our mind’s are so powerful that they make decisions for us before we can rationally process it. Autistic people do not have this ability; everything is broken down primarily to objects.
Gladwell makes the case (by citing other studies) that people also have an ability to make themselves temporarily autistic. When cops shoot a suspect multiple times even though no danger was present is a prime example. Your brain and heartbeats begin to run wild and your conscious, logical self is lost: all you can focus on is objects. What’s the most common theme in cops depositions? I don’t know what the suspect was holding or saying, I just saw him reach for something and I shot him.
The reality is probably far more intense. The cop or cops reached a level where logic went out the window. They were no longer able to read facial expressions. If the suspect pointed or pleaded to the cops that he wasn’t holding anything it went unnoticed because the focus of their eyes was on a single hand or a pocket. All they saw was an object and they couldn’t explain why they focused so hard on it.
Just like the light switch during Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
I think this is the biggest problem that confronts us with issues like “Should Don Imus be fired?” or “Has hip hop gone too far?” We’re all staring at objects and missing the facial expressions and interactions. We’re missing the human element.
Because the reality is we need to do a better job of educating people. The people who are quick to blame Imus for all of society’s ills need to reminded that there are far more pressing problems that need to be fixed above smoking out a washed-up radio personality from a job at CBS (especially since he can now go to satellite radio and say worse things). And, the people who are quick to blame the double standards present in hip hop today should be reminded to be proactive in dispelling the myths that hip hop tries to pass off as being cool (i.e.-baggy pants started as a prison sign for men who wanted to hook up with other men).
Kids will always be quick to buy in to the wrong things if only to piss off their parents. But kids don’t look at things in a full context. They have a tendency to only look at a light switch. Adults should know better. We may need to re-evaluate a lot of our knee-jerk nature and learn to stop looking at the light switch.