"The Style, But Not the Substance" by Baraki Kitwana

OK, one last one and that's it. But I came across this article by way of Oliver Wang at Poplicks. It's an excellent piece by Baraki Kitwana at Newsday about Imus, black popular culture, and consumerism. It's one critical analysis that hits it on the mark.

The Style, But Not the Substance
Baraki Kitwana, Newsweek

When Don Imus put his foot in his mouth on the air last week with a dirty and derogatory reference to young black women, he was articulating a message that had been clearly voiced by Michael Richards, Rush Limbaugh and countless others long before him. Ditto the white law students at the University of Connecticut who donned big booties and blackface this year on Martin Luther King Day, as well as the rash of undergraduates across the country, from Michigan to South Carolina, who somehow imagine that hosting "pimp and ho parties"is a good idea.

That message is this: The aesthetics of hip-hop culture - from the language and clothing to the style and sensibility - can be absorbed into American popular culture like any other disposable product without any effort or responsibility on the part of the consumer.

It is an idea in part ushered in by the marginal voices of black youth themselves, youth so eager to be visible that they gave up far too much of their identity in the interest of partnering with the corporate music industry. Together, and all the while green-lighted by the Federal Communications Commission, a handful of rap artists packaged and commodified rap music (not to be confused with hip-hop culture lived daily by countless youth around the globe at a local level, from graffiti and break dancing to deejaying, spoken word poetry and political activism.).

Encouraged by the quick bucks, this partnership was quickly reinforced by additional peddlers of one-dimensional images of young black men as violent, and women as oversexed bitches and hos - from filmmakers and television producers to music video directors, comedians and beyond.

These snake oil salesmen marvel at the gravitational pull that hip-hop exerts over American youth and see dollar signs. Drawing necessary distinctions between the various lifestyles (street culture, prison culture and the traditional culture of black America) that converge on the national stage isn't even an afterthought.

The result is what cultural critic Greg Tate addressed in his 2005 book, "Everything but the Burden." That is, far too many American consumers of black popular culture don't take the time to decode the complexity of black life that produces a 50 Cent, a Jay-Z or a Russell Simmons, multi-millionaires all, who peddle rap music riddled with the language of the street.

When I interviewed Jay-Z as I was completing my book "Why White Kids Love Hip-Hop: Wankstas, Wiggers, Wannabes and the New Reality of Race in America," he put it this way: "Hip-hop is not clothing or a place you go, this is people's lives, people's culture."

But who picks up the slack when this gets lost on the consumer?

Imus - and his defenders who claim they learned this language from hip-hop - are only partly correct, even as they are wholly dishonest. They would do themselves and the country a service by owning up to at least three facts. 1) Imus took liberty with a culture that he didn't fully understand, and when he got called on it, rather than coming clean, he pointed the finger at hip-hop to take the weight. 2) Clearly those far more powerful than rappers are complicit in bringing pimp and ho talk to the American mainstream. 3) If indeed Imus is a hip-hop fan, innocently consuming its language and aesthetics, that doesn't remove him from the responsibility to understand hip-hop cultural and political roots in all their complexity.

Rather than an ignorant fan chopping it up in the living room with one of his buddies, he's a public figure whose voice is heard by millions. His responsibility then is even greater.

That is why he had to be removed from his radio and cable TV networks. Lest folks inside the hip-hop activist community who were calling for such be deemed hypocrites, let the record show that media justice advocates such as Davey D Cook (of the organization daveyd.com), Rosa Clementes (of R.E.A.C.H. Hip-Hop) and Lisa Fagers (of industryears.com) have for years been very loudly challenging the music industry and rappers to raise the bar.

Hip-hop's internal criticism is something that a 2007 study by the Black Youth Project recently documented. In a survey of 1,600 young people it found that the "overwhelming majority" of young people agree that rap music videos contain too many references to sex, and "the majority" agree rap music videos portray black women and black men in bad or offensive ways.

Maybe the flak over Don Imus' mean-spirited, sexist and racist comments can help to raise the volume of those voices. Our failure to hear them, like our failure to check Imus, can mean the difference between our ability to escape America's old racial politics and our historical tendency to drown in them.