I saw some dude skateboarding this morning, while I was walking to class. Someone skating this early on in the winter is like an act of war; a challenge to all other boarders to step up. I feel like I should be out there right now, shredding sidewalk.

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Trent Reznor is a baby

BTW, Loonette the clown from the Big Comfy Couch is smokin’ hot. Seriously, I’m mad crushing on her right now.

***(Just so you realize before you begin reading: I’m responding to something I saw on TV about hip-hop. I have things to say about other genres of music and expression as well, but we’re talking about hip-hop here. And yes, I know there is such a thing as conscious hip-hop, because I listen to a bit of it myself.)***

Hello friends! Today I’m here to talk to you about mainstream hip-hop.

One day last week, Paula Zahn devoted an episode of her show (on CNN) to Hip-Hop culture. The overarching question she was asking was if hip-hop was art or poison: is it worth protecting as an art form regardless of it’s woman hating, gay bashing, and celebration of excess and violence.

I’m not here to talk about whether hip-hop is poison or art: there is good being done in the genre as well as bad, and I don’t feel like I’m well equipped to pass ultimate judgment on it. What I will be talking about is accountability. Who should the burden of policing the genre fall to, and who should take the blame for the direction hip-hop is going in?

The thing that immediately interested me was that artists in the genre and the ones who brought hip-hop to the mainstream don’t seem to want to take any sort of responsibility for what they put in their lyrics. They say that the misogyny and glorification of violence that exist in hip-hop lyrics is not to be taken seriously, and/or that they are merely mirroring problems which exist in our culture and in other art forms. They say that what they rap about is tongue in cheek, and the focus should be on the music and not on the content of the lyrics.

I call bullshit. Whether or not hip-hop create mores violence through it’s lyrics (evidence suggests that the messages in music do not tend to exacerbate violence-in fact, in the United States, crime drops during the heyday of “gangsta rap”), and whether or not it is merely mirroring what we see in culture right now, these artists are making money from hateful speech, and glorifying excess. They need to understand that they are responsible for perpetuating the negativity they are mirroring from society, through their music. Hip-hop artists need to realize that what they say and do does have an effect on the world.

I’m not clamoring for the censorship of any form of art, be it hip-hop music or painting or poetry or whatever. I believe intensely in freedom of expression. But to claim that the lyrics and imagery portrayed in mainstream hip-hop videos is somehow showing the terrible underside of the “streets”, to effect social change (or whatever mirroring the problems of society really means) is complete farce. Don’t tell me that “Walk it Out” by Unk has some social message.

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I’m not a city guy, I’m from the burbs — that’s even worse

THE BARBER SHAPED MY EYEBROWS WHEN HE CUT MY HAIR

p.s.

More to come this week! The return of serious Nana posts!