Practicalmadness

I bring you more prime examples from the internets of people who have Missed The Point Entirely.

First, Essence Magazine announced a “take back the night”-style campaign to protest misogyny in hip-hop. Then they ran some reactions from hip-hop luminaries such as Russell Simmons. Yet on first glance, it seems less like these hippety-hoppers are in concurrence with Essence’s new feminism and more like they’re saying “it ain’t me, and even if it was, that just how this business is so it ain’t nobody’s fault.” In other words, they found that hip-hop has Missed The Point Entirely:

Talib Kweli, hip-hop artist
Videos can be art, but the video didn’t start out as art. It started out as a promotional tool…So what’s the easiest way to sell something? When you drive down the street you see titties selling you all types of things…so why not use ass and titty to sell music? It makes perfect sense. Whether it’s right or not, I feel that as a man, when I see it, I’m going to look. It’s going to catch my attention. I believe an artist’s responsibility is not to uphold the morals of society. An artist’s responsibility is to speak honestly about what’s going on and what people are going through.

Translation: Ass and titties sell. And besides, it’s not my job to be a role model, just to speak honestly about what I see. Thus I imply that what I see is ass and titties, and so this warped perception I’m forcing on young black women is, in fact, perfectly normal.

Debra Lee, president and COO, BET Holdings, Inc.
BET gets beat up for playing what is selling in stores and getting played in constant rotation on the radio. Many times the sexual aspect is gratuitous. You can’t have women hardly dressed and men fully clothed and say it’s not one-sided or problematic. It is an issue BET has to deal with. Years ago the concern was violence. Now it’s sexuality, and some artists go too far. I hope this is a phase, and we do have to work with artists on it. But if more people are asking for it and like it, who’s to say that’s wrong? If artists put out videos like this, and people don’t like it, they should vote at the record store. Our Uncut show enables us to offer the industry an outlet. If something is adult-oriented, we can say it is going to Uncut.

Translation: Ass and titties sell, and as a for-profit company it is BET’s responsibility to show as much gratuitous sexuality as possible. And if you don’t like it, you should just stop buying it. (And by “it,” I do mean all hip-hop except for that avant-garde “art” stuff only white people listen to.) In the interests of decorum, though, we do restrict the absolute raunchiest stuff for a late-night program, and only subject primetime audiences to a lesser degree of raunch.

Ludacris, hip-hop artist
In my videos I try to be versatile: Sometimes I have women dancing, and then, for example, in my Stand Up video, there are no naked women. I don’t mean to depict women in a certain way. The ones who want to shake what their mama gave them are going to do that whether they’re in videos or not. As artists, we explore our creativity through videos. Who sees those videos on BET, or whatever music channel is showing it, is not always up to us.

Translation: I try to be versatile; sometimes there aren’t even naked women in my videos. Besides, it’s not even me, it’s the women’s and BET’s fault.

To be fair, some of the responses on Essence’s web site are thoughtful and to the point. Ironically, one of the more interesting ones came from the editor of King magazine, which is best described as the hip-hop Maxim. In other words, this is a man who makes his living selling sex to young black people.

Datwon Thomas, editor-in-chief of King magazine
In the hip-hop industry, we get so competitive and do what will win and what will sell and go to any ends to make that happen. You get so caught up in competing that you may drop your guard and do something crazy. For example, if Smooth or Maxim has a hot girl that we featured or wanted to and they get her in a swimsuit, I think I want to show her topless in a thong. Or they photographed her with body paint, I have to put a vanilla wafer over her chest. I don’t want to get locked into that. Eventually you’ll have a butt-naked woman just standing there. I’ve been able to not let it engulf me. I’ve been a victim but haven’t been engulfed. I have two daughters and a wife; I can’t just give in to this.

Now, I didn’t say it was necessarily a right viewpoint, but it is interesting that what Mr. Thomas is saying here is that he is torn between his own desire to shift away from this creeping anti-feminism, and his imperative as a highly paid magazine executive to promote it while out-raunching his competitors.

The mistake nearly all of the respondents make: accepting the connection between female sexuality and money as something that’s normal, rather than the very essence of the problem. These people are saying that the reason why they can’t depict women in a more positive light is because nobody’s paying them to; that it can be in anyone’s commercial interest to degrade black women is rather, well, bad.

In other words, Essence and the hip-hop community have quite an uphill battle ahead of them, assuming they can even figure out what they’re fighting for.