Life Ain't Nothing But Benzos and Hos

Stanley Crouch, in the NY Daily News, on a rebellion in the Afro-American media against hip-hop's images of 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.

It's high time.

Says Crouch:

When asked how the magazine decided to take a stand, the editor, Diane Weathers said, "We started looking at the media war on young girls, the hypersexualization that keeps pushing them in sexual directions at younger and younger ages."

Things got deeper, she says, because, "We started talking at the office about all this hatred in rap song after rap song, and once we started, the subject kept coming up because women were incapable of getting it off their minds."

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."

I used to work as a rap DJ, and I still listen to lots of music of all genres. And it feels strange, looking back on the warped but funny misogyny of NWA's A Bitch Iz A Bitch as a symptom of a kinder, gentler era.

Posted by Mitch at January 4, 2005 04:51 AM | TrackBack