At some people there ought to be a serious discussion of a subject like this. We really should, at some level, really think about why the very idea of having everyone armed really doesn't result in a reduction of gun violence, because trust me as a person who grew up in and has for the past decade spent a great deal of time in the inner city - Most Everyone Is Armed for their own Self-Defense and Everyone Else Knows It. We should discuss how this doesn't really result in a unspoken mutual detante' where no one would dare pull a weapon out for fear that everyone else who are as equally likely of being armed would respond, and that instead those who wish to shoot Do Their Shooting First albiet from cover, from stealth, and from moving vehicles, all in an effort to ensure like a gun-slinger looking for an extra edge of surprise and speed, that they come out on top and not under the dirt.
History and thousands of shootings shows us that knowing your opponent might be armed isn't a deterrent, it's an incentive to get sneakier and hit them when they least expect or can least be able to retaliate.
We could possibly even discuss what is it, socially or cultural or economically, that would drive people to the level where they feel the need, the desperation, or even the thrill, of taking the life of others using a gun.
We could, but apparently that is not the discussion we're going to get from would-be Mississippi Senator Chris McDaniel (R-Tea Party) as he vies for the seat currently held by Thad Cochran.
"The reason Canada is breaking out with brand new gun violence has nothing to do with the United States and guns," McDaniel said in the teaser. "It has everything to do with a culture that is morally bankrupt. What kind of culture is that? It's called hip-hop."
30 years ago, we heard something similar when the PMRC tried to argue that "sexual & violent music" was the source of actual violent crime. They went after Cyndi Lauper for "She Bop". They went after Prince for "Darling Nikki". They went after Twisted Sister for "We're Not gonna take it" and "Under the Knife" (which was about having an operation) as well as W.A.S.P. for "Animal. F#CK Like a Beast" which was just F-N Silly-ass Carton Horror Theater.
And now this guy wants to take issue, not with any specific song, but with Hip Hop as a culture? Oy Gevalt.
I'll be one of the first to admit - as a music fan and a musician - that I don't like modern day Hip Hop. I think a lot of it is prurient juvenile misogynist violence-glorifying crap, because I remember what it used to be like and what he can be like if people would bother to try again. I will also add that I think most modern Pop music is ridiculous infantile shallow narcissistic bullshit for the same reason.
When it comes to pretty much disliking anything that was performed on this years "New Years Rockin' Eve" with Ryan Seacrest, I pretty much hated all of it, except for Billy Joel who thankfully didn't suck.
Just to illustrate that thought and get giant pet peeve off my chest, I have a huge objection to Beyonce' using audio from the Challenger explosion to preface her latest self-aggrandizing "Relationship Song" she co-wrote with the bane of 21st Century songcraft, Ryan Tedder (of One Republic, producer of dozens of songs for dozens of artist that all sound the same, and say the same thing over and over. "Love is like, tough, dude - and stuff, meanwhile I'll be Counting Stars...cha!". Bo-RING!). I mean, what the full-on FUNK made her think that was an appropriate juxtaposition? Particularly with someone as vapid as Ryan Tedder? You have relationship problems that are so bad, (or you want to pretend you do in order to pander to your audience), that you need to draw a parallel to one of the greatest disasters of the U.S. Space Program?
Your relationship problems are that cataclysmic? How big IS Your Ego and will it still fit inside the borders of Texas?
That's just bad judgement IMO, I mean seriously, Beyonce' is NOT writing material that has the resonance of anything U2 did in their first 4 albums. She has no "Sunday Bloody Sunday", "New Years Day" or "Pride (In the Name of Love)" in her repertoire. She can't even begin to touch what Rush did songs such as "Red Sector A" (about the Holocaust which Geddy Lee's parents barely survived) or "Ghost Rider" (About finding a reason to live after your only daughter is killed in a car accident and your wife dies of cancer at nearly the same time, which is what happened to Neil Piert's family in the mid 90's) or "Countdown" (which is about Space Program and does use actual NASA audio, because they gave their permission up front).
Sorry, she's a fine singer and performer but does not have the gravitas to play in that league and the fact thinks she does is just a sad and pathetic self-delusion - but then again, most Pop music these days is equally sad, pathetic and deluded, so that's pretty much On Par with everyone else IMO.
Yet as harshly critical as I am of both Pop and Hip Hop these days, even I wouldn't say any of this nonsense.
"Name a redeeming quality of hip-hop, I want to know anything about hip-hop that has been good for this country. "And it's not—before you get carried away—this has nothing to do with race. Because there are just as many hip-hopping white kids and Asian kids as there are hip-hopping black kids. It’s a problem of a culture that values prison more than college; a culture that values rap and destruction of community values more than it does poetry; a culture that can’t stand education. It’s that culture that can’t get control of itself."
Whew, I am sure glad this "this has nothing to do with race" since he points out a lot more white and Asian kids listen to Hip Hop than black kids. Yet it seems to me when he wants to make the "cultural" link between Hip-Hop and Gun Violence his denial seems to break down since, as we are so often told ad-nauseum, there is a far higher volume and rate of gun violence among teen and young male black kids than there is for White or Asian youth.
Isn't that, after all, the core rationale behind police policies such as New York Cities "Stop-Question-And-Frisk"?
http://www.blackyouthproject.com/...
Guns are causing the deaths of thousands and thousands of children each year. In 2008 and 2009, gun homicide was the leading cause of death among black teens.
Young black males die from gun violence at a rate 2.5 times higher than Latino males, and eight times higher than white males. Gun injuries are suffered by black teens at a rate ten times higher than white teens.
Is he trying to say we need to stop the "Devil Music" before it corrupts are good white youth? Hasn't he heard of
the Elvis? Too late.
I'm not entirely sure you can divorce Hip Hop culture from Black Culture in the way that Rock 'n Roll was divorced from the Black artists, like Chuck Berry, Chubby Checker, Fats Domino, Little Richard and Jimi Hendrix, who founded most of it in the first place. McDaniel's seems to think that music - alone in isolation - makes culture, rather than culture being the driving force behind both the creation and the appreciation of any form of music. Culture is the Horse, while the Music is the Apple cart, not vice versa. A musical form that doesn't relate in some way to legitimate cultural elements, doesn't survive. That's why when the Disco culture died, it took the music with it. When the Rock n' Roll Party culture of the 80's died in the age of safe-sex, aids, and drug overdoses due to that lifestyles excesses, much of the music died with it too.
Hence if you are trying to force a correlation between Gun Violence and "Hip hop", it doesn't really function unless you link both to problems within urban black youth culture, since that is - pretty much - the only real common denominator between them. If the common link is the music, regardless of race, then we should see gun violence rates that are roughly similar to the percentage of people who participate demographically in that musical culture across all races. But We Don't do we? Gun violence among black youth truly is dramatically higher, and it's also true that black youth, and indeed black youth culture, is one of it not THE primary driving forces in Hip Hop.
But it's not the only driving force.
McDaniel's begs for just "one redeeming quality" in Hip Hop. To which I have to wonder, even if these are somewhat old-school references, has he never heard RUN DMC, Will Smith, LL Cool J or Queen Latifah? Has he never heard Grand Master Flash and the Furious Five with "The Message", which directly addresses the subject of cultural and social decay?
That one song pretty much explains the push and pull of various forces that affect people living life in a economic ghetto. It's Hip Hop 101. You don't know this, then you are NOT qualified to speak on the subject.
So it's likely he's never heard Arrested Development and Tennessee, which addresses issues of spirituality and southern pride.
My main issue with modern Hip Hop is that you don't see artists like this, or Public Enemy, Digable Planets, Tribe Called Quest or PM Dawn all that much anymore. Not since the advent of Gangster Rap with Ice T, N.W.A. featuring Ice Cube, Dr. Dre & Easy-E.
Still all of those artists serve a critical purpose, similar to that of "The Message", by providing a spotlight on inner city life, from Poverty, Joblessness to Gangs and Police Misconduct in those communities, that wasn't being addressed otherwise by anyone. Chuck D used to call Hip Hop the "Black CNN". The problem wasn't that these artists did what they did, the problem was that when Market Forces took over, hardly anyone was really allowed to do anything else. There is in fact, quite a bit more to black life and black culture than Gangs and Guns. But once gangster-rap became big, pretty much everyone else had to follow in their footsteps or else they wouldn't get their foot in the door, and that's been the case for over 25 years.
Almost.
People forget, now that he's become a professional ass-clown, that Kanye West was first and foremost known for breaking down that Gangster Rap Wall with a positive message about spirituality and self-discovery with his first big hit "Jesus Walks".
As we all know now, that rather remarkable feat went entirely to his head, and hence we have the ego-maniac we see today cavorting with those perigons of taste, class and restraint, the Kardashians. Kind of a shame, he could made something out of himself besides becoming the butt-end of a thousand jokes.
McDaniel's argues that Hip Hop "lacks poetry" but wasn't it the GOP and Right-Wingers who complained when Actor/Rapper Common was invited to the White House - to Read Poetry? Yes, it was. So even when they do actual poetry, it's not poetry enough?
The Best of Hip Hop, is Poetry set to rhythm. It can be all that the spoken word can accomplish, plus a groove. It can be funny, it can be profane, it can be silly, or it can be profound. it all depends on the ingenuity of the artist, and whether they think they can find a market for what their presenting. The backing music itself can be anything. It can be Latin, it can be Jazz, it can be Blues, it can be Dance music or it can be Rock (as Run DMC, Beastie Boys, Papa Roach and Linkin Park have all shown). It can be deeply personal as we've seen or it can address public issues in a deep way as artists such as Michael Franti, Tupac and Eminem have displayed.
There is a point to be made that some of these guys have lived too far on the edge, and have come to believe far too much of their own "Bad Ass" hype with all the mock-thuggery and drug glamorization as we saw with Tupac and Biggie, but that's also been true of people from the likes of Johnnie Cash and even John Denver. A lot of people in the entertainment business have tended to lose perspective.
It could also be argued that Hip Hop has been a great inspiration to urban youth, offering a pathway to potential prosperity that wouldn't otherwise exist if they show enough imagination, determination, and tenacity to see it through as shown in films such as Eminem's 8 Mile, 50 Cent's Get Rich or Die Trying or even with Terrence Howard in Hustle and Flow. It's given some people Hope, when all other avenues seem Hopeless.
If they could resist the market forces driving them to pander (as Beyonce and many others have done) to those who are easily impressed with the shock value of violent and sexual imagery without purpose, context or meaning as many have shown in the past, it would all the better IMO.
I would add that it might be a good thing to actually Fund and Provide adequate resources to struggling communities with better quality Schools, Police Protection, and Loans for people to start and expand their businesses and create a robust thriving community that has better options than failing into crime, desperation, or self-destructive violence - but then that idea has nothing to do with Scape-Goating an Artform like Hip Hop and also goes exactly opposite to the GOP Agenda of "Let the Poor and Desperate Eat Stale Cake, while serving the Rich More Tax Cuts and Caviar"
But that's just me.
To claim that none of it, not even a little bit, has any social or artistic merit what-so-ever, is either deluded or bigoted, and possibly a bit of both. It's almost as ridiculous, factually and morally bankrupt as claiming that Water-Boarding isn't Torture and was a "worthwhile tool" to use against al Qeada.
Guess who said that? Yeah, Mr. McDaniel's did.
"Waterboarding is something they do to people to make them talk. It is torture, to the liberals. It is a fairly humane form of torture, if you classify it as such," McDaniel also said. "Here's what happens: You make the guy believe he's going to drown. And as you know it's a pretty strong fear—drowning. Well this guy, Muhammad, he spoke all day. He spoke all night. Anything and everything, just let me avoid the waterboard. Because you see Mr. Muhammad here apparently had a problem with drowning. And that worked."
First of all, it's doesn't make you "think" your gonna drown.
You Are Drowning, that's why they had to keep a doctor nearby to do an
emergency tracheotomy to re-establish his ability to breathe in case his airway completely collapsed in a process that occurs
when people drown.
There are two classifications of drowning: wet and dry. In wet drowning, the person has inhaled water which interferes with respiration and causes the circulatory system to collapse. In the less common instance of dry drowning, the airway closes up due to spasms caused by the presence of water.
It's the closing of the airway that causes people to drown, not the amount of water they swallow.
And No, it didn't work. Y'know how I know it didn't work? Because even though Muhammad "talked" to us, practically nothing he told us after being waterboarded 4 dozen of times Was True ("I make up stories"), and the one thing we wanted to know from him which was "How do we Find Bin Laden" - he LIED ABOUT.
If you have to do something over 80 times, and these are the results, I don't think it "works".
That this guy thinks that "Hip Hop is immoral and worthless" but Waterboarding isn't shows that his Moral Compass is apparently spinning wildly out of control.
vyan