In their second in a series of email-list broadsides against the proprietor of the No Spin Zone, the National Hip Hop Political Convention channels Al Franken (but even better IMHO) over O'Reilly's anti-hip-hop agenda. This particular action targets his pressuring Pepsi to drop Ludacris as a spokesperson. It's a cracking good read, and enclosed below in full since I only got it via my email.
I really got a kick out of it. Excellent tear-down of Bill's pompus facade.
They're also calling for letters.
"I was single for a long time. I was all over the world covering wars and met thousands of women."
-- Bill O'Reilly
Playboy interview, May 2002
"I've got ho's in different area codes."
-- Ludacris
"Area Codes"
While Bill O'Reilly's mother Angela explained to the Washington Post that her son "grew up in Westbury, Long Island, a middle-class suburb," Bill O'Reilly used to claim that he grew up in a more proletarian locale, the nearby suburb of Levittown. In the first chapter of his book "The O'Reilly Factor," he writes of his "working-class" background, and suggests that his family was "pretty far down the social totem pole." And it's true that the O'Reillys could only afford to go on Florida vacations once a year, and that his dad did hard, grimy, back-breaking labor as an accountant.
But the family also had enough money to send O'Reilly to private school, and then college (with a year abroad in England), and then college again. "You don't come from any lower than I came from on an economic scale," O'Reilly once told the New York Observer. "I fully realize that blacks in the ghetto, and all that, had a much rougher life than I had. But I started from ground zero. When I got out of B.U., I had not a nickel."
Here, you have to give O'Reilly his due: if you ask the average employer, "Hey, who are you most likely to hire -- a black from the ghetto, or a white guy with a master's degree from Boston University, the employer will reply, 'Whoever's got the nickel!'"
But is O'Reilly really the salt-of-the-earth type he plays on his very popular, very entertaining TV series? O'Reilly says his show on Fox News looks at "things from a blue-collar, workingman's point of view." To convey that view, O'Reilly says things like "corporate America, in my opinion, needs to rethink their responsibility to their country" and "I'm in the vanguard on television of our search-and-destroy mission about the elite media...They don't want to hear from [regular people]. They don't want to address our concerns..."
Interestingly enough, Bill O'Reilly is married to a woman named Maureen McPhilmy, vice president of DWJ Television, a company that specializes in producing commercials for big, rich, powerful corporate clients like Sun Microsystems and Kellogg's, and then passing these commercials off as genuine news stories on channels like Fox News. And, of course, O'Reilly makes a lot of money from one of the world's biggest media conglomerates to portray a regular guy -- $4 million a year, according to the Boston Globe.
So given the shaky foundation on which Bill O'Reilly's blue-collar, workingman's persona rests, his recent vendetta against 24-year-old Chris Bridges, aka Ludacris, is somewhat surprising. After all, Bridges appears to hail from relatively modest origins himself: he grew up in College Park, Georgia, a town of 20,000 near the Atlanta airport, where the median household income is $38,558. (O'Reilly famously exclaimed that his father, who retired in either 1978 or 1980 -- I've seen both listed -- never made more than $35,000 a year.)
Bridges attended Banneker High School, a public institution where the student body is 97% black. At the age of 8, he exclaimed to his mother, "Mom, I love music and whether I am in front of a microphone or behind it, I will be in the music industry." In pursuit of this dream, his mom says, he obtained "internships in radio and entertainment law." Eventually, he turned an internship at an Atlanta radio station into a job as a producer there. At the age of 21, he bought his first house. At the age of 23, he created his own record label and produced his first album. Now, at 25, he's a platinum-selling artist.
I'm not sure if Ludacris ever had to suffer the indignity of having only two sports coats to wear to school -- according to the Washington Post, O'Reilly frequently cites his own memories of such hardship -- but I'd say that he certainly qualifies as a hard-working, self-made man.
On a certain level, then, you'd think Bill O'Reilly would recognize Chris Bridges, aka Ludacris, as a kindred soul. But apparently that's not the case: on August 27th, during the "Talking Points" portion of his TV show, O'Reilly described Ludacris as "a man who is demeaning just about everybody, and is peddling antisocial behavior." O'Reilly then blasted Pepsi for using Ludacris as a commercial pitchman: "I'm calling for all responsible Americans to fight back and punish Pepsi for using a man who degrades women, who encourages substance abuse, and does all the things that hurt particularly the poor in our society." A day later, Pepsi announced that it was discontinuing its ad campaign with Ludacris.
It's true that Ludacris is probably not the best choice to serve as spokesperson for a large corporation that wants to convey hipness in a completely safe, antiseptic, non-controversial way. In addition to penning some funny, clever rhymes, he writes lyrics like "Move bitch, get out the way/Get out the way bitch, get out the way/OH NO! The fight's out/I'ma 'bout to punch yo...lights out." And: "I gotta big weed stash, pocket full of cash/Just seen a big ol' ass, it's Saturday/Sticky, icky, icky, icky/Sticky, icky, icky, icky."
But of course it seems fairly unlikely that Pepsi planned to use any lyrics like that in its commercials featuring Ludacris. And while O'Reilly argued that Pepsi was "rewarding" Ludacris for rapping about "anti-social behavior," the truth is that it was rewarding him for being popular with the demographic it wants to reach.
So why focus on Ludacris? If O'Reilly truly believes that celebrities shouldn't be rewarded for their anti-social behavior, why not target someone whose commercial appearances actually celebrate his real-life misdeeds? One good candidate, as hip-hop commentator Davey D. has already pointed out: temperamental basketball coach (and rape enjoyment counselor) Bobby Knight, who was fired from Indiana University for habitually assaulting folding chairs and players, then hired by Clorox to smash dishes against a wall in a Glad trashbag commercial.
Or how about Tonya Harding? After she approved of her boyfriend's plan to cripple Nancy Kerrigan, O'Reilly's then-employer Inside Edition reportedly paid her $375,000 to appear on O'Reilly's show. Back then, he was so enamored of the concept of rewarding anti-social behavior with big money -- aka "checkbook journalism," the practice of paying people like Joey Buttafuoco to share their sins with the news media -- that he wrote a glowing op-ed piece about it for the New York Times.
And then of course there's Britney Spears, whom Pepsi has employed for some time now as a spokes-dancer, most memorably in that creepy, almost Lynchian spot where Bob Dole barked at his cock ("Down, boy!") while Spears did her standard Tribute-To-The-Ladies-Of-Hooters crotch-grinding. But even though Spears has helped introduce the Vivid Girl aesthetic to her millions of prepubescent fans, O'Reilly thinks her call-girl-next-door persona is just "immature and silly."
"I don't feel Britney Spears is a threat to the nation," he said on his TV show. "She may not be a good role model, but I don't think she's going to do any permanent damage to anybody, whereas [Ludacris] is."
So what is it, exactly, about Ludacris that makes O'Reilly think such dark, dark thoughts?
While O'Reilly acknowledges that the 25-year-old rapper is "not as bad as [genocidal Cambodian dictator] Pol Pot," he does believe that Ludacris is pretty darn bad. According to O'Reilly, Ludacris is:
a "dangerous" man whose message is "Look, be an outlaw. Take narcotics. Abuse people. Punch people. Hurt people."
"a dumb idiot who got lucky and exploits the system."
"subverting the values of the United States."
Plus he "hurts children." Given Ludacris' status as O'Reilly Enemy #1, I expected to find quite a bit of information detailing his arrest record, his criminal past, and his nefarious plot to subvert American values by turning schoolchildren into violent Communist junkies. So far, however, I haven't found anything like that -- except perhaps for one or two mentions of a mysterious institution known as the Ludacris Foundation. Allegedly created to "provide gifts, grants, and scholarships to Foster Care Shelters, Stay-in-School and High School athletics programs, Book Drives/Reading and Art Appreciation programs and many other initiatives," it sounds a hell of a lot like a drug-and-prostitution ring to me.
But other than that, what?
Given that O'Reilly heads up the most popular series on the most popular cable news network, he must have plenty of investigative resources at his disposal. And given that the FoxNews corporate slogan is "We report, you decide," I can only conclude that O'Reilly and his reporters did the in-depth background check that one would expect any responsible news organization to do if it were planning to describe someone as a dangerous, subversive individual who hurts children. And since O'Reilly has made no mention of Ludacris' criminal record or anything like that, I can only conclude that his investigation didn't actually turn up anything too damning.
Except for Ludacris' aforementioned lyrics, that is.
But even there, O'Reilly sees things that don't really exist. Indeed, O'Reilly repeatedly characterizes Ludacris as a decidely emphatic prosyletizer: "Take narcotics. Abuse people. Punch people. Hurt people." But I couldn't find any lyrics where he explicitly encourages people to do any of these things. He talks about his own drug and alcohol use, his own violent exploits, and his own misogynistic treatment of women, yes, but such blustery boasting isn't the same thing as insisting to others that they should do the same.
More importantly, O'Reilly seems to betray no suspicions whatsoever that (a) Ludacris' lyrics aren't necessarily based in fact, and (b) Ludacris' lexicon isn't necessarily literal.
When a guest on O'Reilly's show asked him if any hip-hop figure might make an acceptable Pepsi spokesperson, O'Reilly replied "Chubby Checker." Surprisingly enough, Chubby Checker is still alive and still performing regularly, but of course he's not a hip-hop figure by any stretch of the imagination, unless that imagination simplistically equates black skin with hip-hop. So what does O'Reilly's answer say? That he has either a deep ignorance or a deep contempt for the genre, or possibly both.
So perhaps O'Reilly doesn't realize that a hip-hop lyric should not be automatically interpreted as a deposition: it can be fictional, hyperbolic, metaphorical. Ludacris is a character that Chris Bridges invented. Like many rappers, he rhymes in a deliberately over-the-top, hyper-aggressive way. And for the record, he's actually mostly known as a comic presence - more crazy, bugged-out prankster than thugged-out gangster. "I grew up watching Richard Pryor, The Three Stooges and Dolemite," he explained to one interviewer. "I've always been the funny dude in my crew, so I wanted to put that humor into my lyrics."
(Memo to O'Reilly: has anyone taught more children to be violent than the Three Stooges? You need to stop those guys!)
Now, O'Reilly might not think that lyrics like "Just keep on pissin me off, like a weak kidney/And you will find your family reading your obituary" are particularly funny. But does he really think Ludacris murders anyone who gets on his nerves?
To promote his own show, O'Reilly uses similar (albeit not as clever) vocabulary. One of his favorite adjectives to describe his work is "hard-hitting." He talks about "hammering" Alan Iverson and other public figures. In a Playboy interview, he says he "slapped around" Jerry Falwell on his show. In the same interview, he says he "smashed" Michael Kinsley when Kinsley visited "The O'Reilly Factor," and follows up with this anecdote: "When I went home to the neighborhood, people who saw the show came up to me and asked, 'How come you didn't punch him?' I had to explain that he was in Washington and I was in New York and I couldn't go through the camera. They said, 'We would have fucking killed him.'"
(Memo to Ludacris: Wanna know how to get Bill O'Reilly off your back? Just make sure you identify Michael Kinsley as your target whenever you write a violent lyric.)
Clearly a double standard is at work here. When Bill O'Reilly uses violent imagery to promote his persona, it's marketing. And when Ludacris does it, it's a subversive threat to American values.
Similarly, when Bill O'Reilly writes a novel that includes plenty of sex and violence, it's harmless entertainment. But when Ludacris writes a rap lyric that includes plenty of sex and violence, it's "dangerous" advocacy of a destructive lifestyle. In 1998, O'Reilly published Those Who Trespass, a novel that stars, in the words of its back-jacket promo copy, "a low-profile killer, brutally sadistic and maddeningly professional." The story is further enlivened by a "triangle of erotic suspense." In truth, there is little eroticism and little suspense in this brutally generic and maddeningly delusional book. But there are passages like these ones:
"Goddamn bitch. She'll be sorry. Goddamn Clinton and his stupid family. What the fuck am I doing here?"
"Costello tasted the salty flavor of blood running in his throat...The assailant's right hand, now holding the oval base of the spoon, rocketed upward, jamming the stainless stem through the roof of Ron Costello's mouth. The soft tissue gave way quickly and the steel penetrated the correspondent's brain stem."
"She tried not to stare at his crotch, even though she saw movement there."
"Then he slipped here panties down her legs and, within seconds, his tongue was inside her, moving rapidly."
"He was speaking hushed tones, telling her how much he enjoyed her body, using words that in polite conversation would have been vulgar, but in this context were extremely erotic. His hands firmly gripped her buttocks."
"Silence circled the room like a starving turkey buzzard."
"These TV guys really are pricks..."
How does the novel as a whole stack up against Ludacris' Word of Mouf album? Consider the following chart:
If O'Reilly's novel actually features more murders than Ludacris' CD, why isn't he boycotting himself? My guess is that O'Reilly would probably defend his novel in the same way that he defends The Sopranos: "Is the program a corrupting influence on America? The answer is no, because the terrible acts that Tony and his thugs commit are not condoned or encouraged on the show..."
And it's true that in Those Who Trespass, after depicting numerous sadistic murders, and explaining how the victims did kind of deserve it (because they were mean!), O'Reilly is careful to dramatize the fact that Crime Doesn't Pay.
Nonetheless, his comments about his book's success clearly suggest that he knows it's not the triumph of law and order that his readers are buying: "[My publisher is] telling me to write another one quick. Kill more people!" he exclaimed to the Dallas Morning News with apparent glee. So far, killing people in print has been a profitable undertaking for him: Those Who Trespass has had several printings to date, and Mel Gibson is planning to turn it into a feature film.
Which is great for O'Reilly: I, for one, believe that people should be allowed to pursue all kinds of different projects, for different audiences and different venues, and with different standards of decorum informing them. O'Reilly has proven that he can do a Fox News broadcast without blurting out sentiments like "His hands firmly gripped her buttocks," so I think he should be allowed to write erotic murder fantasies about killing his peers in the media world if that's what makes him happy. And since Ludacris has demonstrated that he can in fact write a rap song without using the words "bitch," "ho," or "motherfucker," then I think he actually can function as a commercial spokesperson.
But I know there are a lot of people out there who aren't as open-minded as I am. And those people are probably wondering why it's OK for Fox News to employ a man who brags about "slapping" and "slamming" his adversaries, and also enjoys day-dreaming about ways to murder characters based on real-life people he has known, while it's wrong for Pepsi to employ a man who engages in similar literary transgressions. The answer is simple, however: in America, we expect far more moral accountability from our soft drink manufacturers than we do from the news media.
Take action against O'reilly.
