Don Imus is on Monster.com this morning. Plus his crew, Benard McGurk and Charles McCord were just as bad if not worse. Not real sure if they still have jobs. I do not mean to rehash what has already been said about his firing, he deserved it. If you attack undeserving individuals on a nationally syndicated radio program/TV show you deserve what you get. And believe me this was not the first time. Imus has a history of racist, misogyny, homophobia and antisemitism. As bad as what he said was, his initial reaction was worse, saying this is what we does on this show, and basically telling us to deal with it. Also blaming black music and movies for their ignorant comments. What a winner. Imus is a piece of trash his firing was way overdue.
The aftermath has been very interesting. Many people notably, Michael Baisden, whose radio program I love, have been saying that we cannot stop at Imus. That we should look at rap music and stop the artists from using such terms. Now I love rap, I grew up with it, I plan to die a fan. (Preferably in old age.) The majority of the music on the radio today I do not particularly care for. Any songs that have a dance related to it, have a grunt or moan that makes up more that 65% of the lyrics, or those that are made for the strip club, I quickly turn off. That is not what I call hip hop, it is not what I call music, it is noise on beats. The reason we hear so much of it is because it sells. God only knows why, but it sells, and the labels (majority of which are white-owned) keep producing it. Artists who want to get signed sell their souls to get on. The root cause is money, labels have it, artists generally don't. The labels need to be answering the questions from Oprah, we should not be attacking Ludacris, directly.
That being said, attacking artists directly is an exercise in futility. The artists only make music the label will print. There are hundreds of rap artists that make positive music that we never hear because they do not sell. I blame society as a whole because real lyrics are not bought, real lyricism tend to be overlooked. There are only a few who have been successful and even they have "dumbed down" their lyrics from time to time in order to sell records, namely Jay-z and Nas. Bottom-line if we want to make a difference go after the record labels and their bottom lines.
Please tell me, who says rap is the only music that uses fowl language? I am sure rock and roll and other non-traditional black music genres do the same thing. People used the words Imus used way before rap. People had bad things to say about black people way before rap. I think a societal study on appropriate and inappropriate language needs to be conducted. Rap has been under attack for 20 years now, unfortunately the artists do not have total control of what is distributed. There are other avenues but you can only get to a certain level on your own, major labels and distributors make stars and m. We need to reestablish decency in this country. It is not about Rap music, it is all about money, if labels ignore trash, and pay for art we would not have trash on the airwaves.
Hey Don any advice on how I could get your radio slot?
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