Bouncing Cats

As old as the Ethical Art argument must certainly be (“Did you hear about Shakespeare’s new play?  Teenage lovers!  And suicide!!  I’m appalled!”), there are two points that require occasional consideration; first the macro, then the micro.

The notion that individual works of art (not just hip-hop, of course) accumulate one at a time until they create a culture is an essentially neutral construction, neither positive nor negative.  It just is.  What makes it either positive or negative is the input at the front end.  Your argument, “entertainers do nothing more than entertain” ignores this accumulation.  When Charles Barkley said, years ago, “I’m not a role model”, he may have wanted that to be true, but just saying it don’t make it so.  Just saying that mass entertainers’ messages stand separately and never accumulate in a consumer’s conscience or a culture’s common belief system ignores human psychology on one hand and the interwoven nature of society on the other.

Fortunately or not, most works of art straddle the emotional divide, neither all devil nor all angel.  Which then takes us to the conscience of the individual artist.  Does he or she recognize, attend to and intentionally take advantage of the cultural accumulation construct for the betterment of others?  I have no idea, but asking a true domestic violence victim to coat my musical depiction of a tormented victimizer with the cooling salve of “It’s okay baby.  Hurt me some more.” is, well, appalling.  I don’t know who I’m madder at – Eminem for the manipulation or Rihanna for agreeing to take part.

What I do wish is that within the hip-hop community, given its increasing world sweep and a lack of doubt as to “hip-hop's ability to make a difference in the lives of the downpressed”, there was at least some recognition of the accumulation construct and an intentional movement to take advantage of it positively.

What do I mean by positively?  Well, what does “make a difference” mean?  It’s not until one gets to cases and faces can one hope to answer those questions.  But over the span of two decades LL Cool J and Red Bull both thought there was some reason to try.  That they were each mildly successful in their individual attempts is good enough for me.

It’s a golden opportunity, easily within reach.  All it would take is three well known hip-hop artists to publicly pound an ethical stake in the ground, and live up to it with their words and deeds for two years.  I wager that at the end of that short time, we all would at least have an option to consider.  Because truly, to someone, we are all role models whether we want to be or not.

You know, I’ve thought long and hard about this and am pretty sure that what comes next is defensible, regardless of whether or not it causes someone to label me naïve, 20 years behind the times, a curmudgeon, or worse, a “clueless moralist” to use the words of the good Dean in an Eminem review from 2000, but I hope I never again have to hear any (very)popular musician rap about how he personally will kill his domestic partner because of her desire to leave him in order to protect herself from his dishonesty and violence in my entire life.  Period, but double especially if he uses the cool sounds of a true domestic violence victim to hook his song, as Eminem does with Rihanna in his recent song “Love The Way You Lie.”

In 1989, James Todd Smith said “Stop the killing/Change your ways/ . . . Or we’ll never see brighter days.”  In 2010, the Dean advised us, in this review of an apparently pro-social and motivational documentary film, not to doubt “hip-hop's ability to make a difference in the lives of the downpressed” as a result of seeing the positive effect it has on very poor young Africans.  So I ask, as hip-hop becomes the pop music sound of the entire world, why do the originators of it still think it’s a good idea to export anti-social messages, including but in no way limited to intentional partner-on-partner violence?

As an example of the influence I am alluding to, three days a week I work with a dozen and a half incarcerated dads, struggling with their own desperate attempts at sobriety, eventually to be released from prison back into economic and emotional circumstances most of us only fear, to outgrow the brutal or non-existent parenting they received and thereby become “the generation that saves their families” (their words, not mine) and “break the intergenerational cycle of criminality” (my words, not theirs).  That’s a dozen and a half out of a couple of million similarly placed American men.  As they take steps towards establishing the non-vicitimizing life-style most of us take for granted, not a single one of them ever again needs to hear “I apologize/Even though I know it's lies/I'm tired of the games/I just want her back/I know I'm a liar/If she ever tries to ****ing leave again/Imma tie her to the bed/And set the house on fire” in their entire lives either.  What the similarly placed moms don’t need to hear is the socially irresponsible, personally victimized “Just gonna stand there/And watch me burn/But that's alright/Because I like/The way it hurts.”

When one of the inmate dads says to me, “I’m just being real” as a best-they-can-do justification for current thinking errors or rationalization for past victimizing behaviors (“I guess I don’t know my own strength.”), I try to remember to say, “That was then.  Your job now is to make ‘real’ better for yourself and for the next generation.” 

And that’s my throwdown on what appears to me to be one enduring criticism of this part of the hip-hop world view – You declaim the world as you see it, but you don’t work hard enough to make it better.  And you have the resources, access, cultural influence and overall power (thank you, Kanye) to do so.  A huge opportunity lost is all I see.

If you think you can counter my argument, then bring it.  But don’t bring me individual songs or lyrics or rhyme schemes (or movies).  There aren’t enough of them.  If there were, this still wouldn't be an issue after so many years.  Bring me a culture based on “Change Your Ways” and “Bouncing Cats.”  Or an artistic movement.  Or a recognizable sub-genre.  Anything, as long as it helps make “real” better.

p.s.:  A moralist works to regulate the morals of others.  I work to help increase the life skills of folks who have been dealt a bad hand and then played it poorly.  There’s a practical difference in the lives of real people, even if trying to remove barriers to effective living looks the same from a distance as the moralist o****ecting on principle.