Hip-Hop language is just not hip

The genre has already acquired (and it’s fair to say earned) a reputation for bad language and bad behaviour. Soon after Imus’s firing, The Daily News had Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton splashed on its cover alongside the hip-hop producer Timbaland, whose oeuvre includes some Imusian language. He had helped arrange a fund-raiser for her and apparently was now a liability. Oprah Winfrey organised a two-show “town meeting” on what’s wrong with hip-hop, starting with the ubiquity of the word “h—” and how to fix it.

Nowadays, as all but the most intemperate foes of hip-hop readily admit, it is not a debate about freedom of speech; most people agree that rappers have the right to say just about anything. This is a debate about hip-hop’s vexed position in the American mainstream.

In the wake of Imus’s firing, some commentators talked about a double standard in the media. Like politicians and reality-tv stars and, yes, talk-radio hosts, rappers are trying to negotiate a culture in which the boundaries of public and private space keep changing. This means mainstream culture is becoming less prim.

One of hip-hop’s many antecedents is the venerable African-American oral tradition known as toasting; those toasts are full of crude words. Hip-hop took those rhymes from the street to the radio, and old-fashioned dirty jokes are surely meant to shock people like Winfrey. Once, such lyrics might have been denounced for their moral turpitude, but now they’re more likely to be denounced for their sexism. Imus has one thing in common with rappers. Like him, many rappers have negotiated an uneasy truck with the mainstream: they are corporate entertainers who portray themselves as outspoken mavericks; they are paid to say private things in public.

The strangest thing about the last few weeks was the fact that hardly any current hip-hop artists were discussed. (All these years later, we’re still talking about Snoop Dogg?) Maybe that’s because hip-hop isn’t in an especially filthy mood right now. It sounds more light-hearted than it has in years with tracks like Huey’s Pop, Lock & Drop It and Crime Mob’s Rock Yo Hips.

For all the panicky talk about hip-hop lyrics, the current situation suggests a scarier possibility. What if the controversial lyrics quieted down, but the problems didn’t? What if hip-hop didn’t matter that much, after all?
-Kelefa Sanneh