In late September, Congressman Bobby Rush (D-Illinois) took a break from doing nothing in Congress to call a hearing entitled “From Imus to Industry: The Business of Stereotypes and Degrading Images.” This hearing, like the Parents’ Music Resource Center hearings of 1985, accomplished about as much as Nancy Pelosi’s charge to end the war in Iraq. Tax dollars were spent, Congress looked busy, and the public was left wondering what exactly their representatives do in Washington. Once again, Congress stuck its nose into something it cannot even begin to comprehend, the music industry. Like 1980’s Al Gore failing to comprehend Frank Zappa’s mind-blowing conclusion that printing music lyrics would cost money, Representative Rush didn’t realize that college educated rap artist David Banner would be able to speak eloquently about the industry in which he makes a living. In this hearing, Banner, along with Master P, successfully defended their right to use certain offensive words - the same offensive words, they pointed out, that appear in such required high school readings as Huckleberry Finn and Invisible Man.
While Banner was defending his lyrics before Congress, another artist’s content was being questioned on the Vanderbilt campus. Though he didn’t know it, Kanye West was under scrutiny by sophomores Jeremy Doochin and Rebecca Maddox who attempted to facilitate a discussion about some of his more offensive lyrics. In addition, these students gathered 115 signatures for a petition condemning degrading and offensive lyrics in all genres of music. After my ears had stopped ringing from the sellout concert, I had a chance to sit down with both Doochin and Maddox in order to get more information about their cause.
Their idea for a protest came after the musical performances of Ludacris and Coolio last year. After witnessing what they considered degrading displays on stage and the subsequent indifference of the Vanderbilt community to these displays, Doochin and Maddox decided to take action. Using Kanye West’s performance for this year’s Commodore Quake as a platform to air their petition, they called student’s attention to offensive lyrics in music in general. Regardless of the success of their petition, Doochin and Maddox were more concerned with sparking discussion regarding what type of artist the Vanderbilt community wants to bring to campus.
In their eyes, any artist brought to campus should represent the Vanderbilt community as a whole. To aid in this process, they proposed establishing a forum to select an artist that represents the entire campus. Once artists are selected, they proposed another forum of discussion about the artist leading up to the concert. The key to these proposed forums was to accomplish for concerts what question and answer sessions do for on campus speakers: require the subject to defend himself and his work. For an artist like Kanye West, Doochin and Maddox hoped to hear his reasons for using offensive and degrading lyrical content.
For Doochin and Maddox, to bring artists like West, Ludacris, and Coolio to campus without any discussion is to approve of these artists’ messages. As they see it, student indifference to the lyrics of these artists leads to student indifference when these lyrics are manifested into actions. Listening to songs degrading women leads to indifference when women are degraded in reality.
Doochin and Maddox’s cause is not new and it certainly won’t be the last of its kind. Since the birth of commercial music, there have been hearings regarding music and its effect on degrading society. Unfortunately, none of these hearings or petitions has been able to offer any substantial solutions to the issues these critics have with music. In the case of Doochin and Maddox, the type of forum they would like to create is simply impractical. How does one assemble a group that practically represents the Vanderbilt campus? All six thousand undergrads can’t offer their opinion in any effective manner save an online vote, and we all know how successful those are. The most effective forum to choose an artist already exists in the form of the Vanderbilt Music Group. More committees would just mean more wasted time. If you don’t feel that you are being represented by the already established process, then apply to be a part of it and have your voice heard. As Frank Zappa told music fans during the PMRC hearings, if you aren’t being represented, “register to vote and as soon as you are old enough, run for something.”
The second issue with Doochin and Maddox’s petition is that they argue that artists such as Kanye West do not represent the Vanderbilt student body. Unfortunately, numbers do not lie. This year’s Quake was a sellout crowd. In the time it took to get 115 signatures for their petition, the floor seats to the concert had sold out. In this case, individuals spoke with their attendance at Quake. Concert attendees might not like that West’s uses offensive language but they don’t dislike it enough to stay home and play Kings.
Regardless of your feelings about it, music with offensive lyrics and content is not going away any time soon. The issue is not the offensive content of the song but what led the artist to choose it for their song. As David Banner testified before Congress, “If you fix our communities, we’ll fix our lyrics.” Until this happens, protestors and politicians will just have to trust the strength of the human mind to think for itself. If the past is any indication, this should be no problem. The drug use and spousal abuse prevalent in The Beatles’ famed Sgt. Pepper album didn’t inspire ten million American Beatles fans to act out the lyrics. Forty years later, why should we expect something radically different to occur regarding rap music?
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