Mark Naison: If the Academy Wanted to Honor Hip Hop, Is This the Right Group and the Right Song?
I agree that people from the Civil Rights Generation must try to reach out to young people and try to understand their music and the experiences that music reflects, even when it makes us uncomfortable. I also agree that it is entirely appropriate for a major cultural institution like the Screen Actors Guild to honor the hip hop tradition in its song of the year category.
But as a historian of hip hop, and someone who thinks hip hop has been an outlet for extraordinary musical an lyrical creativity among young people for over 30 years, I think that the Screen Actors Guild chose the wrong song, and, especially, the wrong group, for this signal honor.
Here's why. Hip hop has been an important part of movies dealing with urban life since the release of "Wild Style" in 1982. Not only has it been a fixture of party movies like "House Party" or comedies like "Widcats," it has provided the soundtrack to powerful urban dramas like "Kiing of New York" "Juice" "Boys in the Hood" "Menace to Society" and "Paid in Full." Among the hip hop artists whose m usic has been featured in major films have been brillliant poets and social commentators like Grandmaster Flash, Public Enemy, Tupac Shakur, Biggie Smalls,Nas KRS-!, and more recently Mos Def, Talib Quali, Eninem, Common and Kanye West.. If the Academy had honored one of these artists, I would have been the first to celebrate their gesture as a recognition of Hip Hop's cultural significance. But choosing "Three Six Mafia" as the group to bestow this honor upon sends a very disturbing message. First of all, the song "It;s Hard Out Here for a Pimp" gives implicit legitimacy to an activity which exploits the pain and desparation of working class and poor women and which is still very much with us. As journalist Kit Roane pointed out in her article "Gangs Turn to New Trade; Young Prostitutes" (NY Times, July 11, 1999) "gang pimping" has become a huge and growing industry in inner city neighborhoods, rivalling drug selling as a source of revenue. I wonder what people who work with teenage sex workers must have thought when they watched the Oscars. I doubt if they were uplifted or amused.
Secondly, the entire career of Three Six Mafia has been built around songs degrading women in the crudest, most graphic fashion. Would you give the "song of the year" award to a group that built it's career around insulting Blacks, Jews, or Muslims, even if that group wrote a catchy tune that was part of a good movie? Then why would you give it to a group that makes sexually abusing and exploliting women it's stock in trade. If you think I am exagerrating, look at the titles of the 3-6 Mafia's greatest hits, which I got off the internet, or, if you have the stomach for it, download their lyrics from list .
Look, I would like nothing better than to see Hip Hop given an honored place in modern American Cultural History. But when a group like the Screen Actors Guild chooses to give their highest honor to one of the least talented, and most crudely sexist, representatives of the Hip Hop tradition, one has to wonder about their motives.
I would like to attribute the movie industry's gesture to ignorance, or laziness, but I think the motive is more venal- they want to attract revenue dollars from the hip hop loving younger generation ( most of whom by the way, are white suburbanites!) and don't care how they do it
In that sense, the Screen Actors Guild and 3-6 Mafia are partners in crime- they are all about the C.R.E.A.M.
To quote Wu Tang Clan, one of my favorite hip hop groups, who understand American capitalism better than any economist
"Cash rules everything around me, CREAM get the money, dollar dollar bill, y'all