The Culture of Fear (22 page)

Lyrics like these have been the raw material for campaigns against rappers for more than a decade—campaigns that have resulted not only in the incarceration of individual rappers but also in commitments from leading entertainment conglomerates such as Time Warner and Disney, as well as the state of Texas, not to invest in companies that produce gangsta albums. William Bennett and C. Delores Tucker, leaders of the antirap campaigns, have had no trouble finding antipolice and antiwomen lyrics to quote in support of their claim that “nothing less is at stake than civilization” if rappers are not rendered silent. So odious are the lyrics, that rarely do politicians or journalists stop to ask what qualifies Bennett to lead a moralistic crusade on behalf of America’s minority youth. Not only has he opposed funding for the nation’s leader in quality children’s programming (the Public Broadcasting Corporation), he has urged that “illegitimate” babies be taken from their mothers and put in orphanages.
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What was Delores Tucker, a longtime Democratic party activist, doing lending her name as coauthor to antirap articles that Bennett used to raise money for his right-wing advocacy group, Empower America? Tucker would have us believe, as she exclaimed in an interview in
Ebony,
that “as a direct result” of dirty rap lyrics, we have “little boys raping little girls.” But more reliable critics have rather a different take. For years they have been trying to call attention to the satiric and self-caricaturing side of rap’s salacious verses, what Nelson George, the music critic, calls “cartoon machismo.”
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Back in 1990, following the release of
Nasty As They Wanna Be,
an album by 2 Live Crew, and the band’s prosecution in Florida on obscenity charges, Henry Louis Gates confided in an op-ed in the
New York Times
that when he first heard the album he “bust out laughing.” Unlike
Newsweek
columnist George Will, who described the album as “extreme infantilism and menace ... [a] slide into the sewer,” Gates viewed 2 Live Crew as “acting out, to lively dance music, a parodic exaggeration of the age-old stereotypes of the oversexed black female and male.” Gates noted that the album included some hilarious spoofs of blues songs, the black power movement, and familiar advertising slogans of the period (“Tastes great!” “Less filling!”). The rap group’s lewd nursery rhymes were best understood, Gates argued, as continuing an age-old Western tradition of bawdy satire.
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Not every informed and open-minded follower of rap has been as upbeat as Gates, of course. Some have strongly criticized him, in fact, for seeming to vindicate performers who refer to women as “cunts,” “bitches,” and “hos,” or worse, who appear to justify their rape and murder, as did a track on the 2 Live Crew album that contained the boast, I’ll . . . bust your pussy then break your backbone.”

Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, a professor of law at UCLA, wrote in an essay that she was shocked rather than amused by
Nasty As They Wanna Be.
Black women should not have to tolerate misogyny, Crenshaw argued, whether or not the music is meant to be laughed at or has artistic value—both of which she granted about
Nasty.
But something else also concerned Crenshaw: the singling out of black male performers for vilification. Attacks on rap artists at once reflect and reinforce
deep and enduring fears about the sexuality and physical strength of black men, she suggests. How else, Crenshaw asks, can one explain why 2 Live Crew were the first group in the history of the nation to be prosecuted on obscenity charges for a musical recording, and one of only a few ever tried for a live performance? Around this same time, she observes, Madonna acted out simulated group sex and the seduction of a priest on stage and in her music videos, and on Home Box Office programs the comic Andrew Dice Clay was making comments every bit as obscene and misogynistic as any rapper.
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The hypocrisy of those who single out rap singers as especially sexist or violent was starkly—and comically—demonstrated in 1995, when presidential candidate Bob Dole denounced various rap albums and movies that he considered obscene and then recommended certain films as wholesome, “friendly to the family” fare. Included among the latter was Arnold Schwarzenegger’s
True Lies,
in which every major female character is called a “bitch.” While in real life Arnold may be a virtuous Republican, in the movie his wife strips, and he puts her through hell when he thinks she might be cheating on him. In one gratuitous scene she is humiliated and tortured for twenty minutes of screen time. Schwarzenegger’s character also kills dozens of people in sequences more graphically violent than a rapper could describe with mere words.
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Even within the confines of American popular music, rappers are far from the first violently sexist fictional heroes. Historians have pointed out that in country music there is a long tradition of men doing awful things to women. Johnny Cash, in an adaptation of the frontier ballad “Banks of the Ohio” declares, “I murdered the only woman I loved/Because she would not marry me.” In “Attitude Adjustment” Hank Williams Jr. gives a girlfriend “adjustment on the top of her head.” Bobby Bare, in “If That Ain’t Love,” tells a woman, “I called you a name and I gave you a whack/Spit in your eye and gave your wrist a twist/And if that ain’t love what is.”

Rock music too has had its share of men attacking women, and not only in heavy metal songs. In “Down By the River” amiable Neil Young sings of shooting his “baby.” And the song “Run for Your Life,”
in which a woman is stalked and threatened with death if she is caught with another man, was a Beatles hit.
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After Tupac Shakur was gunned down in Las Vegas in 1996 at the age of twenty-five much of the coverage suggested he had been a victim of his own raps—even a deserving victim. “Rap Performer Who Personified Violence, Dies,” read a headline in the
New York Times.
“‘What Goes ’Round ...’: Superstar Rapper Tupac Shakur Is Gunned Down in an Ugly Scene Straight Out of His Lyrics,” the headline in
Time
declared. In their stories reporters recalled that Shakur’s lyrics, which had come under fire intermittently throughout his brief career by the likes of William Bennett, Delores Tucker, and Bob Dole, had been directly implicated in two previous killings. In 1992 Vice President Dan Quayle cited an antipolice song by Shakur as a motivating force behind the shooting of a Texas state trooper. And in 1994 prosecutors in Milwaukee made the same claim after a police officer was murdered.
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Why, when white men kill, doesn’t anyone do
aj‘accuse
of Tennessee Ernie Ford or Johnny Cash, whose oddly violent classics are still played on country music stations? In “Sixteen Tons” Ford croons, “If you see me comin’/Better step aside/A lotta men didn’t/A lotta men died,” and in “Folsom Prison Blues” Cash crows, “I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.” Yet no one has suggested, as journalists and politicians did about Shakur’s and 2 Live Crew’s lyrics, that these lines overpower all the others in Ford’s and Cash’s songbooks.
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Any young rap fan who heard one of Shakur’s antipolice songs almost certainly also heard one or more of his antiviolence raps, in which he recounts the horrors of gangster life and calls for black men to stop killing. “And they say/It’s the white man I should fear/But it’s my own kind/Doin’ all the killin’ here,” Shakur laments on one of his songs.
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Many of Shakur’s raps seemed designed to inspire responsibility rather than violence. One of his most popular, “Dear Mama,” was part thank-you letter to his mother for raising him on her own, and part explanation of bad choices he had made as an adolescent. “All along I
was looking for a father—he was gone/I hung around with the thugs/And even though they sold drugs/They showed a young brother love,” Shakur rapped. In another of his hits, “Papa’z Song,” he recalled, all the more poignantly, having “had to play catch by myself/what a sorry sight.”
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Shakur’s songs, taken collectively, reveal “a complex and sometimes contradictory figure,” as Jon Pereles, a music critic for the
New York Times,
wrote in an obituary. It was a key point missed by much of the media, which ran photos of the huge tattoo across Shakur’s belly—“THUG LIFE”—but failed to pass along what he said it stood for: “The Hate You Give Little Infants Fucks Everyone.” And while many mentioned that he had attended the High School of Performing Arts in Baltimore, few acknowledged the lasting impact of that education. “It influences all my work. I really like stuff like ‘Les Miserables’ and ‘Gospel at Colonus,’” Shakur told a
Los Angeles Times
interviewer in 1995. He described himself as “the kind of guy who is moved by a song like Don McLean’s ’Vincent,’ that one about Van Gogh. The lyric on that song is so touching. That’s how I want to make my songs feel.”
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After Tupac Shakur’s death a writer in the
Washington Post
characterized him as “stupid” and “misguided” and accused him of having “committed the unpardonable sin of using his immense poetic talents to degrade and debase the very people who needed his positive words most—his fans.” To judge by their loving tributes to him in calls to radio stations, prayer vigils, and murals that appeared on walls in inner cities following his death, many of those fans apparently held a different view. Ernest Hardy of the
L.A. Weekly,
an alternative paper, was probably closer to the mark when he wrote of Shakur: “What made him important and forged a bond with so many of his young black (especially black male) fans was that he was a signifier trying to figure out what he signified. He knew he lived in a society that still didn’t view him as human, that projected its worst fears onto him; he had to decide whether to battle that or to embrace it.”
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Readers of the music magazine
Vibe
had seen Shakur himself describe this conflict in an interview not long before his death. “What are you at war with?” the interviewer asked. “Different things at different
times,” Shakur replied. “My own heart sometimes. There’s two niggas inside me. One wants to live in peace, and the other won’t die unless he’s free.”
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It seems to me at once sad, inexcusable, and entirely symptomatic of the culture of fear that the only version of Tupac Shakur many Americans knew was a frightening and unidimensional caricature. The opening lines from Ralph Ellison’s novel,
Invisible Man,
still ring true nearly half a century after its publication. “I am an invisible man,” Ellison wrote. “No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.”
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When Presidents and the Press Collude, the Scares Never Stop

M
any scares, like Hollywood stars, have their heyday and then fade from sight, more or less permanently. Witness panics over razor blades in Halloween apples, abortion as a cause of cancer, or children dumping their elderly parents at racetracks. Other fears have more staying power, as the discussion of scares about black men suggests.

Another perennial scare owes its long run to powerful sponsorship. For three decades U.S. presidents and media organizations have worked in unison to promote fears of drug abuse. Unlike almost every other hazard, illicit drugs have no interest group to defend them. So they are safe fodder for winning elections and ratings.
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Drug abuse is a serious problem that deserves serious public attention. But sensationalism rather than rationality has guided the national conversation. Misinformed about who uses drugs, which drugs people abuse, and with what results, we waste enormous sums of money and fail to address other social and personal problems effectively. Federal drug enforcement, a $6 million expense in the 1960s, passed the $1 billion mark in the mid-1980s during Ronald Reagan’s presidency and more than $17 billion during Bill Clinton’s. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, an era of budget cutting and distaste for Big Government, agencies involved in drug control were about the only places within the federal government to grow.
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The money has been spent almost exclusively on curbing illegal drugs, a curious policy given that abuse of legal drugs is a huge problem. More Americans use legal drugs for nonmedical reasons than use cocaine or heroin; hundreds of millions of prescription pills are used illicitly each year. More than half of those who die of drug-related medical problems or seek treatment for those problems are abusing prescription drugs. By the American Medical Association’s own estimates
one in twenty doctors is grossly negligent in prescribing drugs, and according to the Drug Enforcement Agency, at least 15,000 doctors sell prescriptions to addicts and pushers. Yet less than 1 percent of the nation’s antidrug budget goes to stopping prescription drug abuse.
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The gargantuan disparity in spending reflects—and is perpetuated by—what the nation’s media and political leaders have chosen to focus on. Scares about heroin, cocaine, and marijuana issue forth continually from politicians and journalists. But except for burps when a celebrity overdoses, they have been largely silent about the abuse of legal drugs.

It all started on April 9, 1970. An event at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue inaugurated a new and lasting collaboration between presidents and the media. At Richard Nixon’s request, White House officials held a day-long meeting with producers and executives from the major television networks, production companies, and advertising agencies to enlist their support in curtailing illegal drug use. Many of the most influential decision makers in the TV industry participated.