Sex & music has it gone too far? backlash over lyrics, violence and threat to young women grows

Lerone Jr. Bennett

THERE'S always been a connection between sex and music, but a new generation and new generations of technology have pushed the connection to the limits, triggering assaults, rapes and homicides all over the place and detonating a national barrage of criticism and controversy.

The most dramatic cases are known to almost all Americans, and are a matter of court record, but the most insidious and most damaging results can be seen in the miseducation of millions of Black males and the creation of a climate of violence and intimidation that threatens millions of Sisterz in the 'Hood.

There are even charges, some of them unfortunately true, that some mothers and fathers have virtually pushed their young daughters into the arms of "stars" for financial reasons or, worse, for the privilege of basking in the reflected glow of the long Black limousines.

All of this has raised explosive questions about the increasingly close connection between sex and music. "We used to sing about love, losing and finding it again," says psychologist Nathan Hare of the Black Think Tank, based in San Francisco. "But now music seems to have gone into a destructive motif. Sexual ecstasy is taking the place of happiness, and this is taking away from the feeling of music and the mores and customs of the community. It's become self-destructive."

Things have gotten so bad that some superstars are taking it all off and frolicking in porno films. One of the biggest porno hits of the year is an 80-minute video by Treach of the rap duo Naughty by Nature, who said he made the film for his female fans. "[I] did it," he said, "for the women who may have fantasies about being with me."

Some of the new musical icons, like Treach, say, correctly, that pop music has always been a first or second cousin of sex. But the hits from past decades ("Midnight Hour," "60-Minute Man," "Jelly! Jelly!") were kinder and gentler--and left something to the imagination. All the same, one ought to remember, at least for perspective, that Duke Ellington's elegant "Warm Valley" has nothing to do with geography. The key word here and the important difference between the old and new music is elegant. Ellington ("Satin Doll"), Coltrane ("Soul Eyes"), Miles ("Kind of Blue") said in thousands of compositions that the connection between sex and music is allusive and that both require art, empathy and the grace of a great three-point shooter.

Macho-macho music, by contrast, is explicit ("Shake ya a--") and almost juvenile in its frenzy to write dirty words on the shiny fences of CDs. Another and perhaps even more important difference is that the new music can't be escaped or denied because it's repeated all day long and all night long on TV and elsewhere.

How did we get to this point and how do we stop the anti-music music from playing?

The answers are complex and involve a lot of villains, including White producers and directors. But all or almost all of the answers are rooted in two major facts of the evolving dialogue between the new generation and the new generations of technology.

The first fact is a new generation of youth, raised in an electronic fantasy world exacerbated by a dangerous real world of crack, poverty, low-income family disintegration and racism. In appraising this generation, we must remember that it created the rap revolution and is the only generation to say anything new musically in America in the last 30 years.

Let it be said also that the problem is not a whole generation or a whole musical genre; the problem is a minority of the generation and the genre, a minority who inherited extreme needs (broken families, broken dreams, broken streets) from history and who are calling history to account in extreme, macho-macho words and images.

The second fact is the overwhelming impact of new generations of technology--TV, MTV, DVD, Internet, cell phones--that saturate and overwhelm the mind and body, creating a constant climate of stimulation, seduction (sexual, political and economic), and rape masquerading as seduction.

What makes this so destructive socially, musically and sexually is that the electronic blanket of the macho-macho world is based on Four Deadly Fantasies that demean and diminish both males and females.

The first fantasy is that males, especially Black males, exist to be serviced sexually and otherwise by women, Black, White, Yellow, and Green. People who count such things say there are some 90 references to oral sex in the short CD that became the first record to be deemed "legally obscene."

It is only one step from this fantasy to the idea that females, especially Black females, are sexual objects who were created to service males. A companion idea, based perhaps on images of the artists' overwhelmed mothers, some on drugs, says that women are no damn good and that fathers and males, including probably the composers, are worse.

The third fantasy is that power is not in the $30 million salary or the $10 million house but in the penis; and that no matter how much money or power a Brother has, he's nobody if he's not bad in the bed all the time, everywhere and with every fine Sister or blonde, or combination thereof, he meets.

Undergirding all this, coloring and informing all this, is the fourth fantasy idea that life is cheap and fast and that a real man has to prove all the time that his (car, house, etc.) is bigger and that a real man must be prepared to do anything, to die even, to keep from losing face.

The basic problem here and elsewhere is that some macho-macho Brothers have been taught by society, by the images they've seen and the mothers and fathers they've known, to hate themselves and who therefore repeatedly invite self-destruction in suicidal or near suicidal acts.

The inevitable results--how could it be otherwise?--is that millions of stars and fans in the music world and the athletic world are experiencing extreme difficulty in telling the difference between fantasy and reality.

We see this most poignantly in the lives of multimillionaire stars who believe the fantasy they sing and who act out these fantasies in the real world, usually with disastrous results. We see it also in the millions of fans who buy the CDs and music videos and fantasies and try to do to women on their own streets what the stars and the stars' videos and CDs say they do to the women on their street.

A number of studies indicate that the constant portrayal of young Black girls as sex objects is making them targets for people who are not mature enough to distinguish between video fantasy and reality. The problem is magnified when the recording artist himself can't tell the difference between the two and tries to live his video life even after the cameras stop rolling.

This, some say, has led to a national wave of young Black women being hustled and manipulated by unscrupulous stars and predators posing as stars. In some cases, Black teens have been tricked into sex with older celebrities by empty promises of fame, fortune and record deals. But it is not all a one-way street. Some teens, blinded by the fantasy floodlight, seek out older celebrities for sex and materialistic rewards and are even encouraged by their own family members. "Some parents profit from these [arrangements] financially," says Dr. Julia Hare, "and then when it is discovered, they claim, `Oh, I didn't know what was going on.' Materialism seems to be replacing values. It's all about, `What can I have to show and to impress my friends.'"

This situation, Dr. Julia Hare, Dr. Nathan Hare, psychiatrist Carl Bell and others say, is destroying us and requires major action at every level of our lives.

First of all and most important of all, experts say, we've got to ask Black leaders and all Black organizations, especially Black male and female organizations, to take a stand against the institutions and men and women who are singing and dancing us to destruction.

Secondly, and most importantly, they add, we've got to ask entertainment executives; Black and White, to turn down the heat on the musical images they're beaming to our children.

This is not an argument against free speech; this is not an argument against the right of responsible adults to listen to anything they want to listen to and to look at anything they want to look at--this is an argument against the legal wrong of crying fire in a crowded theater of children. It is an argument against adults taking advantage of immature children and adults by exploiting frailties and needs created in large part by the broken images and streets and institutions forced on them by history and racism.

Chicago psychiatrist Carl Bell says some fans, depending on their personal histories, will take the music videos and the actions of some superstars for what it is--out-of-control behavior, but others will soak up the negativity like a sponge, believing that it is acceptable or even expected to disrespect Black women and participate in reckless sexual behavior. "If [the fan] has an intact family, a loving relationship with his parents ... and good problem-solving skills," Dr. Bell says, "then he can listen to some lyrics or see some bad behavior [and it won't affect him] because it's one negative backed up with about 15 positives." But if the fan is surrounded by 15 negatives and no positives, and if "all he sees are hustlers, pimps, prostitutes, then he's going to believe that this is how you treat women," says Dr. Bell.

All of us, Dr. Bell and others say, must re-evaluate our own responses and our own responsibility in creating the negativity that surrounds us and our children. Above all else, they say, we've got to stop glorifying and praising Black and White stars whose personas and mansions and bling-bling are based on music that enslaves and mystifies and destroys.

Fourth and finally, as so many people interviewed for this article said, Black women and Black mothers have got to do what Asian women and other women have done. THEY'VE GOT TO SAY THAT THERE'S NOT GOING TO BE ANY 'HO-MONGERING IN THIS HOUSE, THAT WE'RE NOT GOING TO STAND IDLY BY WHILE STRANGERS CALL OUR MOTHERS, SISTERS AND DAUGHTERS 'HO'S.

That's what the Asian community said when a Black superstar recorded a song that said, among other things, that Asian women not only get down, but they also change the linen. The outraged Asian community put the lyrics on the Internet and organized an international petition.

What happened?

You know what happened. The Black superstar apologized, and the lyrics disappeared from the air waves.

Dr. Julia Hare wants to know why the Black community has not demonstrated equal energy in response to Black superstars who say worse things about Black women 365/24/7.

"The young Black woman is under assault," she says. "We are the only women in the world who would allow this blasphemy; we glorify the music and in fact defend the artists for their poetic license and their right to do this to us. We should have been able to stop this, the way other ethnic communities stopped it, when it first got out of hand." She added:

"I don't hear these derogatory lyrics about Black women from other major groups of people. It is from Black men. What they fail to realize is when they put the Black woman down they are also talking about their own mothers."

And their own fathers.

And their own futures.

It is important, it is a matter of life and death, for all of us to understand that.

We also need a new understanding--in the media, in the entertainment industry, in our churches, schools and organizations--that popular songs are as important as civil rights bills and that a society that pays pipers to corrupt its young and to defame its women and mothers will soon discover that it has no civil rights to defend and no songs to sing.

--Lerone Bennett Jr. (Zondra Hughes contributed information to this story.)

COPYRIGHT 2002 Johnson Publishing Co.
COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group