Attacking Rap: The Most Important Work In Congress

    The House is holding hearings about the evils of rap music.  Haven’t we been here before? There was Tipper Gore’s anti-rock campaign of 1985, and Lieberman and Clinton’s noise for the last few years about video games.  Don’t these people have anything important to do, like end the war, lower crime, improve education, save our infrastructure, deal with global warming...nahhh, you get more airtime attacking hip-hop.

    Republicans AND Democrats like to vilify popular culture, good or bad-—it’s a potential vote-getter, and you don’t have to deal with the real causes of violence in our country, like the fact that we have more guns than people. Rappers and video game companies don’t have a lobby. The NRA is going to beat "NWA" every time.

       

So, it’s better to try to legislate against someone rhyming about having a gun than doing anything about a person who actually uses a gun.  Congress bent over for Bush again when they let the ban on assault weapons lapse, even though they’re used to actually kill police officers, as opposed to some musician just saying "Fuck The Police".  Bush said hunters need machine guns to hunt deer.  Really?  You’re not going to get any steaks out of that, are you?  You’d be lucky to get some jerky.

    I’ve never touched a gun or killed an animal.  If you’re a hunter and you know what you’re doing and you have your licenses, that’s your right. But be careful of all the psychos out there in the woods with you.  Right after the law lapsed, a mentally unstable man in a tree shot seven hunters when they said he was on their property.  He couldn’t have shot seven people without re-loading—unless he had that handy assault rifle.  Thank you, Mr. Bush!

    Hunting is dangerous as hell.  I was looking at a sports magazine (once—must have been in a dentist’s office), and I swear to God, they had an ad for camouflage-colored toilet paper.  Hunters using white toilet paper have been shot and killed, because they were mistaken for white-tailed deer.

   "Hey, Zeke—look at that deer in the orange vest, wipin’ his ass!"  BOOOMMM!!!

The big thing for Clinton and Lieberman and others was that the number one cause of violence in this country was guns.  Just kidding—they said video games.  I’ve never played a video game.  But if you do, or your kids do, you know they don’t cause violence—because the kids never leave their fuckin’ room!  And if the kid were to go outside and someone were to try to pick a fight with him, he wouldn’t know what to do.  He’d be holding his console up and pushing the joystick, thinking, "Shit!  He’s not moving!"

   

For awhile, it was cartoons that caused violence.  They edited the explosions out of Bugs Bunny and Yosemite Sam cartoons before they put them on TV.  Hey, I grew up on Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote.  I never put on roller skates and strapped a rocket to my ass.

    They say the main cause of school shootings is the easy availability of guns, and guns in the homes of the students’ parents and grandparents—just kidding. It’s heavy metal music.  Columbine was Marilyn Manson’s fault.  I grew up on Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath and I never shot anybody.  Of course, heavy metal has changed in all these years, because you have to keep mom and dad scared.  You know who the real heroes are in this country, besides the firefighters and nurses and teachers?  The American Mother.  The ones who grew up on rock-and-roll, who were hip in their day, who smoked some weed.  Now they have to walk by their 13-year-old son’s locked bedroom door in the afternoon, hearing something coming out of there at 100 decibels like

    "SATAN IS GOD!!! KILL YOUR PARENTS!!!  DO IT RIGHT NOW!!! DON’T WAIT FOR DINNER!!!"

    "...Sean...?  What are you listening to today, honey?  Sean, the cat won’t come in the house anymore and the dog hung himself..."

    And they’ve been demonizing rap and rappers since the mid-80’s, not that they’re saints, or that the anti-women, anti-gay, pro-violence crap is defensible.  But if they don’t want kids to be exposed to violence, why keep the war in Iraq going so it’ll be on the news every day for five years?  Ice-T did a song called "Cop Killer".  He wasn’t saying you should do that, he was probably making a statement, but they fired him from his record company, took millions of records off the shelves, and burned them, because the authorities believe children will do whatever it says in a song.

    "...Hey, dude, what’s that song you’re playing?  ‘Cop Killer’?"  (TURNS INTO A ZOMBIE WITH HIS ARMS OUT, SHUFFLING)  "KILL COPS...MUST KILL..."

    They’ve been singing songs about how we should all love each other for forty years, and nobody’s done that yet.  Jesse Colin Young is doing concerts to this day, singing "Come on, people now/Smile on your brother/Everybody get together/Try and love one another right now.."  And gangs are probably beating him up on his way to the car:  

    "DON’T TELL ME WHO TO LOVE, YOU LONG-HAIRED FAG!  GET A JOB, YOU FREAK!.. What’s that song on your car radio?  ‘Cop Killer’?...KILL...COPS...MUST KILL...!"

    I’m a lifetime rock-and-roller, so I’ve never actually heard a rap song all the way through, but I have to respect rap and hip-hop, because it’s the music of the young generation.  Years from now, there’ll be a married couple on their front porch swing, and the wife will say,

    "Listen, honey—they’re playing Our Song!"  

    "WHACK THAT ASS ALL ON THE FLO’!  WHACK THAT ASS AND GIVE ME MO’!"  

    The woman will be wiping away tears, crying, "That’s so beautiful!  They played that at our wedding!"

dougferrari.com