MickyDolenz said:
Scorp said:
it aint about censorship, it's about understanding the influence you have as an artist, where your words grow impressionable for millions who are going to emulate what you project
I've seen the devastating effects firsthand in my own community how young cats have projected the stuff they have not only heard in music BUT video as well, they are LIVING it
it's more than about music/entertainment...it's about the long term affects of what's been projected years after these artists move on......
see, cats weren't saggin their pants when HIP-HOP first started in the late 70s
cats started flashin gang signs out the blue....see, these are the things I'm talkin about....
this is what I'm saying.....for me, this is arguably the greatest rap record/any record of all time, it spoke of the ills of the inner city, the challenges people face daily living in such neglected circumstance, BUT the one thing the record did was provide honest depiction w/out perpetuating the circumstance...a record so brutally honest, and so entertaining, but did not feature profanity or destructive content
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4o8TeqKhgY
you see, it could have been the way all along and I would have supported it to the tilt.....
That's like saying listening to Ozzy Osbourne songs make people commit suicide, which he was taken to court for. Or that heavy metal music turns someone into a Satanist. If someone is going to do something, they were most likely going to do it in the first place. Charles Manson claims that the Beatles white album is about a race war, when there are no songs on the album about that. Gangs were around long before there was a record business, movies, or video games.
As far as "saggin" goes, there was a country/bluegrass singer in the 1950's named Stringbean who wore his pants like that. It's not really new.
People complain about rap music and video games, but not about the news, which has way more violence and bad things going on. People don't protest that the news should only show positive or uplifting stories.
this is why I brought up the subject of self perpetuating behavior
yes, gangs existed....Afrika Bambaataa used to be in the Black Spades back in the mid 70s
I was in small neighborhood gangs, almost joined this major gang called the junior disciples back in 1981, which was a branch from the Original Disciples who started in Chicago back in the 1960s
gangs existed due to socio-economic factors (lack of quality education, lack of jobs, lack of overall fair opportunity, jim crow, defacto segragation).....
but see, the original Crips and Bloods were formed not to fight against each other, but to protect the neighborhoods from police brutality after the Watts riots of 1965 as the civil righs era reached prominence
as as 1979 hit, when the tide began to turn, when the crips and bloods wanted to form a truce to gravitate back to it's original mode of existence, LAPD obstructed that effort and encouraged even more gang violence, then the crack epidemic started, then the proliferation of gun use...
ALL OF THAT was being projected in many music videso of the late 80s/up until the 90s and beyond, and those images grew impressionable on youth who were not aware the root of the circumstance, which led to a round of self perpetuation that has not inflicted not only one generations, but 2 and half generations...
and u pointed out one person who "sagged" back in the 50s, but
1.) I'm sure it wasn't called saggin
2.) you didn't see host of kids in each urban community in the country emulating that look
but that has played out since the late 1980s, and grows deeply ingrained in the psyche of the community, and its' not only guys who are saggin now, it's young ladies who are sporting the sag look......and why are they doing it?....not because they are born with that mindset, it's because what has been projected to them thru music and video,
so by the 90s, you had a situation where you had teenagers, who had no part of the actual gang experience emulate this image, especially when THUG LIFE became the M.O., then you had kids who didn't even live in the inner city trying to adapt to the scene, all because of what was projected to them......these cats were deemed as fake and called WANKSTAS trying to be REAL G'S.
and because of this depiction, allot of teenagers AND grown folks have died as a result....THUG LIFE image cost TUPAC and BIGGIE their lives, and I bet anyone TUPAC's range as an artist and human being was more profound than what he initially projected, an image he was trying to move beyond but the image wouldn't allow him.....
and if we are talented as we claim to be, we wouldn't have to resort to using profanity in records to get attention or to sell records, for that level of discourse eventually dries out creativity and leaves you with no voice to express what really needs to be expressed....and that's why music, particularly black music has withered in the manner and ferocity it has