My Beef With Russell Simmons

Russell Simmons, the so-called CEO of hip hop, made headlines last week when he politely urged the recording and broadcasting industries to excise the words “bitch,” “ho,” and “nigger” from all music. In a statement released through his Hip-Hop Summit Action Network, Simmons called these words “derogatory and disrespectful” and asked music executives to delete them from songs on a voluntary basis.

For real?

Despite all of the positive things Simmons has done over the years—he founded the influential Def Jam music label, signed legendary acts like Run-DMC and Public Enemy, started the Def Comedy and Def Poetry Jams, and recorded public service announcements denouncing anti-Semitism with current Def Jam president Shawn “Jay-Z” Carter—I’ve got a beef with him and his latest proposal.

There’s no question that the three words Simmons wants to bleep cause pain and perpetuate negative stereotypes. But so do “whore,” “trick,” “chickenhead,” and the dozens of other demeaning names many rappers call women in their songs. Why didn’t Simmons request the removal of those words, too? And what about anti-gay epithets? Does Simmons think they are less hurtful than anti-woman epithets? (If you’ve seen Byron Hurt’s excellent documentary, “Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes,” you’d wonder the same thing.)

I appreciate the symbolism of Simmons’s statement. But in failing to hold the recording industry responsible for erasing all curses and slurs—not just the three he finds most despicable—on all albums before releasing them, and without proposing some kind of penalty for radio stations that play partially edited songs, his demand strikes me as overly timid at best and disingenuous at worst.

It’s especially hard to take Simmons’s proposal seriously in light of what he wrote about misogynistic lyrics in his 2001 autobiography. In the book, “Life and Def: Sex, Drugs, Money, and God,” Simmons suggests that such cruel words can have a positive impact on young women: “[A]fter years of hearing rappers talk negatively about women, about their babies’ mothers and sex,” he writes, “there’s been a real change in the patterns of teen pregnancy. Teen pregnancy in the black community is down, and I believe hip-hop…made girls smarter about premarital sex.”

For real?

Aside from this absurdity, my biggest beef with Simmons is that he had claimed to oppose the censorship he’s now proposing. Ten days before requesting the deletion of the three reprehensible words, Simmons defended hip hop artists from critics who claimed that what they say about women in their songs is just as vile as what Don Imus said about the Rutgers University women’s basketball team. “Sometimes their observations or the way in which they choose to express their art may be uncomfortable for some to hear,” he said of rappers, “but our job is not to silence or censor that expression.” And yet that is exactly what he asked the recording and broadcast industries to do last week.

Simmons insists that his proposal is not about censorship but about “the corporate social responsibility of the industry to voluntarily show respect to African Americans and other people of color, African-American women and to all women in lyrics and images.” But if Simmons truly believes that showing respect to women and minorities should be done “voluntarily,” he seriously needs to check himself. Showing respect for these groups is something that needs to happen all the time, in every medium.

Ultimately, blanking out the offensive words, playing them backwards, or covering them over with sound effects does not change the message of the songs, nor does it eliminate the misogyny and homophobia that have contaminated hip hop. Censorship is not the answer to these problems—dialogue is. Simmons has the clout to force music executives and artists to clean up rap, but he has not made any genuine efforts to do so in the past. He should follow the advice he gives others in his new self-help book: “Stop Frontin’ and Start Today.”

For real.

Andrew C. Esensten ’07, a Crimson news editor, is a literature and African and African American studies concentrator in Adams House.