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CNN Segment 1

I hate to belabor this issue, but I think CNN's exposT on Bomani Armah and Tyree Dillihay's Read A Book encapsulates so much of what is wrong with hip hop and the media's take on hip hop that it's worth sitting through the ten minutes of footage and examining just what exactly is going on here:

Let's start with the opening segment, in which Sesame Street and Schoolhouse Rock are presented to a panel of parents as comparable programming alternatives to Read A Book. The apparent leap in logic here being that, since Bomani's video is animated, it must necessarily be geared toward adolescents. Despite eighteen years of adult-oriented cartoons like The Simpsons, Family Guy, Adult Swim and even B.E.T.'s regrettable Bebe's Kids, these parents buy into this comparison without ever questioning whether or not children are the intended audience. When presented as a direct alternative to Big Bird, Read A Book's over-the-top parody of hip hop videos is of course going to look like some sort of deliberate attempt to poison our children's minds. In the context of the rest of the videos shown during Rap City, though? Not quite as outrageous.

CNN Segment 2

Tony Harris, the CNN anchor hosting the discussion, deserves a mention in all of this. It's amazing to see Harris - a man who spends most of his day on camera dissecting the latest casualty figures from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan along with the natural disaster/terror scare du jour without batting an eyelash - feign outrage over an animated video. He even claims that he watches B.E.T., yet seems to think that the only time you can see "big booty women" on the channel is during this video. So either this man is completely uninformed and has no idea what is actually being played on B.E.T., or he's deliberately trying to get the audience to buy into the idea that this video is offensive. Either way, it's hard to argue that there isn't a very real bias in CNN's coverage of this issue.

To throw some weight behind their argument that the children are in danger, CNN pulls out a statement from B.E.T. saying that, although Rap City is geared toward a core demographic of 18 to 34 year-olds, a portion of its audience may be as young as twelve. Presumably this is in large part due to the fact that some children are able to watch television unsupervised, otherwise these outraged parents would have changed channels as soon as the video came on. Even ignoring that, one has to wonder why Read A Book is being singled out when you can turn B.E.T. on at virtually any hour of the day and see a video like "Superman Dat Ho." Now there's a song that mixes references to a children's comic book with sexual innuendo (at least I'm assuming it does, unless I'm missing the meaning behind Soulja Boy's enthusiastic command to "Super Soak That Ho!"), so why isn't CNN up in arms over that?

Here's my theory: Bomani's message is an attack on the status quo, and that's a threat to the various corporate interests that support the media. Over the past decade, we've been force fed these videos by Viacom and the various record companies, videos that are the audio/visual equivalent of junk food. They seem innocuous enough - simplistic beats, rudimentary lyrics, bright, flashy images - but consumed in large quantities, they're not good for you. Whether it's to buy some Bapestas, that new Bentley, some iced-out medallions, whatever, the message in nearly all of these videos is the same: go out and buy something, be a good consumer, so that you can compete with all of the other ballers on tv. So when a song comes along and contradicts the corporate agenda by telling the viewer to save up their money, buy some land and invest their money wisely instead of continuing their blind devotion to materialism, that's bound to ruffle some corporate feathers.

The alternative is that the parents and the various media commentators genuinely do think kids today aren't smart enough to watch a video like Read A Book without it having some detrimental effect on their young minds. Paul Porter, the generally well-spoken man behind industryears.com, argues in the second CNN segment that "twelve year olds don't understand satire," and he seems to genuinely believe that. It's been a while since I've been a teenager, admittedly, but I feel confident in saying that I understood what satire was back then. Jesse Jackson has shown us that not all adults appreciate the concept of satire, but I find it hard to believe that a teenager would be unable to understand the message behind the video.

For parents truly worried about the well-being of their children, perhaps it would be best to stop watching B.E.T., and the rest of the channels owned by Viacom, altogether. That's not going to happen any time soon, though, so the question becomes: Would you rather have your kid singing "Read A Book," or would you prefer to infantilize our teenagers by having them sing along to something like "A Bay Bay"? Maybe you could just take Bomani's advice and "raise yo' goddamn kids" instead of allowing the television to do it for you.

Youtube links via Tyree Dillihay

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