The Irish censorship merry-go-round can get so predictable. Last December, Niggers With Attitude’s scurrilously opportunistic album “Efil4zaggin’” was finally released in Ireland and duly sold its staple 400 copies to the limited domestic rap fan base. Then a month later, an outraged Dublin parent contacted Gay Byrne’s radio show and the controversy got rolling.
Soon everybody was piling in. The Irish Council For The Status Of Women condemned the album as pornographic while my worthy constituent Declan Lynch wondered in his Sunday Independent radio column if Gaybo was just stirring it and duly received a verbal knuckle-dusting from the Howth Head on his last show before the RTE strike. Then came the folley-uppers from Tony Connolly in the Irish Independent, B.P. Fallon who briefly and bravely sought to explain NWA’s stance in the Sunday Tribune and Fintan O’Toole whom in the Irish Times’ “Second Opinion” column, seemed to be using the excesses of NWA to attack most if not all rap as “boring, repetitive and largely uninnovative in musical terms”.
So far, you might rather wearily conclude that the affair was the usual media fabrication of outrage in the traditionally slow month of January. But then on Wednesday 5th February, Kildare Fine Gael TD Brendan Durkan, supplied the necessary next step to the controversy by asking then Justice Minister, ray Burke, if his “attention has been drawn to the distribution / sale of audio tapes on the Irish market which appear to demean and degrade women and promote violence in a fashion likely to encourage impressionable people to crime (and) if he intends to take any legislative action on this issue”.
The chain of events and their implications was extending. One record, one shocked parent and one radio show later and new and fundamental issues of censorship and free expression were being broached.
Nevertheless, Ray Burke’s reply was careful, stating that “there is no specific legislation for the censorship of sound recordings for the simple reason that there has not been a problem of pornographic or obscene records or tapes being put on the market” and he continued by saying he was aware that “serious concern had been expressed “ about NWA.
He added: “I share that concern. I would hope that the civic responsibility and good sense of the record retailers and distributors in this country will ensure that this recording will be quickly taken of their shelves”.
The then Justice Minister concluded that he had “asked the Garda authorities to examine whether distribution or sale of such a recording may constitute a criminal offence and I have asked them to explore all avenues to see whether the sale of such material can be lawfully prevented”.
In response, Record Services, the Irish distributors of NWA, have been equally circumspect. The have ceased selling and importing the album though no copies have been recalled. Individual record stores have been left to make their own decision about sale and withdrawal though it is most unlikely the Irish market would support many further sales.
Those are the Irish facts so far. What are the issues?
First off, “Efil4zaggin’” is often crap and offensively sexist. After its first tracks, you could argue that NWA are just outrageously raising the stakes in the perennial black game of putting on whitey and then justifiably ask what is more obscene – a barrage of “Motherfuckin’”s or the degradation of the ghetto after 12 years of white Republican rule?
But once NWA turn their spleen on women, the argument gets twisted. This isn’t gamesmanship, instead verbal black-on-black violence against women, “To Kill A Hooker”, “Findum Fuckum and Flee”, “She Swallowed It” and “I’d Rather Fuck You” are crude and hateful. Even as documentary tracks, they leave no excuse for NWA’s viciously misogynistic view of even their own black sisters.
And yet B.P. Fallon wasn’t indulging in hyperbole when he insisted that “In 300 years time, the music of NWA will tell the story of America more precisely than a million records by Michael Jackson and Madonna, REM and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers”. Indeed, if nothing else, NWA precisely tell the story of Mike Tyson as an unguided sexual missile.
Certainly rappers like NWA ruthlessly record the destruction and degradation of the old soul community and its codes of solidarity. The humanism of Martin Luther King gets elbowed aside by the opportunism of Don King’s and Mike Tyson’s spiritual advisor Rev Al Sharpton, as over 40 black ministers got behind Tyson in Indiannapolis and even black women backed away from his accuser. Even Jessie Jackson can sometimes seem a by-passed moderate as militant Black Muslim separatism becomes the most favoured rap creed.
NWA’s sexism has its precedents. Take this quote from the third page of Charles Mingus’ autobiography, “Beneath The Underdog” as he explains the status of pimps in his childhood neighbourhood, fully fifty years ago: “That’s almost impossible to explain – how you feel when you’re a kid and the king pimps come back to the neighbourhood. They pose and twirl their watchchains and sport their new Cadillacs and Rolls and expensively tailored clothes. It was like the closest thing to one of our kind becoming President of the USA. When a young, up-and-coming man reaches out to prove himself boss pimp, it’s making it. That’s what it means where I come from – proving you’re a man” (my italics).
As much as preaching, pimping was a career for a ghetto man of all the talents. Mingus quite lasciviously outlines his associations with pimps and prostitutes while in his own autobiography, Malcolm X sadly recalls his own time spent hustling whores. Briefly in the fifties while a junkie, Miles Davis also ran his own stable and even Jimi Hendrix’s most determinedly black nationalist biographer, David Henderson, blithely mythologised the guitarist as the musical counterpart to a superpimp who had mastered the game. So when NWA’s labelmate, Ice Cube raps “A bird in the hand is worth more than a Bush”, he’s exactly recording many young black males preference for the cathouse over the White House.
So to a degree, NWA are exaggerating and twisting old themes and mythologies, not inventing new ones. But what makes NWA’s misogyny so frightening and intolerable to many is that it seems so alarmingly closer to the deed than spotty, adolescent, white HM sexism. They’re far too rawly immediate to be a cartoon to jack off to. There’s now suburban teenage, television-viewing voyeur’s distance to NWA, you don’t really believe they’ll ever grow out of it.
Which brings us back to the Irish misunderstanding of NWA that began with Gay Byrne’s intervention. The whole controversy has been more than faintly artificial exactly because it has been entirely drained of context.
Certainly it has diminished both ourselves and our understanding of African-American urban society. The notion that NWA might somehow act as a catalyst for sex crimes against Irish women hardly warrants consideration as a casual link since the rap audience here is sufficiently knowledgeable about the style to put NWA’s rabble-rousing in its true bleak and misguided context.
For rap itself became a battleground once the black humanism of its early leaders like Afrika Bambaataa, Kurtis Blow and Grandmaster Flash was challenged by brutalists such as Schooly D. and before the likes of De La Soul and PM Dawn led a backlash against rap’s verbal arms race. Furthermore, the whole controversy about NWA has excluded independent black sisters like Queen Latifah, Salt ‘n’ Pepa and, from a more liberated black Islam perspective, Isis.
Ultimately, we will just have to understand if never accept the socio-economic reasons why rap, especially in its most erratic black populist varieties, will continue to aggravate white liberalism by insisting that black reality is constantly interfering with political correctness. Or to extend B.P. Fallon’s analogy, you’ll never learn from “The Cosby Show” about the sheer, unadulterated and desperate black male race that has turned them first against the Jews and now against their own women.
But we should watch our own backyard first. Bernard Durkan’s Dail question shows how the proposals of censorship can constantly stake out new ground as they seek to move on from legislation about video nasties onto recorded material. And what is culturally common about such creeping censorship is that it usually targets the new vulgar populist forms – which coincidentally are often the communications forms of the culturally deprived and voiceless – while avoiding the senior High arts. Will we be next defended against adult commix?
Meanwhile I’ll continue to defend NWA’s right to be obnoxious even if I suspect their opportunism. But not from any superior or condescending liberalism, but because we still need their laceration, the information of their desperation.