Month: April 2010

What have we become?

That was my question when I first learned that rapper T.I. was speaking at middle schools as part of his community service. Apparently I’m not alone in my disapproval. Yahoo News gives us a glimpse:

T.I.’s March 5 visit to Woodland Middle School in Stockbridge, Georgia has outraged parents..

Tom Myers, the father of four girls in the Henry County School System, said that if he knew the rapper and convicted felon was going to appear at his daughters’ school, he would have kept them home that day..

Myers shared with WSBTV a complaint letter he emailed to Oatts. “In the future, if T.I. or any other convicted felon needs to perform community service, ask for parental permission to allow our children to be exposed to these questionable individuals,” he wrote..

I touched on this in my blog last March when T.I.’s sentence (he was facing up to 20 years) was reduced to just one year and a day if he did community service hours by speaking to young people about gangs and violence. (Side note: he was out by Christmas. That’s a pretty quick year.)

Have Adults Given Up?
When are our school systems going to wake up and realize that we’re not helping our kids by allowing this kind of influence?

Let me be very clear. We– adults— are the gatekeepers. We have control who speaks to our kids. We have control who our kids listen to and purchase. We have control what music is played at our schools.

Last Friday night my 12-year-old, Ashley, had a track meet that took place at the local high school. Music was blaring in the ears of all the parents in the bleachers. When we were taking our seat, I Gotta Feeling was playing. Then, no joke, the next song was from Eminem, then the next song from Lil Wayne. You can’t imagine how relieved I was when a Bon Jovi song came on (I don’t think I’ve ever been so happy to hear Bon Jovi before. But, heck, I’d take anything at the moment!). Was an adult in charge of this track meet? Why were we all be subjected to foul-mouthed perverts when all we wanted to do was see our kids run track?

Have we just given up? Are we– adults— supposed to just give up and, not only tell our kids that this music is okay, but play it for them! Are we–adults— supposed to keep giving these individuals awards and elevating them to “hero” status?

Are we so bankrupt on positive role models that we need to book morally bankrupt rappers to come and speak at our schools?

Did T.I. have a major life-style change that qualified him to come and speak to our young people? Or does our federal court system think anyone who gets busted is qualified to be a role model to our young people today? (“And our next speaker, Charles Manson! He got busted too. Let him speak!”)

I can’t help but wonder if some of these adult decision makers don’t know all the information. Have they ever looked at T.I.’s content?

A quick search of T.I.’s albums will give you a glimpse of his true message to young people, the one they’re putting into their ears at the rate of 2 hours and 19 minutes per day, anyway. I encourage you to Google some of his lyrics. Songs like, “I’m Chillin’ With My B*tch.”

I ain’t hangin’with my niggaz, pullin’ no triggaz
I’ll be back to the trap, but for now
i’m chillin’ with my b*tch today
i’m chillin’ with my b*tch today

I ain’t hangin’ with my partners, I’m out eatin’ lobster
I’m on some grown man sh*t, ya dig
i’m chillin’ with my b*tch today
i’m chillin’ with my b*tch today

Well. Isn’t that special.

Or how about a song off the same album as his recent hit, “Whatever You Like” that I talked about in my March blog. This song is called “Porn Star,” about a girl he meets and solicits sex from. Take a peek at the lyrics:

Hey would you..stay
Could you..play with it, with your tongue just a..little
You such a sexy individual physical and mental
And if it’s sentimental shouldn’t rules bend a little
Hey let me start at the top stop in the middle use a popsicle
Make you shiver giggle when it tickle
I could talk to you dirty if you’d like that (bad girl)
I finish once, hit a blunt, start right back
I know you told me you a good girl
But shawty you’s grown woman not a little girl
You could blame it on the patron or the champagne
But sometimes being bad could be a good thing

[Chorus]
Oh yeah sitting here (I’m looking at you like, “Damn”)
We sippin’ on patron, something’s on my mind (you wanna leave with me tonight)
It’s been killing me all night long, and I wonder(listen shawty let me tell you what I’m thinking ‘bout)
Oh girl I wonder (for real shawty let me tell you what im thinking ‘bout)
It’s the end of the night, and I’m thinking you might
Wanna leave the bar, park the car, turn into a porn star

By the way. If you’re offended by the above lyrics. Good! You should be. That’s why I posted them for you. Because apparently we adults have no idea who our kids are listening to. When T.I.’s song Whatever You Like hit the charts in 2008, this album sold like hotcakes in 08 and 09, and this content is what kids across the nation were listening to.

And now they’re listening to him at their school assemblies.

Hmmmmmm.

(ht to David R. Smith for the Yahoo article)

This past weekend I had the opportunity to preach about youth culture, then do a parenting workshop in a church in South Bend, IN. On the drive to the workshop, I decided to tune into a popular radio station to hear a sampling of what our kids were hearing, wondering if I’d hear many of the “Hot 100” songs I’d been researching. After all, I know the top 10 songs kids were downloading. iTune shows us that at a glance. But I was curious what the radio was playing.

This particular radio station seemed like it was playing right from the “Top 10” charts, because in the hour that I had the radio on, I heard almost every song that I had been studying.

After about an hour of listening… I felt like I needed to take a shower and wash off the filth.

Seriously. I study this stuff all the time, and yet I still am amazed how potent today’s music is with oversexualized lyrics. (Is oversexualized even a word? Nope. I just pasted it into WORD and it gave me a little red wiggly line.)

Let me give you a glimpse at some of these top songs I heard.

TELEPHONE
The first song I heard was the joint venture from Beyonce and Lady Gaga, Telephone. The song itself isn’t necessarily profane. It just comes from the perspective of a girl in a club who is getting a call from a recent boyfriend. Gotta love the mentality– the lyrics give you a glimpse:

Just a second; it’s my favorite song they’re gonna play and I cannot text you with a drink in my hand, eh?

The crazy thing about this song is the video, which is still number one on iTunes today. The 30-second preview on iTunes says it all. You’ll be amazed. I won’t go into too much more detail, I’ve already devoted an entire blog article to this video.

I actually talked about this video and showed some screenshots when I preached on Sunday. A teenager attending who liked Lady Gaga commented, “You shouldn’t pick on Lady Gaga. She’s Catholic.”

lol

In my parent seminar I couldn’t pass that comment up. After all, if I found out that the corner drug dealer was Baptist… does that make what he’s doing okay? Call him what you want. He’s selling our kids garbage.

The music industry is doing the same thing. And medical professionals are becoming very concerned with this kind of content. I devoted an entire Youth Culture Window article to this subject.

RUDE BOY
The second song I heard is the number one song on Billboard’s Hot 100, Rude Boy, by Rihanna, a song with the first line, “Come here rude boy, boy; can you get it up?”

It doesn’t get any better. Here’s a snippet:

Tonight I’ma let you be the captain
Tonight I’ma let you do your thing, yeah
Tonight I’ma let you be a rider
Giddy-up, giddy-up, giddy-up babe
Tonight I’ma let it be fire
Tonight I’ma let you take me higher
Tonight, baby, we could get it on, yeah, we could get it on, yeah

Do you like it?
Boy, I want, want, want whatchu want, want, want
Give it to me, baby like boom, boom, boom
What I want, want, want is what you want, want, want
Nah nah-ah

Yes, that’s the number one song on Billboard’s Hot 100 right now, #4 on iTunes.

You gotta love what many of these songs are doing today. They are slippin under the radar and being deemed “clean” by the world’s standards (I addressed that fact in more detail in this blog about the Black Eyed Peas), when the lyrics are anything but clean. Yes, Rude Boy doesn’t have cuss words. So it’s clean, right? Let’s be honest. The whole song is about hooking up. But, hey… as long as they don’t cuss, right?

BEDROCK
The next song I heard was Bed Rock by a whole mess of young rappers including Lil Wayne, Drake, and a bunch of other thugs. I don’t need to say much about a song with the chorus, “Baby, my room is the G spot, call me Mr. Flintstone, I can make your bed rock.” Then they repeat that four more times, “I can make your bed rock.”

The song also features young female rapper, Nicki Minaj, with this opening line:

Okay, I get it, let me think, I guess it’s my turn
Maybe it’s time to put this p***y on your sideburns

In the “clean” version (as they call it) and the edited video, the crass word for her genitalia is edited, you just see her grab her crotch as she mouths it.

Nice to have yet another good role model for our young women, don’t you agree?

OMG
The next song I heard was Usher’s new song OMG, the same one he performed on American Idol two weeks ago. Is it just me, or is American Idol allowing racier stuff recently? It used to be a little bit safer for family viewing, but the last couple years have seemed to digress in terms of the ‘role models’ that perform and coach on the show. Yes, these “artists” are talented. But are they role models? Does America even know the difference?

Usher’s song OMG is a joke. Let me be clear. Usher is incredibly talented and some of his songs are really good artistically (although very often bankrupt morally- more on that here). But this song is really weak. The lyrics sound like a teenager verbalizing his first visit to a night club. A snippet:

i fell in love with shawty when i seen her on the dance floor
she was dancing sexy, pop, pop, popping, dropping, dropping low
never ever has a lady hit me on the first sight
this was something special ; this was just like dynamite
honey got a booty like pow, pow, pow
honey got some boobies like wow, oh wow

Need I say more?

FINAL THOUGHTS
Let’s just say that my drive was pretty depressing. As other songs played (Kesha talking about guys wanting to “touch her junk”), I realized how hard it must be for our young people who listen to this stuff all the time.

It doesn’t require studies like these (students listening to a lot of music with sexual messages were almost twice as likely to start having intercourse within the following two years…) to tell you what effect listening to this content regularly would have on teenagers.

So what can we do?

That’s what I spent two hours talking about on Sunday at my parenting workshop. It’s a balance of rules and a relationship. Yes, rules are necessary. It’s okay to say, “This doesn’t belong on your iPod.” But rules without a relationship lead to rebellion. For many parents, building a relationship with their kids is where this begins.

Have ongoing conversations about music and media with your teenagers. Don’t let the world set the standard for you!

Wow! What a weekend.