Can't Stop Won't Stop (62 page)

Here were the naked post-riot fears of imminent racial and generational change codified into more crackpot conservative pseudo-theory, into an ideology that could preserve the War on Youth.

The truth was that juvenile violence had already peaked. National homicide arrest rates dropped by forty percent between 1993 and 1997. In 1998, California reported its lowest juvenile felony arrest rate since 1966. National crime rates were at their lowest since the mid-'70s. But fears outweighed facts. It was as if the generation that had coined the aphorism, “Never trust anyone over thirty,” was now unable to trust anyone
under
thirty.

Sister Souljah's declaration no longer seemed hyperbole: “We are at war!”

During the 1980s, cultural conservatives had launched attacks on everything from government funding of transgressive art to campus initiatives toward multi-culturalism and inclusion. But in rap music, race, generation and pop culture all came together. By attacking hip-hop, conservatives could move their culture-war
agenda out of obscure Congressional debates and campus Academic Senates into the twenty-four-hour media spin cycle.

In 1985, Tipper Gore, the wife of Tennessee Democratic senator and future presidential candidate AI Gore, and three other Washington wives launched the Parents Music Resource Center to combat sexually explicit lyrics. Gore's eureka moment had come when she heard her daughter, Karenna, enjoying Prince's “Darling Nikki” in her bedroom. Citing songs by Twisted Sister, Cyndi Lauper, David Lee Roth and Madonna, the PMRC successfully pressured the record industry began placing “Parental Adivsory” stickers on potentially explicit records.

At first, “satanic” heavy metal artists drew most of the cultural conservatives' ire. But after NWA's brush with the FBI, Gore and the cultural conservatives turned their attention to rap music. In 1990, she wrote an editorial in the
Washington Post
ripping Ice T for a rap from an album ironically subtitled
Freedom of Speech . . . Just Watch What You Say
: ‘Do we want [our kids] describing themselves or each other as ‘niggers'? Do we want our daughters to think of themselves as ‘bitches' to be abused? Do we want our sons to measure success in gold guns hanging from thick neck chains?”
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A network of Christian fundamentalist groups sprung up to fight rap, pressing the Bush Administration and state and local politicians to ban rap groups like the 2 Live Crew. The campaign was led by Florida lawyer and failed political candidate Jack Thompson, who sent letters to hundreds of sheriff's departments and politicians urging them join the fight to ban rap records. “I think there is a cultural civil war going on,” Thompson said. “I'm kind of the foot-soldier type.”
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In 1990, Thompson's campaign against the 2 Live Crew's
As Nasty As They Wanna Be
got the album banned from Broward County, Florida, to Ontario, Canada. Dozens more record-store employees were fined or arrested for selling the album to minors. Conservative Florida governor Bob Martinez, in a difficult reelection race, denounced the album. Apparently, rappers in gold chains presented a better target than rockers with headless pigeons. Frank Zappa, an early opponent of the PMRC, told
The Source
, “The whole racist aroma swinging from the metal aspect to the rap aspect is a bit suspicious. The devil stuff didn't work. The devil business only played in certain parts of the country.”
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A Florida judge later ruled 2 Live Crew's album obscene, effectively banning
the record. But on May 7, 1992, a Federal Court of Appeals in Atlanta overturned the decision, a decision the Supreme Court let stand. “It's gonna go over to the majors next,” Campbell had predicted at the height of the controversy. “The censors will come after them when they finish with us.”

When the 1992 presidential election season rolled around, Campbell's comments proved prophetic. While Democrat Bill Clinton and President George Bush moved toward their formal nominations, Texas billionaire H. Ross Perot threatened to upset the usual political calculus with a third-party run. Perot was particularly attractive to middle-aged, upper-middle class, suburban and exurban “swing” voters, the so-called center that both parties so desperately coveted. Skillful exploitation of racial and generational fears might prove the key to the election. A month after 2 Live Crew's victory, rappers Sister Souljah and Ice T were both in the gunsights.

Young Black activist Lisa Williamson had become Sister Souljah when she joined Public Enemy in 1990. During the late ‘80s, she had worked with the crew when she served as organizer for the National African Youth/Student Alliance. After Professor Griff left the group, she became “Sister of Instruction/Director of Attitude.” “Rap is a vehicle for mass marketing Black consciousness,” she now said. “You cannot fight fire with a flyer.”
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After appearing on the Terminator X and Public Enemy albums, she worked with Eric “Vietnam” Sadler on her own album, called
360 Degrees of Power
. Released in March, it had not been a big seller. Souljah was a better polemicist than a rapper, and she settled into a heavy schedule of interviews and lectures. Days after the uprising, she sat down for an interview with David Mills, who had now moved downtown to the
Washington Post.

Mills baited Souljah on the riots, asking her if she thought the violence against Reginald Denny was “wise, reasoned action.” Here, he writes, “Souljah's empathy for the rioters reached a chilling extreme.” He quoted her answering:

“I mean, if Black people kill Black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people? You understand what I'm saying? In other words, white people, this government, and that mayor were well aware of
the fact that Black people were dying every day in Los Angeles under gang violence. So if you're a gang member and you would normally be killing somebody, why not kill a white person? Do you think that somebody thinks that white people are better, or above dying, when they would kill their own kind?”

As she said on “Sunday Today”: “Unfortunately for white people, they think it's all right for our children to die, for our men to be in prison, and not theirs.”
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On June 13, as a guest of Jesse Jackson at the Rainbow Coalition's political convention, Bill Clinton read an edited version of Souljah's words in disgust. The night before, Souljah had participated in the convention's youth panel, and Clinton's advisors believed he had been handed the perfect opportunity to distance himself from Jackson's constituencies and ingratiate himself with Perot voters. Clinton said to the stunned crowd:

Just listen to this, what she said: She told the
Washington Post
about a month ago, and I quote, “If Black people kill Black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people? So if you're a gang member and you would normally be killing somebody, why not kill a white person?”

I know she is a young person, but she has a big influence on a lot of people, and when people say that—if you took the words white and Black and you reversed them, you might think David Duke was giving that speech.
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Souljah blasted Clinton for taking her statements out of context. She had never personally advocated violence against whites, she said. She was trying to describe the mindset of those who had committed such actions. Clinton, she said, was trying to make her “a Willie Horton, a campaign issue, a Black monster that would scare the white population.”
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Jackson and other Black leaders seethed at Clinton's well-placed, high-profile 10 percent dis. “She represents the feelings and hopes of a whole generation of people,” Jackson said after Clinton's speech. “She should receive an apology.”
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None was forthcoming. Instead, political pundits heaped praise on Clinton.
New York Times
writer Gwen Ifill wrote, “There is no question that the Clinton campaign is quite satisfied with the outcome of the Sister Souljah episode, and that it may become a blueprint for future risky missions to rescue the campaign's flagging fortunes.”
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The same week, the National Rifle Association and police organizations presented Republicans with an opportunity to resuscitate their own plunging poll numbers. On June 10 and 11, in press conferences from Maryland to Texas, they called for a boycott of Time Warner businesses because of a song called “Cop Killer,” released on their Sire Records label by Ice T's Black heavy metal band Body Count.

In Austin, the law enforcement group pushed to close the Time Warner–owned Six Flags Over Texas theme park. In Houston, the Police Officers Association pressed the City Council to block renewal of its Time Warner Cable contract. Within a week, the national Fraternal Order of Police, the National Association of Chiefs of Police and the governor of Alabama had joined the call for a boycott and a ban.

“People who ride around all night and use crack cocaine and listen to rap music that talks about killing cops—it's bound to pump them up,” Paul Taylor, the Fraternal Order's president, said. “No matter what anybody tells you, this kind of music is dangerous.”
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Vice President Dan Quayle attacked Time Warner's execs as a “cultural elite” that cared less about family values than about making a buck. At a National Association of Radio Talk Show Hosts convention, he asked to thunderous applause, “So where is the corporate responsibility here?”
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The line worked so well it became a permanent part of Quayle's limited repertoire. In one stump speech, Quayle even stated he felt his Democratic opponent Clinton had been correct to criticize Sister Souljah.
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Not to be left out, Oliver North hired Jack Thompson to take on Time Warner on behalf of his Freedom Alliance organization and President Bush let reporters know he felt “Cop Killer” was “sick.” No one could muster the same passion to protest Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger's cop-killing movie,
The Terminator.

Lost in the noise was a statement from the National Black Police Association,
which represented 35,000 Black cops, condemning the ban and the Time-Warner boycott. “This song is not a call for murder. It's a rap of protest. Ice T isn't just making this stuff up,” said Ronald Hampton, the Association's director. “There are no statistics to support the argument that a song can incite someone to violence.”
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The cultural conservatives' position on “Cop Killer” was not even consistent with their stance on campus hate speech codes, which they huffed would restrict the free flow of ideas and bend discourse to the forces of “political correctness.” But the battle over “Cop Killer” indicated that conservatives were willing to be intellectually dishonest if it helped advance their agenda. In late June, at the request of a Florida sheriff, John McDougall, the state's attorney general began investigating whether Ice T could be charged under the Florida hate crime laws for speech that “dehumanized” police officers.

Why were law enforcement organizations and right-wingers so passionately committed to banning one song from a rapper's heavy metal side-project? A clue came in a report by Amnesty International on police brutality in Los Angeles released in the middle of the “Cop Killer” controversy. Investigators from the human rights organization had come to the city after the beating of Rodney King to look at police practices. In a year-long inquiry, they found that police and sheriffs' treatment of harmless suspects sometimes “amounted to torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.” Police brutality, Amnesty International Secretary General Ian Martin said, was “one of a number of current human rights scandals in the U.S. that undermine its credibility in promoting rights internationally.”
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Calls for police reform across the country had reached deafening pitch since the March 1991 beating of Rodney King. The Amnesty report reflected the fact that Los Angeles had become a global symbol of American law enforcement's systemic breakdown over issues of race and youth. Embattled police associations, it seemed, saw “Cop Killer” as an opportunity to reverse unwanted scrutiny. Here was the culture war as a strategic diversion.

Charlton Heston stepped into the Time Warner shareholders meeting on July 16 and gave a masterful performance. With the voice of Moses, he condemned Time Warner executives for choosing greed over responsibility, and proceeded to dramatically read the lyrics to Body Count's “KKK Bitch”—a song in which ice-T's character imagines rough sex with the daughter of a Grand Wizard and Tipper
Gore's two twelve-year-old nieces. Then he turned to “Cop Killer.” Heston asked a rhetorical question, “If that song were titled ‘Fag Killer' or the lyrics went, ‘Die, die, die, Kike, die,' would you still sell it?”
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Outside, police carried picket signs that read,
TIME WARNER PUTS PROFITS OVER POLICE LIVES and MEDIA MOGULS OF MURDER
. They chanted, “Ban rap! It's all crap!”

Thousands of record stores pulled Body Count's album, many at the request of California state attorney general Dan Lungren. The city of Philadelphia's pension fund voted to divest millions of dollars in Time Warner stock. Republican party officials made an issue of Clinton receiving political contributions from Time Warner. When Body Count played a show in Hollywood, one fan mused, “There are more cops out here than at Florence and Normandie.”
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Ice T called a press conference for July 28. Before he spoke, he showed a half-hour clip about the Black Panther Party. “One of the main problems with the press is that they don't have the slightest idea of what I'm talking about,” he said. Then he announced he was pulling the song off the album so that he could offer it free at his concerts. It was never about money, he said, “This song is about anger and the community and how people get that way. It is not a call to murder police.
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