According to Billboard magazine, Chuck D of Public Enemy wants ‘to change the face of urban radio’… ‘That shit is over’, he declared during the radio show Hot 97’s Summer Jam, while commenting about the n-word, ‘If there was a festival and it was filled with anti-Semitic slurs… or racial slurs at anyone but black people, what do you think would happen? Why does there have to be such a double standard?’
And when Hot 97 DJ Peter Rosenberg denies the station’s responsibility in the overuse of the n-word, Chuck answered: ‘Where does it come from bro? And what’s fueling it ok? In [1989] it was used sparingly in small circles, now it’s mainstream. Why? … You saying black folk pinned it on themselves out of nowhere dude?’
Chuck D is totally right, and he has been very vocal on Twitter, criticizing the New York station by saying things such as ‘what a sloppy fiasco (the station) has made of Hip-Hop,’… and by this he is talking about the prolific use of the N-word over the airwaves. Furthermore, he was very unhappy about the Summer Jam line up, which had Nas, 50 Cent, Childish Gambino, Iggy Azalea, the Roots, Nick Minaj, Wiz Khalifa, and which wasn’t representing adequately the hip hop community: ‘It’s just a sloppy presentation of the art form, the worst presentation known to man. It’s negligent. There needs to be a greater representation of the culture and the community on that radio station,’ D added.
‘My goal by year’s end is to change the face and sound of urban radio’, he said, ‘I’ve been in this shit 30 years, too long to just sit and let it be. I’m not going to be the grim reaper. I don’t want to be the grim reaper. But people have to stand up and we need some change, and it’s time.’
Then he explained what the word ‘Urban’ means, ‘When people say the word Urban, they don’t know what that means. When they say urban music, they mean playing black artists — and artists outside the community. It should be a representation of playing music by a lot of different artists — non-black artists, too. I just want to see artists be able to have fair game.’ To continue, he called the comments made by Hot 97 personalities ‘a bunch of hogwash’, adding that the discussion needed to go to their bosses: ‘Why would I sit down with them? I don’t have time for that. I don’t have to show ’em shit; they’re grown people. I ain’t wasting my time. Let them sit down with the community and the artists. They’ll tell ’em. I’ll watch from afar. But they better get it right or we’ll destroy the platform of Urban radio across the country.’
Although he didn’t say exactly how he counts to destroy Urban radio – probably by supporting petitions like this one asking to take Hot 97 NY off the air – he said he would continue to speak out about the station via different outlets, and ‘wants to accomplish something tangible by year’s end’.
Wow, I am not sure it is realistic, but Chuck D makes very good points. The n-word is a hateful word that black people have re-claimed and made their own while giving it another meaning, but it’s difficult for me to comment on it, being white and totally outside of the rap culture. It just makes me cringe a bit every time I hear it, but when you hear it 50 times in the same song it has lost any real meaning, it’s hate speech repeated ad nauseam and achieving meaningless results, people don’t pay attention to the word anymore… or do they? Look what happened to Justin Bieber last week, hear a white person saying it a few times and we are right back to its real meaning!
Plus isn’t it a bit lazy to repeat this word in a song a million times? Come up with something new people! The use of the n-word opens the larger debate of sexist-racist-materialist dump rap taking over the airwaves to the detriment of incisive-social-commentary rap, there are too many niggas in Paris and not enough fear of a black planet. At the end, I wonder whether it is not too late to reverse this weird and disastrous tendency, it’s hard to go against the flow, but I applause Chuck D for doing so.
