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Lyrics like these have been the raw material for campaigns against rappers for more than a decade—campaigns that have resulted not only in the incarceration of individual rappers but also in commitments from leading entertainment conglomerates such as Time Warner and Disney, as well as the state of Texas, not to invest in companies that produce gangsta albums. William Bennett and C. Delores Tucker, leaders of the antirap campaigns, have had no trouble finding antipolice and antiwomen lyrics to quote in support of their claim that “nothing less is at stake than civilization” if rappers are not rendered silent. So odious are the lyrics, that rarely do politicians or journalists stop to ask what qualifies Bennett to lead a moralistic crusade on behalf of America’s minority youth. Not only has he opposed funding for the nation’s leader in quality children’s programming (the Public Broadcasting Corporation), he has urged that “illegitimate” babies be taken from their mothers and put in orphanages.34

What was Delores Tucker, a longtime Democratic party activist, doing lending her name as coauthor to antirap articles that Bennett used to raise money for his right-wing advocacy group, Empower America? Tucker would have us believe, as she exclaimed in an interview in Ebony, that “as a direct result” of dirty rap lyrics, we have “little boys raping little girls.” But more reliable critics have rather a different take. For years they have been trying to call attention to the satiric and self-caricaturing side of rap’s salacious verses, what Nelson George, the music critic, calls “cartoon machismo.”35

Back in 1990, following the release of Nasty As They Wanna Be, an album by 2 Live Crew, and the band’s prosecution in Florida on obscenity charges, Henry Louis Gates confided in an op-ed in the New York Times that when he first heard the album he “bust out laughing.” Unlike Newsweek columnist George Will, who described the album as “extreme infantilism and menace ... [a] slide into the sewer,” Gates viewed 2 Live Crew as “acting out, to lively dance music, a parodic exaggeration of the age-old stereotypes of the oversexed black female and male.” Gates noted that the album included some hilarious spoofs of blues songs, the black power movement, and familiar advertising slogans of the period (“Tastes great!” “Less filling!”). The rap group’s lewd nursery rhymes were best understood, Gates argued, as continuing an age-old Western tradition of bawdy satire.36

Not every informed and open-minded follower of rap has been as upbeat as Gates, of course. Some have strongly criticized him, in fact, for seeming to vindicate performers who refer to women as “cunts,” “bitches,” and “hos,” or worse, who appear to justify their rape and murder, as did a track on the 2 Live Crew album that contained the boast, I’ll . . . bust your pussy then break your backbone.”

Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, a professor of law at UCLA, wrote in an essay that she was shocked rather than amused by Nasty As They Wanna Be. Black women should not have to tolerate misogyny, Crenshaw argued, whether or not the music is meant to be laughed at or has artistic value—both of which she granted about Nasty. But something else also concerned Crenshaw: the singling out of black male performers for vilification. Attacks on rap artists at once reflect and reinforce deep and enduring fears about the sexuality and physical strength of black men, she suggests. How else, Crenshaw asks, can one explain why 2 Live Crew were the first group in the history of the nation to be prosecuted on obscenity charges for a musical recording, and one of only a few ever tried for a live performance? Around this same time, she observes, Madonna acted out simulated group sex and the seduction of a priest on stage and in her music videos, and on Home Box Office programs the comic Andrew Dice Clay was making comments every bit as obscene and misogynistic as any rapper.37

The hypocrisy of those who single out rap singers as especially sexist or violent was starkly