Hip Hop and Obama are now BFFs.

In case the Will.I.Am video didn't convince you. Russell Simmons is giving his endorsement to Obama, apparently.

From the article:

Turn on the radio station. There are a whole lot of songs that use the same language ... We've been permitting it in our homes, and in our schools and on iPods ... If it's not good for Don Imus, I don't know why it's good for us. If we don't like other people to degrade us, why are we degrading ourselves?"

Mr. Simmons did not agree that the two were comparable.

"People who are angry, uneducated and come from tremendous struggle, they have poetic license and they say things that offend you," Simmons said. "You have to talk about the conditions that create those kinds of lyrics. When you are talking about a privileged man who has a mainstream vehicle and mainstream support, and is on a radio station like that, you have to deal with them differently."



[+/-] Obama had told the South Carolina Legislative Black Caucus that "we've got to admit to ourselves, that it was not the first time that we heard the word 'ho.'[See more.]

From an artistic standpoint, I can understand where Russell Simmons is coming from-- black people taking curse words and slurs and making their use more commonplace might be reflective of a sort of trend Black people have made in America.

I can't say I know the context to both statements-- what the question being asked to Obama was[if it were more than just, "What is your reaction to the controversy surrounding Don Imus?"] and I also don't know if Simmons was responding to Obama's quote directly[though it seems as if it was].

I do think that Simmons is ignoring the main point of Obama's statement, though-- that we have been using these words to degrade ourselves for way too long. I've heard the arguments contrary-- that words only have power when you let them, that words can be transformed. But, last I heard, n---a still meant a n---a.

In order to have poetic/creative license, you have to have consciousness-- the awareness of the transformation you're making, of the rules you're breaking, of the new norms. you're creating. And I feel like a lot of black people are just unconscious.

But this also might be an overly academic way of looking at it. So many people use these words that should be hurtful, and I guess part of me is wondering if so many people can be so wrong?

[Of course they can. The same thing happened in Galileo's time.]

Thoughts appreciated, of course.