I feel compelled to write a full throated defence for an individual who I feel changed my life. As a black youth in my mid-teens, I was blindly attracted by images of successful, charismatic and rich black men on my television set. Rappers such as the Notorious BIG, Nas, Jay-Z, Snoop Dogg and Dr Dre had me transfixed with their way of words. They could go from celebrating the good life which I and the majority of my rap loving friends longed for to accurately describing the sense of worthlessness and helplessness black youths felt (and still feel) in impoverished and predominantly minority populated areas. While the media lambasted my heroes for being menaces to society, thugs and so on – the only thing me and my friends saw were these men describing how life was where we lived (yes, even in the UK).
Mainstream society might frown on the constant use of the N words, but that word is as important as your Ps and Qs in the communities which these rappers speak from. I learnt about American police brutality, the Rodney King incident and LA Riots not through text books or in a class room, but from NWA, Ice T and Ice Cube. America was shocked to see the image of LAPD Officers beating up an unarmed man, but if you listened to hip-hop then you would have known that it was as frequent and as widespread as the use of the N-word in rap lyrics.
With that said, although I grew up in an unsavoury area, I was brought up by remarkable parents and importantly a Superwoman of a mother who I adored. Singing along to my favourite tracks on Snoop Dogg’s famous ‘Doggystyle’ left me inadvertently calling women all sorts of names and produced a bitter taste in my mouth, even at that young age. I longed for the good life which rappers gloriously painted (see Juicy by the Notorious BIG) but never really took to the gangster image (see the whole of Dr Dre’s Chronic album).
Which leads me to the rapper Common. The debate of whether Common should attend Mrs Obama’s poetry event for me shouldn’t be a debate at all. If you are not interested in hip-hop and only look at Common’s work on the surface then I guess it is easy to label him as ‘vile’ and a ‘thug’, but for any hip-hop head, anyone who has actually listened to a Common album, that description of Common, aka Lonnie Lynn, is hilarious. Yes, he uses the N-word, uses the B-word (but not exclusively to describe women), has said some questionable things about the police (but in response to chronic police brutality) and has advocated the burning of a President (you’ve got me on that one) but he has also discusses lack of education within the black community, urges black men to run away from their responsibility as parents or as husbands, he talks constantly about spirituality and he talks about that very rare thing in hip-hop, love.
Common showed me that it was cool to be intelligent. It was possible to love hip-hop and not be obsessed with b*tches, hos, whips and rims and so on. I am sure that many readers will shrug and question why it’s a big deal – well trust me, in an environment where a teenager is looking to establish his own identity and there are hardly any examples of successful and positive black role models, I thank god I latched on to Common’s music. I know a lot of people that were seduced by the other side of hip-hop and followed a path of crime.
If I was Mrs Obama’s staff, maybe I would think about cancelling Common’s appearance at this event. Republicans are successfully tying this story into the narrative that ‘Obama is a black extremist’ and quite frankly at a time when the President is trying to get re-elected, this is distraction he doesn’t need. I also take the point that the left protested against many performers of the Bush Presidency. If Common’s appearance is cancelled, I feel that some of the children present at the poetry event would have lost an opportunity to meet and witness one of the most important black performers alive and be exposed to one of the most positive figures of hip hop history.
Just a normal everyday bloke writing about films.