Commentary: Now That the Risque Has Gone Mainstream, Boomers Only Have Themselves to Blame

Date: Thursday, October 02, 2008
By: Gregory Kane, BlackAmericaWeb.com



Do not Google “kids freak fest.”

Hey, you’ve been warned and forewarned. Google it at your own risk. But trust me, you won’t like what you see. I’m not even sure BlackAmericaWeb.com editors will let me describe what you’ll see, so I’ll just put it this way:

Just because these little kids have all their clothes on when they’re doing what they’re doing doesn’t mean it’s not child pornography.

The video of the “kids freak fest” -- and we’re not talking teens here, but kids in the eight-to 11-year-old range, doing a “freak” dance -- has been out for some time. The Urban Media Broadcasting Network has been running comments from justifiably outraged parents for a while. Some are wondering how we got into this mess.

I’m wondering how we couldn’t see this coming. I mean, haven’t we been looking around lately? And listening?
Click here! click here

Rapper Lil' Wayne -- and I agree with one of my writing students that any rapper who still puts “Lil'” or “Young” in front of his name needs a serious beat-down -- is the most popular MC around. And I’ve listened to the lyrics of his song “Lollipop.” And what is Lil' Wayne rapping about in that song, people?

I don’t need to spell it out for you, and thank heavens I have BAW editors who have too much class and dignity to do it either. But we all know what he’s rapping about. And before we blame him, we have to ask ourselves: How did this guy get a recording contract? And if he felt the need to make such a record, does that mean radio stations have to play it?

Now, I’m not going to bore you -- or insult your intelligence -- about how it was in the “good old days” for black folks. My good old days include Emmitt Till’s lynching and the 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama that left four black girls dead. That being said, there were some things black parents -- indeed, all parents -- of that era could count on.

One of them was that their children could listen to the radio and not hear certain music being played. And it wasn’t that risque music wasn’t around then. It was. But it wasn’t mainstream. You had to search high and low for it. The same with those famous “blue” comedy albums Redd Foxx made before his hit it big on TV in “Sanford and Son.”

But somewhere along the way, baby boomers of all races decided to bring risque into the mainstream. We did it in the name of free speech. We elevated people like white comedian Lenny Bruce to hero status, even though he used crude language on stage to describe an act much like what Lil' Wayne raps about in “Lollipop.” Then we had the nerve to run around talking about Bruce’s “legacy.”

Let me tell you something about Lenny Bruce’s “legacy.” One part of his legacy is that now eight-year-old, third-grade boys tell girls to perform a certain sexual act on them in the language Bruce seemed to love. That actually happened here in Baltimore, and a teacher got in trouble after she disciplined the boy.

See how things change over the years? If I’d ever had the stupidity to say anything like that when I was in the third grade, the teacher would have washed my mouth out with soap and water. Then she’d have tanned my fanny. My mom, rather than being angry with her, would have repeated the butt whipping, kissed teacher on the cheek, hugged her and then invited her over for Sunday dinner.

So if we’re looking for culprits in how the “kids freak fest” came about, we might want to look in the mirror, especially if we’re baby boomers. We need to ask ourselves if we went too far with the freedom business. We need to ask ourselves if we became so obsessed with rights in the 1960s and 1970s that we forgot all about that other “r” word: Responsibility.

Responsible parents don’t let their kids perform “freak” dances. Responsible parents don’t let their kids watch videos like Nelly’s “Tip Drill.” The folks at Urban Media asked if the kids in the “freak fest” video learned their conduct from “Tip Drill.” I don’t know for certain, but several years ago every boy in one eighth-grade class I talked to had seen the video when it ran on BET between 3 a.m. and 4 a.m.

Have we entered an era where we have too many rights and too much freedom? Here’s one thing we can all agree on: We definitely need fewer “kids freak fest” videos in cyberspace.

I thought I'd go my whole life without hearing or reading these sentiments from another human being.

When we criticize today's music as being too sexual or immoral, the usual rejoinder is, "Oh, relax. They used to say the same thing about Elvis' harmless little gyrations." Well, maybe the gyrations weren't so harmless; maybe they allowed the envelope to be pushed further and further over the years.

What I personally believe, though, is that there's fake morality and there's real morality. In the early years this guy is talking about, the morality being assaulted was largely phony and needed to be assaulted. But somewhere along the line, people forgot that there really is a morality that should be upheld. Where the sexual messages dehumanize and disparage, we've probably crossed a line we shouldn't have.