That nasty music

Friend of the Blog Margaret sent me this article from today's New York Times about a study to determine whether hip-hop makes teenagers lose their minds and have sex. Conclusion: No, teenagers lose their minds and have sex whether they listen to hip-hop or not. It's alcohol, drugs and "peer pressure"--God, how I hate that phrase--that bring the boys and girls together.

Feature that, as my grandmother used to say. (Translation for children of the 20th century: Duh.) Who pays for these idiotic studies? And who decides they need this kind of coverage in the Times? The fact that the study pretty much exonerates hip-hop as a destroyer of youth seems almost painful for the writer to admit, so she hauls in a different study that examines "whether hip-hop’s explicit lyrics encourage early sex." The conclusion here is that degrading images of women, rather than happy sex talk, leads to mind loss and getting busy at a young age. In that case, I say we should immediately ban the Bible, which is just chock full of nasty girls: Eve, Jezebel, Salome, Bathsheba. Think of all the damage it's doing to innocent youth here in the Homeland.

I know our collective memory is short, but honestly, how many times do we have to have this silly ritual of demonizing pop music before everybody gets over it? We've always had nasty music, and we always will. People were loving it long before the hip-hop industry was a gleam in Russell Simmons' eye.

Here's Jimmie Rodgers, "the father of country music," singing T for Texas. I'm not sure when this film was made, but Jimmy died in 1933. Let's see--Lust? Misogyny? Violence? Drugs? Yep, all there. Some things never change. Enjoy.