Spotted via Nah Right.
So recently on the Bill O'Reilly show, he had a small forum via satellite with a black community leader and Hip Hop activist Bakari Kitwana. They were discussing the fact that Nas, a rapper that has violent lyrics (murder, murder, murder!) and a gun charge on his record, performing at a benefit for the Virginia Tech victims.
The vid starts with a nice little piece highlighting some of Nas's most violent lyrics (though I wonder what the hell did Jay-Z getting shot in the 99 problems vid have to do with anything). Then, Bill O'Reilly went on to say that, it was Virginia Tech's own students (predominately white school) that had the problem with the rappers showing up, not just a bunch of old uptight bastards looking for a chance to beat up on rap music.
Though Kitwana is a knowledgable dude, his argument was pretty shot, and seemed unprepared to give justifications to pretty basic questions that he should have known were coming. Then to top it all, he didn't even attempt to address Nas having a gun charge on his police record.
I'm guessing by the tone of this so far, you know which way I'm leaning. Yeah O'Reilly is an asshole, bigot, and has a past just as questionable as the people he targets. But even through all that, I'm not going to use that as an excuse to automatically discredit what he was saying in the inverview.
You see, we, the hip hop audience, don't think of Nas as a violent rapper, especially compared to alot of other artists out there. We think of him as a conscious rapper, and kind of just disregard the murder talk we hear from hear him spit on occasion. But I mean, even though they did go around and pick out his worst lines, he still had to say them in order to for them to be used against him, and I think we all know that if they wanted to, the could've picked out even more lyrics, but just stopped there probably for time issues. O'Reilly made a good point about the fact that even though he loves Stephen King and thinks of him as a brilliant writer, he would not think it appropriate to invite him to VT right about now, just based off of the content of his books. So at least this time, Bill wasn't just targeting hip hop, he was making a great point.
Most of all, it was the students themselves that are speaking out about the performance, so hell, you can't even argue with that right?
Basically, hip hop heads need to stop going on the O'Reilly Show, because we get sonned everytime we go. Yeah, it may be entertaining to watch, but at the end, we end up looking just they way the want us to--dancing around the actual topics, but in the end, having no real justification for whatever it is we happen to be defending.
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