More clueless writing about hip-hop

Miami Herald and syndicated columnist Leonard Pitts wrote a column about Oprah Winfrey's supposed distate for hip-hop. Here's a sample:

The lords of hip-hop made their fortunes and their fame by flipping the middle-finger salute to middle-American alarm and apprehension over their music, its rawness, its explicitness, its violence and its effects. They were outsiders, loud and profanely proud in their rejection of white picket fence mores and norms.

Fine. They have every right.

But now they're singing the blues because the ultimate arbiter of white picket fence mores and norms wants nothing to do with them? Now they're seeking sympathy because they are denied a stamp of approval from Middle America's main gatekeeper?

Cry me a river.

I mean, what do they expect? You can't have it both ways. You cannot curse people and expect them to support you, cannot offend them then ask them to welcome you. I'm reminded of what mama always said about respect: you got to give some to get some.

Perhaps this is news to the hip-hop nation, populated as it is by people who routinely embrace values neutrality and moral relativism, who often duck responsibility for what they say and how they say it, who frequently refuse to recognize that words have meaning and consequence.

Some thoughts: (1)You know who else flipped "the middle-finger salute to middle-American alarm and apprehension"? Elvis Presley. And he did it about 40 years before Eminem did. The same could be said of most other great pop artists from the past 50 years. Upsetting the apple cart is the what rockers/rappers are supposed to do. The difference is that rockers have a museum honoring them for it. (2) Once more with feeling: RAP IS MAINSTREAM! Listen to top 40 radio. (3) Do I really need to list all the rappers that aren't gangstas? Do I really have to do that? Jee-zus! (4) In the case of a gangsta rapper like 50 Cent (who seems barely like a gangsta rapper, really, compared with NWA or Ice-T back in the day), do people really think he's a criminal? I mean, are middle-aged white boomers really that dumb? It's a role, people. Would Oprah refuse to have Al Pacino on her show because he played Scarface? Or Denzel Washington because he played a corrupt cop in (and won an Oscar for)"Training Day"?

There's a honest debate to be had about why white people love buying records made by black men pretending to be criminals. (See Spike Lee's "Bamboozled.") But this continued marginalization of rap by the media (the insistence that it's not mainstream) isn't just wrong, it's ridiculous.