Hello, wonderful users/contribs/staff/mods/lurkers/mx, and welcome to another edition of Sputnik Discusses! Davey’s MIA this week (my money’s on him having to stave off Australia’s terrifying wildlife), so I’ll be doing whatever I can to prompt and moderate the discussion this time around. I’m in the midst of our school’s “reading period,” which is essentially the lull before the maelstrom of finals in which we study as frantically as we can and/or procrastinate as frantically as we can, so I’ll hopefully have some time to respond to as many of you as I can in the comments section. Don’t be surprised if Davey manages to poke his head in here or there, though.

I’d like to broach the topic of potentially offensive or hurtful lyrics in hip-hop because that’s been a topic of contention on my school’s campus as of the past few weeks. A bit of context: Princeton University’s Undergraduate Student Government (USG) hosts a day-long festival called Lawnparties every fall and every spring, in which various campus organizations invite about a dozen artists to perform on a certain part of campus known as Prospect Ave. This past iteration of Lawnparties, held on Sunday, featured Detroit rapper Big Sean as the headliner. The choice was a divisive one. Almost immediately, a small but significant portion of the student body began to protest his selection, calling on our USG to “take down Big Sean.” According to Duncan Hosie, a junior and one of the students who spearheaded the protests, he and his fellow students felt compelled to speak out because “Lawnparties should not make members of the Princeton community feel unwelcome. Big Sean’s homophobic rhetoric makes [him] feel uncomfortable [as a gay male], and his hostility to women has made many women [he has] talked to uncomfortable.” Many other students expressed similar feelings. In an eloquent op-ed for the Daily Princetonian, the school’s daily newspaper (full disclosure: I’m also an op-ed columnist for the paper), opinion editor emerita Tehila Wenger  expressed disgust with USG’s Lawnparties choice. As she puts it, “The level of inurement society persuades us to accept upon ourselves is as appalling as the refrain of IDFWU. In fact, that particular kind of inurement is intimately linked to the refrain of IDFWU…I felt disappointed in Princeton’s choice and irritated that my tuition dollars would be sponsoring a performance that at best normalizes and at worst celebrates misogyny and homophobia.”

On the other side, there’s been about an equal distribution of constructively trying to explain why Big Sean is OK and laughing derisively at the protesters’ apparently obvious boneheadedness. In a separate op-ed for the Daily Princetonian, freshman columnist Julia Case-Levine argues that it’s possible to enjoy music with violently misogynistic lyrics (a la Big Sean) because the media one consumes doesn’t define that person’s beliefs. “Listening to music mindfully does not necessarily implicate us as participants in rape culture; I would go as far as saying that in consciously consuming offensive music we are extended and pushed to see what we usually get to ignore and perhaps provoked to confront our own inner inconsistencies. Some part of me is confident we can listen to sexist lyrics, push back and in doing so even solidify our commitment to equality.” Some were not so constructive with their criticism of the backlash, though. In an unfortunately (but unsurprisingly) patronizing piece for Gawker tastefully titled “Big Sean Is Turning Princeton Students Into Idiots,” writer Jordan Sargent (who reviewed Big Sean’s latest album, Dark Sky Paradise, for Pitchfork) argues that, hey, Big Sean really isn’t that bad, and people are getting up in arms for no reason whatsoever. As he puts it, “Most people who listen to rap music learn how to navigate around, and within, the misogyny and homophobia that seep into so many tracks. The people who used to want to ban rap didn’t understand it, and some 20 years later, the people who want to ban rap nowadays don’t either. Those people are Bill O’Reilly, basically, plus assorted racists who think that every single black rapper is dangerous, and apparently, hundreds of young people on the campus of Princeton University.” (His claim that “Big Sean is one of the most openly harmless rappers in recent memory.” and a “dumb goofball” doesn’t seem as compelling to me, given that the rapper has gone to court on sexual assault charges and that many of his lyrics are some of the most violently misogynistic I’ve encountered in my time listening to hip-hop, but what do I know?)

Personally, I’m not really sure what I think. On one hand, I listen to (and really like)  a lot of hip-hop with pretty derogatory lyrics, and have written a few very positive reviews for albums with lyrics arguably worse than Big Sean’s. On the other hand, apart from Case-Levine’s piece, I don’t think anyone has articulated anything particularly convincing in support of Big Sean’s lyricism apart from claims of “you just don’t understand the culture” (and no, Jordan, saying people can “navigate around, and within, the misogyny and homophobia” within much of rap doesn’t particularly strike me as a reason I should support that misogyny and homophobia in the first place). I don’t like Big Sean because I think his flow is boring, his punchlines are mediocre at best, and whenever he’s featured on a track his guest verse almost without exception brings down the song’s quality, but I don’t think that his lyrics particularly help, either. I typically listen to hip-hop for the sound of the rapper’s flow and the beats, and am typically able to ignore the lyrics, but I’m not sure that’s somewhere I want to be.

So, what do you think? Does the kind of homophobia and misogyny rappers like Big Sean espouse really harm the music in and of itself? Are the students protesting the rapper misunderstanding hip-hop culture or unfairly targeting Big Sean? Sound off in the comments section below, and happy discussing!