Bitch this, bitch that…

A week or so ago, there was a segment on ABC News having to do with why rap albums these days are selling as if they might give you teh ghey. Part of the segment involved street interviews with random-ass people walking around the streets of New York.

They went up to this one old cracka-ass cracka and asked him why rap music isn't doing as well as other genres of music, and I thought he had an interesting response. According to this old crackety crack, people aren't buying rap music as much because it's too offensive. Who wants to hear all that cursing and violence and disrepect for women and so on and so forth?

Well, other than myself.

Now granted, hip-hop isn't made for middle aged cracka-ass crackas (or Oprah, for that matter), so who gives a shit what they think anyway. But on the other hand, hip-hop is a billion dollar a year (er, whatever) industry. If there's a buck to be made going after old-ass white people why not go after it? Lord's knows us d-bags can't be counted on to support anything.

One of the things that struck me about the incident earlier this year with Oprah and Ludacris and Fiddy and what have you is that Oprah claimed to like hip-hop, and I'm tempted to believe her. It's just that so much of it is so filthy, why even run the risk of tainting her gozillion dollar multimedia empire by being associated with it?

It's easy to get self-righteous about artistic expression and censorship and what have you, but lest we forget, the issue with Oprah was a case of hip-hop artists looking to her show as an opportunity to bring their various projects to a more mainstream audience. This was hardly a matter of Oprah trying to dictate what these jigs rap about.

The message was clear though: If you want that will.i.am money, you've got to teh ghey it up a bit.

Now, am I suggesting that rappers work on making their images more palatable to old white people? Of course not. Lord knows most hip-hop these days is shitty enough as it is. I wouldn't be surprised though if that's what happens anyway. Take for example Jay-Z dressing like my father and rapping about not putting rims on his Mercedes.

I know you d-bags hate it when I mention your idol/boss Jay-Z, but do you think it's a coincidence that his music has gotten so shitty during a time when he's showing up in more TV commercials and magazine covers than ever?