TIME - Man of the Year/CompactPublishing-TimeMagazine-TimeManOfTheYear-Win31MSDOS.iso/moy/072092/0720641.000

Text File | 1993-04-08 | 6KB | 121 lines

                                                                                ESSAY, Page 89

. . . Or Is It Creative Freedom?


Barbara Ehrenreich


    Ice-T's song Cop Killer is as bad as they come. This is
black anger -- raw, rude and cruel -- and one reason the song's
so shocking is that in postliberal America, black anger is
virtually taboo. You won't find it on TV, not on the McLaughlin
Group or Crossfire, and certainly not in the placid features of
Arsenio Hall or Bernard Shaw. It's been beaten back into the
outlaw subcultures of rap and rock, where, precisely because it
is taboo, it sells. And the nastier it is, the faster it moves
off the shelves. As Ice-T asks in another song on the same
album, "Goddamn what a brotha gotta do/ To get a message
through/ To the red, white and blue?"

    But there's a gross overreaction going on, building to a
veritable paroxysm of white denial. A national boycott has been
called, not just of the song or Ice-T, but of all Time Warner
products. The President himself has denounced Time Warner as
"wrong" and Ice-T as "sick." Ollie North's Freedom Alliance has
started a petition drive aimed at bringing Time Warner
executives to trial for "sedition and anarchy."

    Much of this is posturing and requires no more courage
than it takes to stand up in a VFW hall and condemn communism
or crack. Yes, Cop Killer is irresponsible and vile. But Ice-T
is as right about some things as he is righteous about the
rest. And ultimately, he's not even dangerous -- least of all
to the white power structure his songs condemn.

    The "danger" implicit in all the uproar is of
empty-headed, suggestible black kids, crouching by their boom
boxes, waiting for the word. But what Ice-T's fans know and his
detractors obviously don't is that Cop Killer is just one more
entry in pop music's long history of macho hyperbole and violent
boast. Flip to the classic-rock station, and you might catch the
Rolling Stones announcing "the time is right for violent
revo-loo-shun!" from their 1968 hit Street Fighting Man. And
where were the defenders of our law-enforcement officers when
a white British group, the Clash, taunted its fans with the
lyrics: "When they kick open your front door/ How you gonna
come/ With your hands on your head/ Or on the trigger of your
gun?"

    "Die, Die, Die Pig" is strong speech, but the Constitution
protects strong speech, and it's doing so this year more
aggressively than ever. The Supreme Court has just downgraded
cross burnings to the level of bonfires and ruled that it's no
crime to throw around verbal grenades like "nigger" and "kike."
Where are the defenders of decorum and social stability when
prime-time demagogues like Howard Stern deride African Americans
as "spear chuckers"?

    More to the point, young African Americans are not so
naive and suggestible that they have to depend on a compact disc
for their sociology lessons. To paraphrase another song from
another era, you don't need a rap song to tell which way the
wind is blowing. Black youths know that the police are likely
to see them through a filter of stereotypes as miscreants and
potential "cop killers." They are aware that a black youth is
seven times as likely to be charged with a felony as a white
youth who has committed the same offense, and is much more
likely to be imprisoned.

    They know, too, that in a shameful number of cases, it is
the police themselves who indulge in "anarchy" and violence.
The U.S. Justice Department has received 47,000 complaints of
police brutality in the past six years, and Amnesty
International has just issued a report on police brutality in
Los Angeles, documenting 40 cases of "torture or cruel, inhuman
or degrading treatment."

    Menacing as it sounds, the fantasy in Cop Killer is the
fantasy of the powerless and beaten down -- the black man who's
been hassled once too often ("A pig stopped me for nothin'!"),
spread-eagled against a police car, pushed around. It's not a
"responsible" fantasy (fantasies seldom are). It's not even a
very creative one. In fact, the sad thing about Cop Killer is
that it falls for the cheapest, most conventional image of
rebellion that our culture offers: the lone gunman spraying fire
from his AK-47. This is not "sedition"; it's the familiar,
all-American, Hollywood-style pornography of violence.

    Which is why Ice-T is right to say he's no more dangerous
than George Bush's pal Arnold Schwarzenegger, who wasted an
army of cops in Terminator 2. Images of extraordinary cruelty
and violence are marketed every day, many of far less artistic
merit than Cop Killer. This is our free market of ideas and
images, and it shouldn't be any less free for a black man than
for other purveyors of "irresponsible" sentiments, from David
Duke to Andrew Dice Clay.

    Just, please, don't dignify Ice-T's contribution with the
word sedition. The past masters of sedition -- men like George
Washington, Toussaint-Louverture, Fidel Castro or Mao Zedong,
all of whom led and won armed insurrections -- would be
unimpressed by Cop Killer and probably saddened. They would
shake their heads and mutter words like "infantile" and
"adventurism." They might point out that the cops are hardly a
noble target, being, for the most part, honest working stiffs
who've got stuck with the job of patrolling ghettos ravaged by
economic decline and official neglect.

    There is a difference, the true seditionist would argue,
between a revolution and a gesture of macho defiance. Gestures
are cheap. They feel good, they blow off some rage. But
revolutions, violent or otherwise, are made by people who have
learned how to count very slowly to 10.