Cam'ron: Snitching Hurts "Code Of Ethics"

[Chadman]

Believe it came up in this forum and elsewhere that CBS should also focus on the rap lyrics and behavior to affect change during the Imus discussions. Looks like they might be doing some of that tomorrow night on 60 Minutes.

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Cam'ron: Snitching Hurts "Code Of Ethics"

Rapper Also Tells Anderson Cooper It Would Hurt His Business

(CBS) Rap star Cam'ron says there's no situation ? including a serial killer living next door ? that would cause him to help police in any way, because to do so would hurt his music sales and violate his "code of ethics."

Cam'ron, whose real name is Cameron Giles, talks to CNN's Anderson Cooper for a 60 Minutes report on how the hip-hop culture's message to shun the police has undermined efforts to solve murders across the country.

Cooper's report will be broadcast this Sunday, April 22, at 7 p.m. ET/PT.

"If I knew the serial killer was living next door to me?" Giles responds to a hypothetical question posed by Cooper. "I wouldn't call and tell anybody on him ? but I'd probably move. But I'm not going to call and be like, 'The serial killer's in 4E.' "

Giles' "code of ethics" also extends to crimes committed against him. After being shot and wounded by gunmen, Giles refused to cooperate with police. Why?

"Because ? it would definitely hurt my business, and the way I was raised, I just don't do that," says Giles.

Pressed by Cooper, who says had he been the victim, he would want his attacker to be caught, Giles explains further: "But then again, you're not going to be on the stage tonight in the middle of, say, Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina, with people with gold and platinum teeth and dreadlocks jumping up and down singing your songs, either. We're in two different lines of business."

"So for you, it's really about business?" Cooper asks.

"It's about business," Giles says, "but it's still also a code of ethics."

Rappers appear to be concerned about damaging what's known as their "street credibility," says Geoffrey Canada, an anti-violence advocate and educator from New York City's Harlem neighborhood.

"It's one of those things that sells music and no one really quite understands why," says Canada. Their fans look up to artists if they come from the "meanest streets of the urban ghetto," he tells Cooper. For that reason, Canada says, they do not cooperate with the police.

Canada says in the poor New York City neighborhood he grew up in, only the criminals didn't talk to the police, but within today's hip-hop culture, that has changed. "It is now a cultural norm that is being preached in poor communities ? It's like you can't be a black person if you have a set of values that say 'I will not watch a crime happen in my community without getting involved to stop it,' " Canada tells Cooper.

Young people from some of New York's toughest neighborhoods echo Canada's assessment, calling the message not to help police "the rules" and helping the police "a crime" in their neighborhoods.

These "rules" are contributing to a much lower percentage of arrests in homicide cases ? a statistic known as the "clearance rate" ? in largely poor, minority neighborhoods throughout the country, according to professor David Kennedy of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

"I work in communities where the clearance rate for homicides has gone into the single digits," says Kennedy. The national rate for homicide clearance is about 60 percent. "In these neighborhoods, we are on the verge of ? or maybe we have already lost ? the rule of law," he tells Cooper.

Says Canada: "It's like we're saying to the criminals, 'You can have our community ? Do anything you want and we will either deal with it ourselves or we'll simply ignore it.'"

Produced By Andy Court and Keith Sharman
? MMVII, CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.

 

[Chadman]

A leader in the Hip-Hop community, Russell Simmons has come out against 3 words, which is a pretty big step, overall. He was one of the pioneers of leading Hip-Hop into the mainstream, and his commentary might get things rolling.

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Simmons Says 3 Epithets Should Be Banned

Apr 23 07:43 PM US/Eastern
By MARCUS FRANKLIN
Associated Press Writer

NEW YORK (AP) - Hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons said Monday that the recording and broadcast industries should consistently ban three racial and sexist epithets from all so-called clean versions of rap songs and the airwaves.
Currently such epithets are banned from most clean versions, but record companies sometimes "arbitrarily" decide which offensive words to exclude and there's no uniform standard for deleting such words, Simmons said.

The recommendations drew mixed reaction and come two weeks after some began carping anew about rap lyrics after radio personality Don Imus was fired by CBS Radio and NBC for referring to the players on the Rutgers university women's basketball team as "nappy-headed hos."

Expressing concern about the "growing public outrage" over the use of such words in rap lyrics, Simmons said the words "bitch," "ho" and "******" should be considered "extreme curse words."

"We recommend (they're) always out," Simmons, the pioneering entrepreneur who made millions of dollars as he helped shape hip-hop culture, said in an interview Monday. "This is a first step. It's a clear message and a consistency that we want the industry to accept for more corporate social responsibility."

Last week, Simmons called a private meeting of influential music industry executives to discuss the issue. However, no music executives were associated with Monday's announcement by Simmons' Hip-Hop Summit Action Network.

Calls to Sony Music, Universal Music Group and Atlantic Records were not returned. The Recording Industry Association of America and Warner Music Group declined to comment.

Reaction to the announcement was mixed.

Bakari Kitwana, who has written about rap in books such as "Why White Kids Love Hip-Hop," said it was a step in the right direction. Kitwana said there needed to be uniformity in removing obscenities from music. He pointed out that in some songs curse words are replaced with clean words while, in others, epithets and curse words are merely covered up by silence, allowing listeners to still infer from context the edited words.

"It shows that people in the industry are realizing that the pendulum is swinging and that there's a national conversation that they don't want to be on the wrong side of," Kitwana said of the recommendations. "This is further along than we could have expected them to go 10 years ago. But there has to be more. I think they can do more around the question of content."

Writer Joan Morgan said the announcement amounted to "absolutely nothing." She called the recommendations "short-sighted at best and disingenuous at worst." It was, she said, an "anemic, insufficient response" that failed to address homophobia and other issues in certain strains of hip-hop culture and rap music.

Morgan, author of "When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost: A Hip-Hop Feminist Breaks It Down," said calling for the removal of the three epithets assumes "all of the violence, misogyny and sexism in hip-hop is only expressed in" those words.

"It's says let's take the responsibility away from people creating the content and put it back on the corporations," said Morgan.

The recommendations also included forums to foster dialogue among entertainers, hip-hop fans and executives and the creation of a mentoring program for entertainers. Another recommendation called for the establishment of a coalition of music, radio and television executives to advise those industries on "lyrical and visual standards."

The announcement cautioned against violating free-speech rights but said that freedom of expression comes with responsibility.

"Our discussions are about the corporate social responsibility of the industry to voluntarily show respect to African-Americans and other people of color, African-American women and to all women in lyrics and images," read a joint statement from Simmons and Benjamin Chavis, the network's executive director.

 

[StevieD]

Really funny, these phony's, all of them Sharpton, jackson, Oprah, Brian Williams, NBC, CBS, the sponsors all of them. It appears none of them can find a radio station playing gangstah rap that they can boycott. What a joke.

 

[Pujo21]

OBAMA -- Should Do The Right Thing

OBAMA -- Should Do The Right Thing

DON IMUS should make an effort to open his own Radio Studio and broadcast this Gangsta Rap 24 hours non-stop like the Russian Tick Tock on Berlin Radio.


I am hoping someone will ask Reverand OBAMA :142smilie what his stand is on " The Brotha's Code "

Will OBAMA return all that Hip Hop $$$$ that was donated ?

OBAMA opened his big mouth , let's see him do the right thing.

 

[StevieD]

DON IMUS should make an effort to open his own Radio Studio and broadcast this Gangsta Rap 24 hours non-stop like the Russian Tick Tock on Berlin Radio.


I am hoping someone will ask Reverand OBAMA :142smilie what his stand is on " The Brotha's Code "

Will OBAMA return all that Hip Hop $$$$ that was donated ?

OBAMA opened his big mouth , let's see him do the right thing.

Obama is another idiot. He compres the tragedy at Virginia Tech to the "Violence of Imus."
The guy is another phony dope. Sorry, I just get excited in the face of hypocracy.