There might be a lot in this:
Hip hop mogul 50 Cent, Universal Music Group and several of its record labels were sued on Wednesday for promoting a “gangsta lifestyle” by a 14-year-old boy who says friends of the rapper assaulted him.
The lawsuit filed by James Rosemond and his mother, Cynthia Reed, says Universal Music Group — owned by Vivendi SA — and its labels Interscope Records, G-Unit Records and Shady Records, bear responsibility for the assault because they encourage artists to pursue violent, criminal lifestyles.
The lawsuit also names 50 Cent — whose real name is Curtis Jackson — Violator Management, Violator CEO Chris Lighty, Tony Yayo, a rapper and a member of 50 Cent’s G-Unit hip hop group, and Lowell Fletcher, an employee of Yayo.
All defendants declined to comment.
I imagine that the plaintif here is seeking a payday, and some lawyers are licking their chops over a hefty out-of-court settlement - but it occurs to me that those who purvey socially destructive sex and violence in our popular culture do bear at least some responsibility for the resultant social pathologies. Should not a record company, for instance, which puts out music glorifying “sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll” pay a price when some of their customers take them at their word and ruin themselves via a course of “sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll”?
I’ve often wished I could ask some of our pop culture icons - especially those in music - if they feel any shame or remorse that their glorification of sex, drugs and violence has led countless young people into a self-destructive lifestyle, un-supported by the vast monetary resources of rock stars and music moguls, who can pay for rehab and for others to clean up their messes? Now it occurs to me that we could, in effect, place a tax on popular culture - make it help pay for the problems it helps create.
How many of us have friends and family members who went whole hog into sex and drugs because it was “cool” - and made “cool” because various pop culture heros did it (or, at least, seemed to do it) and it never appeared to cause them any problems, and is presented to the public as a heck of a lot of fun? Counting quicky among my friends and family over the past 30 years, I come up with seven who destroyed their lives at the urging of popular culture, and one of them is actually dead. True, we all have to be held responsible for our own choices in life - and these friends and family members are paying their price…in poverty, addiction and, in one case, in a coffin. And as we all have to be held responsible for our choices, shouldn’t stars and media corporations pay their price for their choices? No one was ever clamouring for gansta-rap - the music business put it out, and slickly marketed it for maximum impact on young people. They created the market for it, and then raked in the huge profits…isn’t it high time they paid a bit back? Made good some of the damage they’ve done?
What do you think?
Tags: Legal affairs, morality, Popular Culture
April 10th, 2008
You probably don’t know this, but Nick Hornby is my favorite fiction writer. If you haven’t read him before, you should. If you’ve seen the movie High Fidelity, he wrote the book it was adapted from.
Anyway, his most recent novel, Slam, is about a teenaged boy (who is obsessed with Tony Hawk and skateboarding) who gets his girlfriend pregnant — that’s a short way of explaining the story. Anyway, Nick Hornby has a blog, and a while back he wrote a blog entry that I thought may be of interest to you.
[Another] article in the Guardian [link] about how movies depicting pregnancy are somehow anti-abortion: after ‘Knocked Up’, it’s the new (and very charming) ‘Juno’ that is in trouble […] “Hollywood heroines who don’t consider abortion are of a generation taking its rights for granted,” is the misleading subtitle of Hadley Freeman’s piece. Actually, sixteen-year-old Juno does consider abortion. She goes to an abortion clinic and then changes her mind. I suspect that considering abortion isn’t enough, though – Juno needs to go through with an abortion, if she’s going to keep columnists off her case.
My book ‘Slam’, which is about a sixteen-year-old father, also got attacked on these grounds in at least one American review, so I have a special interest in this debate. Alicia, the boy’s ex-girlfriend, is determined not to have an abortion because she read pro-life propaganda on the internet, and can’t be persuaded to rethink her decision. I would like Hadley Freeman, my critic and all the others to explain, patiently and carefully, to Judd Apatow (the writer of ‘Knocked Up’, Diablo Cody (‘Juno’) and myself how we can write about pregnancy and unplanned parenthood without causing offence.
Nick Hornby is liberal, and obviously supports abortion, so I couldn’t help being amused by his blog entry. I remember thinking when I read Slam, or saw Knocked Up or Juno that some pro-abortion groups or individuals would take issue with the fact that in each of these stories which involved unintended pregnancies the mother-to-be made the conscious decision to keep the baby. Hadley Freeman, who wrote the Guardian article says, “It is surely no coincidence that these films are emerging from a country that has had eight years of ultra-conservative Republican rule.” Ahh, yes, how Republicans have such an impact on Hollywood!
Continuing in his blog entry, Hornby further refutes Freeman:
Should ‘Slam’, ‘Knocked Up’ and ‘Juno’ all end a third of the way through, with a visit to a clinic? Are these people really saying that you mustn’t write about pregnancy because you’re somehow letting the side down
Now, I’ve recently been reading a lot of fiction, and seeing movies more often than I have in the past. I expect that sometimes books that don’t even have an agenda will have things in them I don’t agree with. I’ve never gotten hot and bothered over a book or a movie because a character had an abortion. Neither of the two movies or the book had an agenda against abortion. Their stories were still entertaining and I don’t see why anyone who is pro-abortion can’t enjoy them just because abortion was not chosen by the characters involved.
If abortion is really about “choice” (as the left says it is) then the choice of life shouldn’t be seen as a setback to the movement be it in life or in entertainment. Though I guess some people think it is. Can the pro-abortion movement not find happiness in the “choice” of life? Apparently not, if they get so worked up over the choice of life in fiction.
Tags: abortion, agenda, debate, Nick Hornby
February 15th, 2008
The Hollywood writers strike is now over…
Striking Hollywood writers are going back to work.
The Writers Guild of America said its members voted Tuesday to end their devastating, three-month strike that brought the entertainment industry to a standstill.
Writers will go back to work Wednesday after voting in Beverly Hills and New York.
“At the end of the day, everybody won. It was a fair deal and one that the companies can live with, and it recognizes the large contribution that writers have made to the industry,” said Leslie Moonves, chief executive officer of CBS Corp.
It’s about time. Now we can expect more new episodes of The Office and Family Guy. And that’s pretty much all I watch these days.
February 12th, 2008
