Rev Al Sharpton took his previously reported campaign against racist and sexist language in hip hop to Detroit this weekend. Speaking outside the city's Motown Historical Museum he told reporters: "The 1960s were the Motown sound and James Brown. But they did not call us the 'N' word and they did not degrade women".
Sharpton's campaign will continue in the city until the National Association For The Advancement of Colored People hold a convention there in July, where organisers plan to stage a 'mock funeral' for the aforementioned 'N word'. As part of their campaign, those in favour of more self-censorship in hip hop will collect bars of soap. I'm not sure what they intend to do with the soap in the short term (create a big 'no to the N word' mountain of soap, I guess), though long term all soap collected will be donated to "shelters and halfway houses for women" (so, no rappers will actually be washing their mouths out with soap and water).
As previously reported, the latest onslaught against the use of words like 'nigga' and 'ho' in hop hop follows the controversial way the entirely un-hip hop Don Imus described the Rutgers University women's basketball team. After Imus suffered a backlash for his seemingly racist and sexist throw away remark, media attention focused on the use of similar words within the black community through the hip hop genre. Although it was Def Jam founder and Hip-Hop Summit Action Network chief Russell Simmons who initially called for a re-evaluation of the kinds of words considered acceptable in the hip hop fraternity, it is Sharpton who has led the campaign against racist and sexist words in the genre. He has focused much of his attention on the major record companies and mainstream music TV channels who, he claims, are profiting from racist and sexist music.