The bearded hip-hop artist Action Bronson has officially been bumped as a headlining act at the NXNE festival in Toronto later this month. This came about because one lone Toronto music fan named Erica Shiner was offended by his song Consensual Rape, a paean to sexual assault and the degradation of females, and by his video Brunch, which features the artist verbally abusing and stabbing the body of dead woman.
So Shiner started a petition. Her mission was not to silence or censor Action Bronson, or even to shame his fans. She just found it unacceptable that the city's biggest music festival was giving him top billing at Yonge-Dundas Square, a public mainstage that's free and open to people of all ages.
At first, organizers of NXNE pooh-poohed the complaint, issuing a weaselly statement supporting Bronson and standing behind the lineup, pointing out that he had performed on the same stage a few years back and the concert was described by critics as "laid back" and "a lot of fun."
They added that female artists with "undisguised feminist viewpoints" would be performing as well, and then concluded with the inanely obvious pronouncement that NXNE believes all of the artists "have the right to express their views through music, but those views belong to them and them alone."
Reading between the statement's lines, "undisguised feminism" – advocating for women's rights – was being offered as an ideological counterpoint to Bronson lyrics such as, "Your life is cheap like a hooker in the Philippines," or "if seven dudes are in the room then she's pleasing them like a trooper. Hit her in the pooper. Throw her in the shower."
After more than 40,000 people had signed Shiner's online petition (it prompting a deluge of death and rape threats toward her on Twitter), NXNE organizers removed Bronson from the Yonge-Dundas Square lineup, citing their decision to "accede to the strong wishes of the community."
You know what I find surprising about this whole thing? Not the fact that people were offended by Bronson's oeuvre (watch Brunch and judge for yourself). I was amazed he'd been selected as a headliner, that he'd played a public concert in Toronto before and that no one, as far as I'd heard, had even batted an eye. How could this be?
And then I remembered high school.
I grew up in the 1980s and 1990s, the heyday of hip hop. Run DMC and Public Enemy burst onto the scene when I was in junior school, and by the time I was in my teens, gangsta rap was blasting out of every car, nightclub and teenagers' bedroom boombox. Every adolescent dance or unsupervised party I went to (as in every party after the age of 14) thumped into the night on bass-driven monologues about what the musical heroes of our youth planned to do or had done with the various bitches, hos, sluts and skanks who had the honour of bouncing up and down in their hot tubs and their booty videos.
I was the bookish (if somewhat feral) feminist daughter of a feminist mother and yet it never occurred to me, not even once, to object to the soundtrack of abuse being directed, more of less constantly, at my gender. In fact, I have distinct memories of how much we all loathed Tipper Gore and her uptight campaign to have albums with explicit content labelled for parental supervision. "It's censorship!" we cried, though of course it was nothing of the sort.
Today, we take it for granted that parents deserve to know if their kids are listening to music that celebrates, oh, I dunno, the sexual violation, degradation and murder of women. The glorification of gang violence in hip hop was the alarming issue back then – a worry that seems laughable given there were no Bloods or Crips in my Toronto high school. On the other hand, we were all having – or at least were deeply interested in – sex. And what was our music teaching us about issues of sexual respect and consent? Nothing good, that's what.
Looking back on the music of my teenage years, it makes me think of a middle-class African American reflecting on minstrel shows that were once – not so long ago – perfectly acceptable mainstream entertainment. But the rappers themselves aren't entirely to blame. As the black American feminist writer known as bell hooks once said, "It's much easier to attack gangsta rap than to confront the culture that produces the need for gangsta rap."
Erica Shiner's brave petition did just that, and it succeeded. The decline of popular spectacles of human degradation isn't censorship, it's social progress, straight up. A critical mass of music fans in Toronto was offended by the music of Action Bronson, and that's a good thing. One day soon we will marvel that anyone ever listened to guys like him at all.