Against Those Thugs
S1: This podcast has language that some people might find offensive.
S2: In 1990 the Billboard album charts were dominated by rock and pop. Janet Jackson Aerosmith Paula Abdul Motley Crue the biggest rappers were Vanilla Ice and M.C. Hammer. The following year the charts looked very different.
S3: NWA was at the top. Soon Ice Cube Snoop Dogg and Tupac would be to gangsta rap hadn’t suddenly gotten more popular would change was it. Billboard had started using SoundScan. A more accurate system for counting record sales for hip hop fans. These new charts were validation proof that rap music made for people who loved rap was both hugely popular and a massive moneymaker but not everyone was celebrating in the early 1990s.
S2: The Reverend Calvin Butts fashioned himself as an advocate for inner city black neighborhoods from the pulpit of Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem but campaigned against advertisements for liquor and cigarettes and in the spring of nineteen ninety three.
S1: He identified another malignant force violent a misogynistic rap music. I may have more in common with a white man. Who loves humanity than I do with a black man who thinks that he ought to call all women bees and hos so you know there is some point where we can’t be pushed into this contest and you know for the sake of unity we all just keep this quiet but singled out some rap acts by name NWA 2 Live Crew and the Ghetto Boys he calls their music filth. And he didn’t just rant against rap from the pulpit. On the morning of June 5th nineteen ninety three he let a few hundred supporters to the sidewalk in front of his church.
S4: There he’d placed several boxes of cassette tapes and compact discs. He also had a steamroller. But when butts climbed aboard and got ready to start crushing. He found that his path was blocked. Dozens of rap fans had showed up to stage a counter protest. They shouted that the reverend was out of touch and accused him of censorship. Taking in the tent scene but called off the steam rolling. Instead he and his followers boarded a bus to midtown Manhattan. There they dumped everything in front of the Madison Avenue headquarters of the Sony Corporation Sony but said was representative of an industry which laughs at black people all the way to the bank.
S5: Some members of bus group crush the music under their feet for good measure. Butts got so angry he organized a rap stomping. Recognize that. This poison and the industry has a lot of responsibility.
S6: Take it back.
S4: Butts told the hip hop magazine The Source that he was a fan of rap music and he called it an important art form.
S2: He said that he was speaking out against those who prostitute the music and so negative and filthy messages to our children and adults. Here’s butts on the New York TV show. Video Music Box.
S7: I’m talking about lyrics that reflect a kind of attitude toward a person that sees them as a piece of sexual meat rather than a human being. This is not only a condition in the community of people of African descent. We’ve got to worry about the complete deterioration of the moral fabric in America.
S3: In 1994 the group Bone Thugs and Harmony used a line from one of butt’s assignments as a sample. We’re not against rap. We’re not against rappers. But we are against those.
S8: Reverend puts came down hard on rappers. But he was willing to engage with the music and its defenders. The next black activist to take up the fight that would be less accommodating. I am here. To put the nation on notice that violence perpetuated against women through the music industry in the forms of gangsta rap and misogynist lyrics will not be tolerated in a long. How did hip hop divide black leaders along generational and gender lines. How did veterans of the civil rights movement make common cause with white conservatives. And how did a 66 year old woman on a moral crusade up in the music industry. This slow burn. I’m your host Joel Anderson. And this is episode four against those thugs.
S2: In her office in Washington D.C..
S3: C. Delores Tucker displayed a photo of herself arm in arm with Martin Luther King Tucker march with Dr. King from Selma to Montgomery in 1965. Her civil rights activism launched her own a political career in her home state of Pennsylvania in 1971. Tucker became the first black woman to hold a cabinet level position in the state.
S1: Peter Bailey was a reporter with Ebony magazine when he was assigned to write a profile of Tucker who is Pennsylvania’s secretary of the Commonwealth. I think it’s had the article with the lady to see in Pennsylvania as you name it article and Ebony. Bailey spent three days with Tucker in Harrisburg the state capital.
S9: And I came away from those three days that this is a person who takes care of business. That was my initial impression of her and it was never changed over the next twenty five years.
S3: Tucker’s career in state politics ended in scandal. In 1977 the governor fired her for using her office for personal enrichment. She’d collected tens of thousands of dollars for speeches and you state employees to write them. After that Tucker kept running for office lieutenant governor U.S. Senate House of Representatives. But she never made it past the Democratic primaries. But even as she failed to win elections Tucker continued to get audiences with powerful people. She co-founded the National Political Congress of Black women and she mixed with the likes of Coretta Scott King Jesse Jackson and Gloria Steinem. Yes she was a powerful presence. That’s Eleanor Holmes Norton who’s represented Washington D.C. in the House of Representatives since 1991. She knew Tucker from civil rights work in the 1960s and got reacquainted with her in the 90s.
S10: We associate that kind of presence in making speeches and the rest with men like Martin Luther King I’m not saying she was Martin Luther King but she was a very accomplished speaker.
S2: Tucker drew her inspiration from the black church addressing crowds as if she was speaking from a pulpit in women as she spoke her voice would build into the sing song intonation of a preacher immunities.
S11: We march for our rights to Selma. I was there with Dr. King were beaten with billy clubs and were beaten with dogs unleashed by Bull Connors. We will not tolerate injustice and insults from our worst enemies. Then and we sure ain’t gonna accept insults from our youth. Now.
S2: Tucker was impossible to ignore. She wore colorful turbans to all of her public appearances and she carried herself with the bearing of a woman who believed she belonged in any room in the fall of 1993. Tucker was at an event for the Congressional Black Caucus when the singers Dionne Warwick and Melba Moore approached her Warwick in Moore had had long careers in pop and rb and they were outraged by the kind of music that was now a sending to the top of the charts. Tucker quickly agreed to join them in the fight against offensive rap lyrics. She later claimed that the dangers of hip hop had become real for her when her niece asked her what is a bitch here’s Eleanor Holmes Norton again.
S10: I don’t think that there’s any doubt that probably the average Margaret couldn’t find that music offensive a lot of cursing a lot of name calling. There’s nothing to be said for that as an artistic matter. So she decided to go up strong against it.
S2: Tucker was attacking black rappers but she also believed that white record executives were forcing them to traffic and demeaning stereotypes. She called rap music pornography pointing to the graphic descriptions of sex and depictions of women as bitches and hos. Oh yeah take you. Home in bus. Oh.
S1: Fuck you. And she blamed raps glamorization of gang violence for inner city crime. Just.
S12: Gang banging. The week. Before. You. Don’t.
S1: Like the law enforcement officers who blame rappers for assaults on cops. She argued that the music was inciting its listeners to anti-social behavior.
S2: Fancy grown used to hearing these kinds of objections often from women of Tucker’s generation.
S10: We thought it was just the wrong sequel to the civil rights movement.
S1: C. Delores Tucker didn’t always side with her civil rights allies starting in the 1960s.
S13: The NAACP gave out image awards for artistic work by black Americans in advance of the nineteen ninety four awards. Tupac Shakur was nominated for his role in poetic justice in the film. Tupac played a sympathetic single father who falls for Janet Jackson two days after two parks nomination was announced. He was arrested and charged with sexually abusing Aiyana Jackson Tucker said that Tupac demonstrated a pattern of behavior that demeaned black women. She pushed the NAACP to withdraw his nomination. The group kept Tupac in contention despite the controversy as celebrities arrive for tonight’s Image Awards.
S14: They had a lot to say about honoring two packs record. Do you have any concern about Tupac being gone or does it bother you.
S15: Tupac is my man. I think he should be prayed for.
S1: I don’t think it’s at a point where Tupac didn’t win an Image Award and Tucker’s movement was catching on Black Entertainment Television announced it would stop airing rap music videos that showed guns radio stations which had already shown concern over explicit lyrics pledged to take derogatory rap songs off their playlists.
S2: Tucker’s advocacy got its biggest boost however when she leaned on her old political connections. Tucker enlisted Congresswoman Curtis Collins and Senator Carol Moseley Braun to bring her fight against rap to Capitol Hill on February 20 3rd 1994. A Senate subcommittee held a hearing on violent and demeaning imagery and popular music during her testimony.
S1: Tucker said gangsta rap was turning children into a social time bomb and that America’s rap addled youth would trigger a crime wave of epidemic proportions that we have never seen the likes of.
S3: She then read from a letter she claimed she’d received from a prisoner.
S1: Rappers make it sound so good it looks so real that I would drink and smoke drugs just like on the video thinking that that was the only way I could be somebody. The prisoners supposedly wrote manhood girls became hos and bitches. What is so bad about it is they accepted it. Tucker’s testimony didn’t go unchallenged. Michael Eric Dyson who was then a professor at Brown warned against the ongoing time honored tradition of demonizing young black men in pathology rising black youth culture also speaking up in defense of gangsta rap was Congresswoman Maxine Waters.
S3: Waters was a 55 year old black woman. She would have seemed the natural ally for Tucker but Waters represented South Central Los Angeles where much of the music being debated in Congress came from. These are my children Waters said. I do not intend to marginalize or demean them. Rather I take responsibility for trying to understand what they are saying. But the hearings didn’t end with any concrete policy proposals. Moseley Braun did say that record companies needed to do more to protect children from offensive lyrics. We don’t threaten. She said we suggest C. Delores Tucker and Carol Moseley Braun were criticizing rap from the outside. But there were also women within the hip hop community who took issue with what some male rappers were saying Kiernan Mayo came up listening to rap in Brooklyn in the 1980s. She went to high school with future hip hop stars.
S16: A lot of the native tongue kids were either associated or involved.
S3: Also the jungle brother is so there and then his it male became a staff writer at the source where she and some other women use their platform to celebrate the music they loved and to call out sexism where they found it.
S16: That’s what we were trying to do by way of our presence at the source. Like vying for space vying for accuracy telling women stories from a woman’s perspective challenging the blatant rampant misogyny that C. Delores Tucker was also trying to challenge in nineteen ninety four male picture editors on a profile of Tucker.
S3: She was hoping to find some common ground with hip hop’s most visible critic. You know I had a certain as I do for all black elders I had a certain reverence.
S17: And respect for her that I was hoping would be returned in kind not just to me but to the culture. It didn’t go that way. She seemed a little kooky to me.
S18: Talking to Mayo. Tucker described gangsta rap as part of a huge and murderous conspiracy.
S19: What record companies are doing as programming listeners to say that we are not people.
S18: And when the man comes to exterminate us and put us in concentration camps the white kids are going to be happy about it for Tucker these concentration camps weren’t some far off thing. She claimed that the first of them had already been built in New Orleans. A lot of the conversation in retrospect was kind of like. Wild like far fetched males profile portrayed Tucker as ignorant of hip hop and still hung up on the civil rights struggles of the 1960s.
S19: The problem with Tucker’s activism male road is our fundamental belief that gangsta rap is a cause and not an effect.
S3: Rap music was dividing the Civil Rights and Hip Hop generations.
S20: It was also attracting increasing numbers of white listeners gangsta rap has become incredibly popular and profitable by selling lyrics about black on black violence to a young mainstream audience that wouldn’t dream of going anywhere near a ghetto.
S2: Now after billboards switched over to Soundscan record companies got regular confirmation that hip hop’s audience had expanded beyond its original base of black and brown kids and East Coast cities. Even as some radio stations banned rap with explicit lyrics others embraced the music changing their formats to all hip hop all the time.
S3: Yo MTV Raps was the network’s highest rated show. The L.A. Times described rap as a 700 million dollar a year business. Rap is essentially a black art form.
S21: But it’s a goldmine for white recording companies which artists say encouraged the hardcore lyrics because they sell. And surprisingly 70 percent of rap music is bought by white young people.
S22: This is real time. Listen to Snoop Dogg. Obviously that’s real popular.
S23: I think it’s a way of rebelling against what they’ve grown up with and it’s something that’s a little dangerous.
S2: Without getting too close to the reality of the record companies were happy to capitalize on increasing sales from black and white record buyers but they also faced increasing criticism from black and white cultural conservatives.
S3: William Bennett made his name as Ronald Reagan’s secretary of education in George H.W. Bush’s national drug czar after he left the White House. Bennett became a cultural warrior. He looked like a Founding Father. Silver haired jolly in very very serious. He thought of himself as a national moral compass and he talked about the importance of teaching values to children. He saw little to like in rap music and he wanted in on C. Delores Tucker’s crusade. They made an odd couple but they found common cause and battling gangsta rap.
S22: I’m a liberal Democrat and I’m a conservative Republican but we’re both worried about society our children live in today.
S3: Here’s a Peter Bailey who worked for Tucker then.
S9: In this instance I could see that that music is so destructive that if I had to work with Bill Bennett in order to do something with it then I was prepared to do so.
S2: To kick off their partnership Bennett and Tucker stage a dramatic appearance at Time Warner’s 1995 shareholders meeting.
S3: Much as Charlton Heston had done three years earlier Tucker who bought ten shares of Time Warner stock which entitles her to speak at the meeting. She came prepared to put on a show.
S24: If she came into a dress like you did though she was like the superstar of all superstars. She came at it with a turban on everything you know and she said when she walked in they had a black woman who had a position with Time Warner. And she was kind of directing her to a seat. It was kind of near the back of the room and I took a fishing boat right by took a seat right out front.
S2: David Dare I ask you to move Tucker read lyrics from songs about Tupac and Snoop Doggy Dogg and ACT CEO Gerald Levin how long with Time Warner put profit before principle.
S25: Here’s how Tucker described the event at a press conference and I was able to address the chairman the board of directors the stockholders and Time magazine reported that after I finished the 17 minute address that there was one third of the stockholders applauding.
S2: So we are making an impact because of our children and gangster C. Delores Tucker certainly wasn’t the first to attack rap lyrics but the tucker Bennett alliance was something new. The beginning of a bipartisan national campaign against gangsta rap.
S26: Bob Dole the Senate majority leader who was on his way to the presidential nomination got on board a line has been crossed not just of taste but of human dignity and decency. It’s crossed every time sexual violence has given a catchy tune. I’m talking about groups like Cannibal Corpse Ghetto Boys and to life through the mainstreaming of demons. He must come to an end. But at the only stop and the leaders of the entertainment industry recognize and shoulder their responsibility.
S1: Bennett and Tucker singled out Time Warner and especially its partial subsidiary Interscope Records which handled distribution for sugar nights Death Row label. Tucker told The New York Times Interscope is the company Time Warner needs to get out of business with immediately death row when its artists were furious Signet ran a two page ad in The Source featuring a list of freedom fighters under the names Martin Luther King Nelson Mandela and Malcolm X with C. Delores Tucker crossed out with a red line in gang circles crossing got a name.
S3: Someone was marked for death here’s to park in a 1995 interview from Dannemora prison.
S27: I don’t understand. Delores Tucker and Bob Dole and all these other days. How do you say like Guy gangsta music might never even classify rap music as gangsta music and if you really I know they haven’t listened to my tape. I know somebody gives them up to go attack superhot and now what it does is they they attack a few famous rappers and now then themselves a famous Delores Tucker just wanna get a name which she won’t find because it’ll fade. I don’t I don’t see how she can say she’s helping the black community and strike back at us. We are the black community.
S3: We are part of the black community but eventually Time Warner cracked first. The company fired Doug Morris the executive who had made the Interscope deal. Tucker take the credit I predict that Interscope Records will fall next she said in a statement. Behind the scenes Tucker had even bigger plans. She set up a meeting with sugar night and pitched him on a new venture that would put out positive hip hop records. She said she could convince Time Warner to put up 80 million dollars Signet wasn’t interested. Interscope and Death Row filed lawsuits against Tucker alleging that she was interfering in their contractual relationship Tucker never became a rap mogul herself. But she did score a win in her campaign against Interscope in September 1995 Time Warner sold its stake in the label back to co-founders Ted Field and Jimmy I’ve seen Time Warner now involved in a huge merger deal with the Turner company is cutting itself loose from one of its most controversial and profitable holdings.
S28: Time Warner today announced it’s selling off a 50 percent stake in a record distributor specializing in gangsta rap music but sucker’s victory was short lived after Time Warner fired Doug Morris.
S3: He took a job running MCI records within a few months. MCI bought that 50 percent stake in Interscope for 200 million netting the label’s founders a 90 million dollar profit rep was now big business and that mean it was too valuable to contain. Here’s Dan Chanos. He’s the author of the book The Big Payback The History Of The Business of Hip Hop.
S29: You’re not gonna be able to kill gangsta rap certainly and you’re not gonna be able to kill hip hop in general. It’s just gonna be like whack a mole. If it gets too hot you tamp it down. But it’s gonna pop up somewhere else because ultimately what really mattered was capital and how much money everything would make the purchase of Interscope made MCI one of the biggest labels in the music industry.
S3: Renamed Universal Music Group today it’s the largest nine months after the sale the top four slots in the Billboard album charts belong to Bush no doubt Snoop Doggy Dogg and Tupac all Interscope artists Tucker retreated from the spotlight after the Interscope sale.
S9: She was not taking care of herself her health the way she should because of his commitment that he had to work you know keep keep battling this gangsta rap that I strongly she felt about it so she she didn’t do something that she should probably should have done healthwise.
S3: Tupac last outed sucker in a song called How do you want it. Which came out as a single in June nineteen ninety six.
S30: In nineteen ninety seven.
S2: Tucker filed a lawsuit against two parks state and his record labels claiming the song caused her emotional distress. The suit was dismissed. Tucker died in 2005 Tupac was wrong when he said her name would fade. It’s been kept alive in hip hop lyrics that Tucker surely would have hated.
S31: No I’m not in that song. Can’t be banned.
S32: I’m sorry Mr. Norris. Let me tell you something big motherfucker. Next week on slow burn Tupac and death row go on the attack.
S8: Slow burn as a production of Slate Plus Slate’s membership program. You can sign up for Slate Plus to hear a bonus episode of the show this week and every week this season. In this week’s bonus episode you’ll hear an extended interview with Kiernan mayor one of the first staff writers at The Source magazine. I talked to her about interviewing C. Delores Tucker. And about covering the early days of hip hop. To hear it. Sign up for Slate Plus at Slate dot com. Slash slow burn.
S33: Slow Burn is produced by me and Christopher Johnson with editorial direction by Josh Levine and Gabriel Roth. Sophie Sommer grad is our researcher our mix engineers are Jared Paul and Paul mountain. Don will composed our theme song.
S34: The artwork for slow burn is by Lisa Larson Walker. Special thanks to Slate’s child to Derrick Johnson. Chris M.A. lo and Lou Allison Benedikt and Jared hope. You can find a full list of books articles and documentaries used to research this episode on our show page.
S33: And by the way we created a playlist on Spotify to go with this season will be updated get each week with new episodes and songs about Tupac Biggie and their collaborators. Check it out every week at the link in the show notes. Thanks for listening.
