Rapper Plays White House, Hilarity Ensues

Right-wingers pile on Common for lyrics he wrote about killing police. His acting career would have been a much better target.

The usual suspects have condemned U.S. President Barack Obama for inviting socially conscious hip-hop artist Common to perform at the White House last night. Their rub? In a 2007 poem, Common speaks about strained relations between police and black people in which one could, if he or she had no understanding of artistic licence in hip-hop or the rest of Common's much more nuanced ouevre, make the case that he's in favour of killing police.

Fox News' website features some great wince-inducing attempts by Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly to talk about rap, while lobbing verbal grenades at an MC whom they've presumably never listened to before this week.

Similarly, Sarah Palin nearly ruins one of the genre's greatest songs: “The judgment is just so lacking of class and decency and all that's good about America ... They're just inviting someone like me or someone else to ask, 'C'mon Barack Obama, who are you palling around with now?... I'm not anti-rap. In fact, like Bret Baier, I know the lyrics to 'Rapper's Delight.'"

Thomas Chatterton Williams delivers a much more reasoned criticism in the New York Daily News: “It is our sad reality to find ourselves in an era in which the bar for what is considered to be 'positive' is set so low that anyone who rhymes words together for a living and refrains from advocating selling drugs may be said to fit the label,” he writes. “We don't need the Obamas to tell us that Common is a great poet or that Jay-Z and Lil' Wayne are cool entertainers. That is the message we hear everywhere around us.”

Thankfully, Jamal Simmons writes in The Root precisely why the whole uproar is as misguided as Common's 2008 album Universal Mind Control: “When gunfire and drugs are the norm, when friends killed and poor schools for most are standard, when police are seen as both friend and foe - and when all of this happens while television portrays lifestyles of ease and comfort just miles from your home but light years from your reality - hostility and anger are expected responses ... Blaming an artist whose work constructively tells the story of that pain and a too-often indifferent government is certainly not the most constructive way to address it.”