Robin on Speaking as a Parent raises some difficult issues about the work of 50 Cent and the sexualisation of popular culture and the potential impact on the very young. He says “to pretend that this is an issue of self expression is bogus nonsense — the issue here is profit”.

The problem with that is that in a capitalist liberal democracy, the right to try to make a profit is part of the right of self–expression. You have to be very careful before you curtail people’s right to make a living out of something that other people want to pay for.

And undoubtedly many people do want to buy this stuff. The strange thing about 50 Cent and others like him is that it’s so mainstream. 50 years ago the adult majority would probably have frowned upon this sort of thing and not wanted to buy it, so it would have been a minority interest… like, I don’t know… certain types of nastier pr*no are now. But rap music has gone in the last 20 years from being an American urban minority thing to being a massive, mainstream worldwide phenomenon. Because this sort of attitude to sex/women and particularly pimp–as–hero culture is ingrained in certain parts of rap culture and music, traceable back at least as far as the writings of Iceberg Slim and probably before that, this pimp stuff is benefitting from that worldwide exposure. Result: respectable, 30–something people bob their heads to “I’m a mf’in P.I.M.P” when it comes on KISS FM.

There has been a cultural shift with the result that stuff that, if you think about it, is really pretty unpleasant is just regarded as lightweight, popular entertainment. Society’s attitudes have shifted, and Robin is right, we’re anaesthetised to it — we don’t think about what these lyrics mean. That may be partly as a result of marketing, driven by the profit motive, but why do people market this stuff to us: because they think it’ll sell. Why is that? Does it say anything deeper about us than the fact that we like Dre’s catchy hooks and most of us don’t listen to the lyrics anyway?