Each night, in households all over the world, normally discerning parents allow their children to venture into the ghetto. “The Ghetto,” as I use the term, is not so much a place as a state of mind — a way of being in our new culture. Its attendant lifestyle, once confined to the outer reaches of darkest city life, has now made a serious advance into mainstream culture.
Kids from all walks of life now dress like the street, talk like the street, and walk like the street. The image of the ‘70s street urchin, replete with stocking cap, ill-fitting clothes and pimpin’ attitude, is increasingly visible in our neighborhoods and even our homes. And who is the great importer of this corrosive behavior and worldview? Much of the credit must go to MTV.
Once the home of be-bop and bubble gum songsters, MTV has morphed into a profane filth pump bent on slowly reshaping the habits, beliefs and lifestyles of the young. This is not Ozzie and Harriet.
A few weeks ago I happened upon the MTV Music Video Awards. This is sort of the Oscars of MTV, a night when pop music’s icons come out to strut their stuff and bask in teen glory. The show opened with the Wayans brothers, an over-the-top comedy act, wearing fuzzy wide-rim hats and mink-lined long coats. They looked like a couple of “Huggy Bear” pimps waiting for a downtown bus. The disappointing thing is they wanted to look like a pair of pimps waiting for a bus.
Within three minutes of their opening monologue (rife with assorted profanities) one of these comic geniuses dropped his trousers and mooned Radio City and the world. The camera quickly cut to the reigning queen of teen kitsch, Britney Spears, who looked like someone had just hit her in the gut with a sledgehammer. It was a look most everyone in the audience would have when Spears finally took the stage later on.
Here is this teenybopper icon who appeals to an eighth grade audience literally ripping her clothes off like a Vegas stripper. During the remainder of the routine she did a bump-and-grind while lip-synching a new song that sounds remarkably like her old song. But this underscores the message MTV wants women to get: you are a sex object created for the pleasure of men (or boys as the case may be). If you want to be treated well, you’d better start showing more flesh and perfecting the bump-and-grind.
One of the hosts even commented after Spears’ number, “That girl went from the Mickey Mouse Club to the strip club.” So did the rest of MTV.
Sex is all over this network. It is the focus of the dramas, the music, the videos and the commercials. The only sex not encouraged is sex with a spouse.
One of the commercials during the awards show featured two men kissing, two women kissing, and then a straight couple kissing, followed by the graphic: Do you speak MTV? The encouragement of sexual activity among the young — particularly homosexual sexual activity — seems a major goal for MTV. Its dramatic series Undressed regularly features homosexual couples in explicit situations.
Now even if Mom and Dad were taking the kids to Church every Sunday and force-feeding them theology all weekend, daily exposure to MTV would seriously nibble away at their moral foundation. A recent report by the Federal Trade Commission found that in a typical week children spend more than 19 hours in front of the TV. They spend an additional 10 hours listening to music. Children 8 to 13 spend more time with media than any other age group. With those kinds of statistics, it’s clear who is shaping the future: MTV, not Mom and Dad?
The network’s prurient sexual agenda is among the most blatant on television. Consider this sampling of songs nominated for MTV Music Video Awards this year: “The Thong Song” (you can just imagine the video), “Shake Your Bon-Bon” (this does not refer to maracas), and “Big Pimpin’”.
MTV’s lifestyle preference this year is what I have taken to calling “Pimp Chic.” Gangster rappers are all over the network. Their lyrics deal with everything from cop killing to incest to rape, all of which are depicted as positive behaviors.
The videos are laughable, except for the fact that they air in constant repetition just when the latch-key kids land at home: 3:00 pm. The kiddies have gotten the message. Look what they’re wearing, then look at the videos. The rappers (at least in their videos) always travel in a posse with old rags tied around their heads. They’re usually tattooed, dripping in gold, pants down around their knees, sporting shades, and always seated in or leaning upon a luxury car. Later, a whole pack of people, including many partially-clad women, writhe to the beat of the tune (if that’s what you want to call it). The video normally ends with the rapper passing before a row of women furiously gyrating their pelvises. Just why people are gyrating their pelvises in the middle of traffic is never really explained.
The core of this pimp mentality is the celebration of money and luxury items and the degradation of women. Through the body parts and the incessant beat the boys receive their own bit of MTV philosophy: women are commodities to own and dominate. They can make money for you, but their primary reason for existence is to ogle, fondle, and fulfill your desires.
To finish off this subversive catechism for the young, MTV now has its own perverse indoctrination unit. For those youngsters not into the sex scene, why not try a little crude, self-destructive behavior? In one of the network’s new fall programs, a man straps himself inside a port-o-let. Soon the mobile toilet is turned upside down causing excrement to submerge the idiot. He later strips down to his birthday suit and shouts obscenities into the camera as friends hose him down. Upcoming episodes will treat us to the same imbecile shocking himself with a stun gun and jumping into a canal with roller skates. This delightful bit of self-hate is appropriately titled “Jackass.” At least they got the title right.
Sex, perversion, crudeness, the erosion of humanity — all the qualities of the ghetto — have been embraced by the young. How ironic that men and women who work so hard to shield their kids from the ugliness of the world with security systems and gated communities, stand idly by as the very same hostile forces they know to be a threat enter the home through television and convert their children. They try to ignore the crude language and the baggy pants, to write it off as a stage of maturation. But the culture these expressions represent, and the subsequent actions they guarantee, will not be ignored.
As the headlines announce countless stories of children shooting each other, raping each other and destroying each other, we should not be surprised. After all, these are only the real life re-runs. You can see it first on MTV.
