Still Peddling Filth for Profit

What would you do upon learning that the corporate owners of a local youth-oriented theme park have been pumping toxic matter from an adjacent property into the outlying community? Maybe you’d report them to the authorities, boycott their theme park--or at least hold them in contempt.

In this case, the offender is Universal Studios’ MCA music division, which continues to capitalize on what a variety of critics agree is insidious social pollution: “gangsta” rap music.

Consider these all-too-typical lyrics from the Geto Boys’ tune “Assassins”: I dug between the chair and whipped out the machete; she screamed, I sliced her up until her guts were like spaghetti.

Sexual mutilation of women, gang fights, cop killing, rape, race wars and street murder. Such ugly themes have led a panel of white and black critics alike to castigate the record industry in general for exploiting violent rap, and MCA in particular for misleading the public about company standards.

This is not the first time rap music has sullied a shiny corporate image.

Following attacks by a cross-section of educators and national politicians, Time Warner’s red-faced board members unloaded rap distributor Interscope Records in 1995, leading MCA to purchase half of it last year for a staggering $200 million. MCA coyly promised not to publish records it considered “objectionable.”

But the final album from recently slain rap star Tupac Shakur--in all its depraved grandeur-- promised to be too profitable an endeavor for MCA to hold back; it sold more than half a million copies its first week.

Social critic and former Education Secretary William J. Bennett minced no words at a national news conference last month: “MCA lies. Their word is not worth anything. Seagram / MCA is peddling filth for profit and reneging on a moral commitment.”

An industry spin surgeon replied that “artistic merit” guided executive decisions to release the album.

Well, OK, but we among the artistically challenged might wonder about the merits of Shakur’s “Makaveli: The Don Killuminati,” whose cover depicts the convicted sex offender Shakur--genitals covered by a parental advisory sticker--as a crucified messianic figure.

Echoing Bennett, the chairwoman of the National Congress of Black Women called Shakur’s grand finale for MCA an offense to blacks, women and Christians. Indeed, from the demented spelling to the sick cover and violent title, could there be anything or anyone that isn’t degraded?

But in case anyone believes the controversy is merely over aesthetic preferences, consider the rap sheet of rap executive Marion “Suge” Knight, whose Death Row Records rakes in millions for himself and MCA.

At last count, Knight had eight criminal convictions, and could be sentenced in February for up to nine years in prison for an alleged probation violation. For the last few months he’s run Death Row records from his cell at County Jail, where inmates aspiring to be “artists” have reportedly been auditioning for him.

Death Row star Snoop Doggy Dogg--a.k.a. Calvin Broadus--has been in court on various charges, including murder, of which he was recently acquitted. Shakur himself died after getting shot in Knight’s car following a fight among reputed gang members in a Las Vegas hotel.

Meanwhile, federal agents have been investigating Death Row Records for operating as a possible criminal enterprise, and local authorities are trying to determine if Death Row money or favors unfairly influenced a deputy Los Angeles prosecutor to accept lenient probation for Knight.

Given the tangible violence in the rap music biz, one wonders if there is anything remotely resembling self-respect among executives at Universal Studios or its MCA Music subsidiary upon receiving those T. rex-size paychecks, bonuses and stock options enhanced by megabuck deals with a convicted felon and his cronies.

MCA Chairman Frank J. Biondi Jr. recently said that corporate parent Universal Studios Inc. represents “the best in entertainment.” Considering the cultural pollution spewing from Universal Studios’ gangsta rap hit factory, “the best in entertainment” appears to cover a Jurassic-size load of MCA sludge.