“ICE-T: THE ISSUE IS SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY”MICHAEL KINSLEYTime Magazine (1992)How did the company that publishes this magazine come to produce a record glorifyingthe murder of police?I got my 12-gauge sawed offI got my headlights turned offI'm 'bout to bust some shots offI'm 'bout to dust some cops off. . .Die, Die, Die Pig, Die!So go the lyrics to Cop Killer by the rapper Ice-T on the album Body Count. The albumis released by Warner Bros. Records, part of the Time Warner media and entertainmentconglomerate.In a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece laying out the company's position, Time WarnerCo-CEO Gerald Levin makes two defenses. First, Ice-T's Cop Killer is misunderstood. "Itdoesn't incite or glorify violence . . . It's his fictionalized attempt to get inside acharacter's head . . .Cop Killer is no more a call for gunning down the police thanFrankie and Johnny is a summons for jilted lovers to shoot one another." Instead of"finding ways to silence the messenger," we should be "heeding the anguished crycontained in his message."This defense is self-contradictory. Frankie and Johnny does not pretend to have apolitical "message" that must be "heeded." If Cop Killer has a message, it is that themurder of policemen is a justified response to police brutality. And not in self-defense,but in premeditated acts of revenge against random cops. ("I know your family'sgrievin' f—k 'em.") Killing policemen is a good thing—that is the plain meaning of thewords, and no "larger understanding" of black culture, the rage of the streets oranything else can explain it away. This is not Ella Fitzgerald telling a story in a song. Asin much of today's popular music, the line between performer and performance ispurposely blurred. These are political sermonettes clearly intended to endorse thesentiments being expressed. Tracy Morrow (Ice-T) himself has said, "I scared thepolice, and they need to be scared." That seems clear.The company's second defense of Cop Killer is the classic one of free expression: "Westand for creative freedom. We believe that the worth of what an artist or journalisthas to say does not depend on preapproval from a government official or a corporatecensor." Of course Ice-T has the right to say whatever he wants. But that doesn'trequire any company to provide him an outlet. And it doesn't relieve a company ofresponsibility for the messages it chooses to promote. Judgment is not "censorship."Many an "anguished cry" goes unrecorded. This one was recorded, and promoted,because a successful artist under contract wanted to record it. Nothing wrong withmaking money, but a company cannot take the money and run from theresponsibility.The founder of Time, Henry Luce, would snort at the notion that his company shouldprovide a value-free forum for the exchange of ideas. In Luce's system, editors weresupposed to make value judgments and promote the truth as they saw it. Time hasmoved far from its old Lucean rigidity—far enough to allow for dissenting essays likethis one. That evolution is a good thing, as long as it's not a handy excuse forabandoning all standards. No commercial enterprise need agree with every word thatappears under its corporate imprimatur. If Time Warner now intends to be a “globalforce for encouraging the confrontation of ideas," that's swell. But a policy of allowingdiverse viewpoints is not a moral free pass. Pro and con on national health care is onething; pro and con on killing policemen is another.A bit of sympathy is in order for Time Warner. It is indeed a "global force" with mediatentacles around the world. If it imposes rigorous standards and values from the top, itgets accused of corporate censorship. If it doesn't, it gets accused of moralirresponsibility. A dilemma. But someone should have thought of that before decidingto become a global force.And another genuine dilemma. Whatever the actual merits of Cop Killer, if Time Warnerwithdraws the album now the company will be perceived as giving in to outsidepressure. That is a disastrous precedent for a global conglomerate. The Time-Warnermerger of 1989 was supposed to produce corporate "synergy": the whole wassupposed to be more than the sum of the parts. The Cop Killer controversy is anexample of negative synergy. People get mad at Cop Killer and start boycotting themovie Batman Returns. A reviewer praises Cop Killer ("Tracy Morrow's poetry takes aswitchblade and deftly slices life's jugular," etc.), and Time is accused of corruptioninstead of mere foolishness. Senior Time Warner executives find themselves underattack for—and defending—products of their company they neither honestly care fornor really understand, and doubtless weren't even aware of before controversy hit.Anyway, it's absurd to discuss Cop Killer as part of the "confrontation of ideas"—oreven as an authentic anguished cry of rage from the ghetto. Cop Killer is a cynicalcommercial concoction, designed to titillate its audience with imagery of violence. Itmerely exploits the authentic anguish of the inner city for further titillation. TracyMorrow is in business for a buck, just like Time Warner. Cop Killer is an excellent jokeon the white establishment, of which the company's anguished apologia("Why can't we hear what rap is trying to tell us?") is the punch
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