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Though advertisers haven't banded together yet, some citizen groups are trying it. Dennis Walcott, president of the New York Urban League, organized a protest last week at radio station wqht in New York to persuade the station to stop playing Shimmy Shimmy Ya, a rap song that the protesters say encourages sex without condoms. "I'm not asking for censorship,'' says Walcott. "I'm asking for corporations who make money from these things to think about content and message.''
The prominence of African-American organizations as critics of gangsta rap is a new element in this year's version of the culture wars. In his new campaign against Time Warner, Bill Bennett is allied with C. DeLores Tucker, head of the National Political Congress of Black Women. After a woman working at radio station WBLS in New York complained last year about the lyrics of one rap song, management established a committee to screen the playlist. For station head Pierre Sutton, who is black, it's simply a matter of "not in my house you don't.'' Says Sutton: "Artists have the right to say what they want to, and we have the right to decide with regard to the playing of same.'' When 1993 statistics showed that violent crime in Kansas City, Missouri, had risen 200% in one year, FM station KPRS decided no longer to broadcast violent, sexually explicit or misogynist rap. Under the new policy, KPRS rose from third to first place in the local ratings.
Though the cultural-pollution issue looks like an easy win for the Republicans, it's not a clean sweep. As the debate develops in weeks to come, the soft spots in their arguments are likely to become more apparent. For a party committed to free-market principles -- and which also wants to defund public television and end government oversight of the airwaves -- a problem is that pop culture represents the free market at its freest, meaning most able to make a profitable pitch to the grosser appetites. Some of the most violent American films, like the Stallone-Willis-Schwarzenegger action pictures, are also among the most successful American film exports because their bang-bang simplicities translate easily across cultural boundaries. Says Democratic Senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey: "The free market that the economic conservatives champion undermines the moral character that the social conservatives desire.''
In the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing, the conservatives are also stuck with their own problem of violence in the media -- and it's not just Schwarzenegger's body counts. "Jackbooted thugs,'' the description of federal law-enforcement agents in a fund-raising letter from the National Rifle Association, is a kind of cop-killer lyric in itself. So is "aim at the head" -- radio talk-show host G. Gordon Liddy's suggestion for greeting federal law-enforcement agents at your door.