katlyn

I thought the article Cop Out was very interesting. Prior to the reading I did not know much about the Rodney King incident. After class I went home and googled the subject to get a little more understanding of the situation. Under the Wikipedia link a list of references to Rodney King in popular culture came up. It included South Park, the Dave Chappelle Show., Family Guy, the Simpson’s, Malcolm X, and many other media’s that used the beating to help get a point across. Such shows and movies (as listed above) are known today for their political implications. The point I’m trying to make here is that just as Ice- T used Rodney King to get his point across, so did the shows listed above. It’s the consumers who decide if they, as the viewer, are going to sit down and watch an episode of the Dave Chappelle Show, which has a reputation for pushing the envelope, and subject themselves to the suggestive remarks and racial slander. The same goes for Ice- T’s song. The consumer makes the choice to listen to the rap song or not. That’s the beauty of freedom of the press, media, and speech. Ice- T’s controversial rap song was his opinion, an opinion he was expressing in a non- violent way. Whether or not the listener agreed with the message of the song really has little importance. That same truth could go for any type of music. A Christian could sit down and listen to an atheist band sing about their disagreement with God and be highly offended, but at the end of the day what it comes down to is that living in a free country, everyone is entitled to their own opinion. The article even states that only a “tiny minority of Americans actually heard the song at all�(669). Disagreement with the song prior to even listening to it adds proof of the general culture’s ignorance to the situation at hand, and the preconceptions towards rap music being bad. It was much easier for the people to snub the song and look down on it than it was for the nation to actually address the problem, as well as the possibility that the Rodney King beating might have actually been out of racial discrimination and prejudice.