The Imus Test: Rap Lyrics Undergo Examination

To Tucker's husband, Imus's slur "brought about a revival of the struggle she waged, literally, by herself for the past 14 years -- she struggled against this, and speaking out against lyrics and how they demeaned and defamed women," said William Tucker, vice chairman of the Bethune-Dubois Institute, which is honoring his wife, who died in 2005.

There was a time when the rap heard over commercial airwaves was an art form preoccupied with the issues of the day, from Melle Mel's haunting classic about ghetto life, "The Message," to Public Enemy's chanting "Fight the Power." Even for the most devoted hip-hop heads much of rap is hard to take these days, given the same old beats and raggedy rhymes about pimping, loose women, guns and money. (So-called "conscious rap," as embodied by the likes of the Roots and Mos Def, remains forgotten in this debate.)

"Rap is not a perfect art form. I don't know an art form that is," said Danyel Smith, editor in chief of Vibe magazine. "Rap gets a lot of blame, fairly and unfairly, for misogyny and violence, while people tend to forget American cinema, for the last 100 years, has explicit misogyny and explicit violence in Technicolor. Which frankly is what lot of rappers, gangsta and otherwise, are influenced by."

The rap genre has been reeling commercially, with album sales plummeting by 27 percent between 2004 and 2006, according to Nielsen SoundScan. (Album sales across all genres were down 11 percent for the same period.) The genre's free fall has continued this year, with album sales down by more than 33 percent during the first quarter, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

"Hip-hop is a dog at this point. It's not a terrible dog, but records aren't selling," said Felicia Palmer, editor of SOHH.com, a leading hip-hop site. "If I were a record label person, I'd use this as an opportunity to turn things around by taking the proactive approach and putting out a different type of product. If hip-hop is declining, it behooves us to bring it back to where it should be. . . . I'm glad this is happening and that the finger is being pointed back at us. Don Imus has taken a major fall, and he's not going down by himself."

The question of hip-hop's culpability in the Imus issue is one that some rap-industry figures appear reluctant to address. Label executives and radio programmers on both coasts repeatedly declined to comment for this article. Will the renewed focus on rap's responsibilities bring a revival of socially conscious rap?

"We can't continue to embrace the 'Do as I say, not as I do' mind-set. It never works. . . . We need to turn the mirror back on ourselves and see if we're participatory in our oppression," said Asha Camille Jennings, a New York University law student who three years ago, while a student at Spelman College, organized a protest against Nelly for his negative images of black women, including a video depicting their bodies as credit card machines.

"It starts from within. Whether Snoop calls me a ho or Don Imus calls me a ho, I don't care," she said. "I'm tired of us blaming other people. Nobody held a gun up to 50 Cent's head and said, 'Call that woman a ho!' He wrote the lyrics and he presented it to the record label. They didn't say, 'I'm worried, you only said "ho" three times, I need more.' "

Staff writer J. Freedom du Lac and special correspondent Melinda Newman contributed to this report.