I don’t know about you, but if a YouTube video garners a million views, I’m impressed. If it gets 10 million, I’m rather stunned. Perhaps it’s because I know just how hard this is. Focus on the Family regularly posts videos of my movie reviews on YouTube. Just minutes ago, I zipped over to YouTube, typed in my name and found several of my videos. No million-plus-eyeballs for any of mine. Instead, I have several in the hundreds, a few in the thousands, and sadly, one video that has just two. Sigh!
A few weeks ago, my wife was using her laptop to listen to music off of YouTube. I recall her humming along to Celine Dion and Trevin Hunte. During a lull in the music, I typed in “Gangnam Style” so Leesa could hear a bit of PSY’s popular diddy. At that time, I recall that the number of views was around 750 million. When I checked a couple of days ago, the view count exceeded 925 million! No matter how you slice the data, this represents a lot of people!
With nearly a billion views, PSY now has the honor of having the most popular YouTube video ever and has made millions because of it. But despite his popularity (or perhaps because of it), this South Korean rapper has been doing some serious damage control the last few days. As it turns out, years before he came up with his signature “I’m riding a pony” dance moves, he was spouting some very troubling, anti-American rhetoric.
Just what did he rap? CNN translated the lyrics as, “Kill those f—ing Yankees who have been torturing Iraqi captives and those who ordered them to torture/ … Kill them all slowly and painfully … daughters, mothers, daughters-in-law and fathers.” Awful stuff!
PSY says he now deeply regrets his vitriolic and violent rants. Whether he’s sincere or not may never be known, but to me he seems genuinely remorseful. I hope so. ABC News quoted him as saying, “I will forever be sorry for any pain I have caused by those words.” Denver’s Fox 31 offered more of PSY’s apologetic statement: “While I’m grateful for the freedom to express one’s self, I’ve learned there are limits to what language is appropriate and I’m deeply sorry for how these lyrics could be interpreted. …While it’s important that we express our opinions, I deeply regret the inflammatory and inappropriate language I used to do so.”
Did you catch the part in which PSY said, “I’ve learned there are limits to what language is appropriate?” To me, the best part of this whole news story is that simple admission. Why?
Rappers have a history of voicing inappropriate things. And rarely do those lyrics get much attention—even though they are, in many ways, just as troubling as PSY’s. Here are just a few examples to make my point:
Daddy made a nice bed for mommy at the bottom of the lake/Here, you wanna help Daddy tie a rope around this rock?/We’ll tie it to her footsie and then roll her off the dock [Eminem]
When it comes to cookin’ coke, they know I got the recipe/ … I’m the neighborhood pusher [50 Cent]
They say you’re nobody ’til somebody kills you/But where I’m from you’re nobody ’til you kill somebody [Lil Wayne]
Personally, I applaud PSY for realizing there should be limits regarding what a person should say (and rap). I applaud him for apologizing. Still, I also think there are a lot of singers/rappers out there who have similar apologizing to do! But don’t hold your breath waiting to see a rush of apologies from those in the music industry. For one thing, they really don’t need to. People snap up their records anyway.
Recent Comments