Power 99 Rally Redefines What It Means To Be “On The Positive Tip”
CAMDEN, N.J. — A Camden peace rally has some residents upset about the featured performer who sings about snitches.Rap artist Swizz Beatz is a featured performer at Thursday night’s “Peace on the Streets” rally in Camden.
But with lines like, “It’s me snitches, and I ain’t gonna shoot ya, I could just choke ya,” some wonder if his anti-snitching lyrics will taint the rally’s message of peace and cooperation.
By now, you may have seen this story bouncing around all over the place, accompanied with cries of “Outrage!” and “Hypocrisy!” (What, doesn’t anyone say “Mon dieu!” anymore?) But before we all crucify poor widdle Swizz Beatz for simply being a man of his times, let’s root out the real culprits in the service of dissecting the “Stop Stop Snitchin’” movement. First off, Power 99 needs to have its head examined for what may be the stupidest quote in any local news story this year.
…after the jump.
“There’s another word that’s there that starts with a B and it kinda rhymes with ’snitchin,’ but obviously we can’t air that on the radio. So he used that instead, but the song itself has nothing to do about it. And in fact, he’s a very positive guy,” Loraine Ballard Morrill, of Power 99 community affairs, said.
No idea why, but this totally conjures memories of Vanilla Ice quibbling about how he didn’t steal the riff from “Under Pressure” — the high watermark in the history of Senseless, Laughable Hip-Hop Lies. If it was merely a radio edit, then why is the Swizz Beatz website positively bumpin’ with “snitch” this and “snitch” that? Power 99, you’re either stupid (for buying an obvious PR line from the Swizz machine) or retarded (for repeating it). Either way, the prognosis is not good, and if you think your thinking listeners haven’t noticed mixed messages pumpin’ out the radio before, you’re crazy, too. Meanwhile, the “Stop Stop Snitchin’” campaign rages on like a fifth-generation dub of “Just Say No”: All bluster and powerless against the forces that brought the “Stop Snitchin’” nation to light in the first place. Real talk: “Stop Snitchin’” is the result of decades of race and class wars and a system that doesn’t adequately rehabilitate or, for that matter, punish those that should be. Throwing up a white flag on it now does nothing but sop up blood. Like so many other ghetto ills, the anti-snitch movement won’t be quashed until people in the community gain more antipathy towards local thugs than what already exists for the police. On the plus side, Swizz’s weekend SoundScan numbers are gonna be bijonkers. So there’s that at least.
NBC10: Cops Not That Into New Swizz Track
