Parents, you might want to keep the kiddies away from Nicki Minaj and 2 Chainz.
“Have you heard of Nicki Minaj?” the little girl asked me. I teach a chess class one day a week at a Baltimore summer camp. She and I were playing a game.
Now I realize what a crap shoot it is with my sanity to discuss anything having to do with today’s crop of rappers, but maybe this was the one time I wouldn’t come up snake eyes.
“Yeah, I’ve heard of her,” I answered. I started to mention that Minaj, in her videos, is fond of wearing skimpy outfits, those thunder thighs of hers notwithstanding.
“Have you heard of 2 Chainz?” the girl asked. I told her I hadn’t. The way she pronounced it, I thought she had said, “Tu Chang.” Maybe this rapper was a refugee from the rap group Wu-Tang Clan.
Further investigation revealed that she in fact had said “2 Chainz.” He’s an Atlanta rapper who did a duet with Minaj on a song called “Beez in the Trap.”
Again, “Beez in the Trap” is no “My Girl,” that classic written by Motown’s Smokey Robinson and Ronald White and immortalized by the voices of the Temptations. You’ll hear nothing like “I got sunshine on a cloudy day / when it’s cold outside, I got the month of May” on the Minaj-Chainz track. What you will hear is this:
“B—–s ain’t s–t, but they ain’t say nothing
“A hundred m—–f—–s can’t tell me nothing
“I beez in the trap, bee beez in the trap
“I beez in the trap, bee beez in the trap”
Now would it be a rap song without a reference to the B-word and a dropping of what I call the Great Oedipal Expletive? Oh, and of course, there’s the N-word, dropped later in the song.
The little lady I played chess with was more than familiar with Minaj, 2 Chainz and the lyrics to “Beez in the Trap.” She couldn’t have been more than 8 years old. Can I be the only one detecting a “Houston, we have a problem” moment here?
When I was this little girl’s age, the worst my parents worried about my hearing on the radio was Jerry Lee Lewis’ “Great Balls of Fire” or “A Whole Lot of Shaking Going On.”
Today’s youngsters parroting Minaj’s lyrics “I beez in the trap” probably have no idea what a trap is. But their parents had better know — or learn. Google the word “trap” along with the word “drug” and you’ll be taken to the website Urban Dictionary, where you’ll find this definition: “Term used to define a crack house, or the surroundings in which a drug dealer (or trap star) would use to make [his] profit.”
It is worth mentioning at this point that these rappers extolling the glory of trap houses are, for the most part, black. They have received not one word of condemnation from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
Now let’s go back to early July, when Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney discarded his better judgment and decided to speak at the NAACP’s annual convention. He got boos and catcalls.
So it’s boos and catcalls for Romney and other Republicans, and silence for those rappers filling black children’s head with nonsense about trap houses.
It looks like there’s a group of folks with their priorities seriously misplaced.
Examiner Columnist Gregory Kane is a Pulitzer-nominated news and opinion journalist who has covered people and politics from Baltimore to the Sudan.
