NY DAILY NEWS BLAST HOT97

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Shame on Hot 97
The direct phone line to Jeffrey Smulyan, the founder and chairman of the Indiana company that owns New York's Hot 97 hip hop radio station, is (317) 684-6530. People disgusted by the station's reliance on music that glorifies violence and contempt for women should call and give the man an earful.
The phone number appears in the Code of Business Conduct and Ethics posted on the Web site of Hot 97's parent company, Emmis Communications. When I called yesterday, Smulyan answered on the first ring, but he didn't want to speak to me about the company's ethics or anything else.
I don't blame him. Emmis is Hebrew for "truth," and the truth is that Hot 97 doesn't just romanticize violence, it actively fosters it. This is the company where a man was shot last week while the station happily broadcast on-air taunts between two crack dealers-turned "artists," 50 Cent and The Game.
The same Hudson St. address is where in 2001 a machine-gun-toting member of rapper Lil' Kim's entourage shot a man in a rival rapper's group - a crime for which the shooter is serving 12 years in prison.
"That could have happened just as easily outside of anyplace where hip hop artists gather," a Hot 97 spokesman said yesterday. Maybe. But this is the same station that last month announced a twisted on-air game, "smackfest," in which female contestants would slap one another in the face, with a cash prize to the one producing the loudest sound and/or causing the greatest injury.
The game only ended because the deejays promoting it got fired for airing a song parody that ridiculed victims of the Asian tsunami. One deejay told a Korean-American staffer who complained about the parody, "I'm gonna start shooting some Asians."
The sickening corporate promotion of violence is reminiscent of the famous first chapter of the novel "Invisible Man" by the late Ralph Ellison. The book's hero describes something called the "battle royal," in which bankers, judges, lawyers, merchants and other respectable types round up 10 black boys and place them, blindfolded, in a makeshift boxing ring set up in a ballroom.
While the city fathers laugh, drink, smoke and curse, the boys blindly pummel each other bloody in a nightmare of degradation. At the end of it all, the men throw a few coins to the "winners" - and in a final spasm of humiliation, the coins are tossed onto an electric rug that delivers paralyzing shocks to the boys as they grab for the money, thrashing and howling in pain.
One assumes the gangster rappers have never read Ellison's classic, and neither know nor care that they're willing clowns providing amusement in a minstrel show.
Vivendi Universal creates and distributes records by 50 Cent and The Game. Reebok proudly uses 50 Cent as a corporate pitchman. These companies, along with Hot 97, promote the modern battle royal. And they ought to be ashamed. Originally published on March 8, 2005