Mos Def calls out lil jon and industry execs

... Finally finding her place in the world after years as a troubled misfit, Smith chose the moment of high punk insanity to make her sanest, most focused album. As producer, she chose a slick music-business professional, Jimmy Iovine ... today, he is the controversial head of Interscope Records, specializing in carefully calculated outrages such as Marilyn Manson, Eminem, and Limp Bizkit. While some of Smith's fans at the time would cry "sellout," many who discovered her work later on hold "Easter" second only to the debut, and some even prefer it... Earmarked as the title track until Arista balked, "Rock 'n' Roll ****" is the centerpiece of the album, and the hardest that Smith has ever rocked, outdoing even the incendiary "Gloria" and "Free Money" from the first album. The lyrics are pure Patti: grandiose, overreaching, and a little silly (held up as heroes who lived "outside of society" are Jackson ****, Jimi Hendrix, and Smith's grandmother), but they are vivid and inspiring all the same. They are also, of course, extremely controversial for their use of the offensive racial epithet. For Smith, the word "****" means anyone who refuses to conform to society's rigid rules, living instead by their own code of conduct. That reading of the word was inspired by Norman Mailer's famous Beat-era essay, "The White Negro," as well as by a T-shirt that the legendary rock critic Lester Bangs wore proclaiming himself "The Last of the White Niggers" ... can of worms #4-7: a Beatnik or "Beat" was like a 1950s hippy-****. check out "The White Negro and the Negro White" by Gary T. Marx (1961), "[url=http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:3CBNYCT_RCkJ:www.flatblacknova.com/buszek/PoMoSeminar/PoMoReadings/BangsWhite.pdf]The White Noise Supremacists" by Lester Bangs (1979), and "Elvis Presley was a 'White Negro' First" by David Earl Jackson (1995) ... Having grown up in largely African-American neighborhoods in Chicago and South Jersey, Smith thought she knew what she was saying, but some critics accused her of ignorance at best, and racism at worst. Writing in Rolling Stone, Dave Marsh, formerly a Smith booster, charged that, "Smith doesn't understand the word's connotation, which is not outlawry but a particularly vicious kind of subjugation and humiliation that's antithetical to her motive." The debate over when if ever the word should be used--and if so, by whom--continues today, more than two decades later...