Rap Mogul Takes On Obama

April 16, 2007 — -- Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., found himself criticized Monday by one of rap and hip-hop's leading producers, Def Jam Records co-founder Russell Simmons, who challenged the presidential candidate to stop criticizing rappers' lyrics and start working to improve the urban-American world that inspires them.

"My response to Sen. Obama is that you have to talk about the poverty and ignorance that creates such a climate that the poets can talk like that," Simmons told ABC News. "And all the politicians owe them an education and an opportunity for a better life -- and maybe they'll say something better."

Obama, the first presidential candidate to call for shock jock Don Imus to be fired for his racist comments about the Rutgers University women's basketball team, has said it's troublesome to condemn Imus' "nappy-headed hos" slur without addressing similar language used by rap and hip-hop musicians.

At a fundraising dinner for the South Carolina Legislative Black Caucus in Columbia, S.C., Friday, Obama said, "We've got to admit to ourselves, that it was not the first time that we heard the word 'ho.' Turn on the radio station. There are a whole lot of songs that use the same language ... We've been permitting it in our homes, and in our schools and on iPods."

Obama added that "If it's not good for Don Imus, I don't know why it's good for us. If we don't like other people to degrade us, why are we degrading ourselves?"

At the South Florence High School library in Florence, S.C., Obama said of rappers, "They're degrading their sisters." He said that "There are a whole bunch of young rappers who look like us, who use the words that Don Imus does, who are on our radio stations."

But Simmons disputed Obama's contention that Imus' comments were in any way similar to those heard in rap music.

"People who are angry, uneducated and come from tremendous struggle, they have poetic license and they say things that offend you," Simmons said. "You have to talk about the conditions that create those kinds of lyrics. When you are talking about a privileged man who has a mainstream vehicle and mainstream support and is on a radio station like that you have to deal with them differently."