On Tavis Smiley’s show last last week, Ashley Judd admitted that she could have chosen her words more carefully when she declared hip-hop to be anti-woman. In her new memoir, she writes of being asked to join a charity campaign:
Along with other performers, YouthAIDS was supported by rap and hip-hop artists like Snoop Dogg and P. Diddy to spread the message…um, who? Those names were a red flag.
As far as I’m concerned, most rap and hip-hop music – with it’s rape culture and insanely abusive lyrics and depictions of girls and women as ‘ho’s’ – is the contemporary soundtrack of misogyny.
Judd has since spoken with Russell Simmons and discussed her true intention in writing those words, noting that she was not attempting to single out hip-hop, and misogyny “is not acceptable in any artistic expression, in any cultural form, whether its country music or in television story lines… And if [you] read more than one paragraph in the book, [you] would see that all four hundred pages are about that.”