News Reporter
Three weeks after “The Movies Made Me Do It” drew student ire for connecting Hollywood and smoking, Dean of Students John Ford stepped up to the podium and dropped a bombshell: rap, he said, is a leading cause of underage drinking. Given the seriousness of the issue—over the span of a week, four students had been taken to the hospital with drinking-related symptoms - the comment was baffling. It transformed a stern warning on alcohol’s dangers into a discourse on the state of popular culture. Mr. Ford is neither a psychologist nor a music aficionado (he is famous on campus for his talk-radio preference); on what, then, did he base these comments?
Context is important—and, given the sensitive nature of the events, little was provided—in disproving Mr. Ford’s theory. The second of the two incidents (an off-campus party broken up by police), which apparently prompted Mr. Ford’s outburst, is enough to expose his argument as flawed. One would be hard-pressed to find a demographic and setting as far removed from hip-hop culture as hockey players and New Canaan, yet Mr. Ford saw fit to link the two. In doing so, he joined Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh and a host of other social commentators who use rap as a societal scapegoat. And, just like conservative talk radio, he knows not of what he speaks.
While it’s unlikely that Mr. Ford intended to provoke controversy, the nature of his comments were such that he did so anyway. He conjured a fictitious culture out of thin air and took aim at its alleged attributes, discrediting his later comments—many of which were valid—and ignoring the larger picture. Drinking is a part of high school life—that is indisputable. But when Mr. Ford narrows its causes into a conveniant box (a “box” which likely reflects his own prejudices), he does everyone an injustice. If he truly believes in music’s power to cause misbehavior, he should broaden his blacklist to include songs such as “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” and “Casey Jones,” drug-themed classics popular in the present day.
On that note, I would argue that it’s time for the administration to shift its focus to more important matters. Rather than drawing a tenuous link between drinking and rap, for instance, Mr. Ford’s speech could have addressed a problem that I have witnessed here: cocaine consumption. Rap rarely mentions cocaine as anything but a product. Are adolescents subliminally influenced by old Rolling Stones songs? Do the discussions by rapper Cassidy of street “hustling” encourage adolescents to contribute to the industry? Perhaps. But, more likely, they do it for other reasons—reasons less conveniant than hip-hop. Only when the school truly begins to explore these other causes—instead of taking the easy way out, as they did last Wednesday —will the specter of “Coke Rosemary Hall” and Choate’s substance-abuse issues disappear completely.
