Media

I've always been intrigued by the way entertainers consistently deny responsibility for the messages they propagate. Charles Barkley is famously quoted (albeit out of context) for asserting that athletes aren't role models. The latest edition in this saga of moral abdication is found in this week's TIME (March 3 Issue, p. 8). In a Q&A session, rapper-actor-entrepreneur Sean Combs, aka P. Diddy, Puffy, etc., was asked the following question:

Do you feel the culture of vanity in rap and hip-hop has given young people a skewed reality of what is important in life?

His interesting response:

"A lot of things affect people's views if they let their views be affected. A weak-minded person who was going to do something negative or be vain was going to do that whether it was the music or somebody else that affected him."

Essentially, our friend Puffy is saying that yes, the culture of vanity (and worse!) in rap and hip-hop does have the potential to alter a young person's perception of what is important in life, but the responsibility rests entirely on that inexperienced young person to discern what is real and what is important. We will spend our careers making the hip-hop lifestyle appear enticing, normal, fulfilling, and realistic, but that's no reason for the youth to think that it really is. We can't be held responsible for their thinking that it is.

I believe this is why it's so important for each of us to take full responsibility for the voices we allow to influence our lives. If we allow ourselves to be deceived, we can't expect to be able to shift the blame to anyone else. No one out in the world is taking pains to ensure we're not led astray, so we can't be expecting them to.