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Censoring “No Homo” in Hip Hop?
Loading ...Listening to Hot 99.5 yesterday, I was interested to hear the radio station bleep out the latest trend in hip-hop homophobia: “no homo.” “No homo,” for the uninitiated, is a little piece of wordplay which works to neutralize any potentially “gay” interpretations of a rapper’s lyrics. For a full review of the term, check out Bryan Safi’s informative piece, above.
Recently, Hot 99.5 washed the term out of Kanye West’s contribution to Jay-Z’s “Run This Town.” In the track, Kanye employs the phrase in order to insist that he does not regularly engage in gay orgies. “It’s crazy how you can go from being Joe Blow,” Kanye says. “To everybody on your dick—no homo.”
Generally, radio censorship only inspires listeners to imagine the offensive term in their head. In the case of “no homo,” however, bleeping may also serve a valuable and unintentionally hilarious function!
Apparently, bleeping out “no homo” has become pretty standard for radio stations. Recently, a poster on the IGN hip-hop message boards voiced his concern with no-no-homo radio programmers: “They bleeped out ‘No homo’. What’s that all about?” he writes. “No homo meaning, no gay intended. Why is that so wrong?
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