Is Hip-Hop Ready to Clean Up Its Act?

The Imus affair may have done some good after all:

Hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons said Monday that the recording and broadcast industries should consistently ban three racial and sexist epithets from all so-called clean versions of rap songs and the airwaves.

Currently such epithets are banned from most clean versions, but record companies sometimes "arbitrarily" decide which offensive words to exclude and there's no uniform standard for deleting such words, Simmons said.

The recommendations drew mixed reaction and come two weeks after some began carping anew about rap lyrics after radio personality Don Imus was fired by CBS Radio and NBC for referring to the players on the Rutgers university women's basketball team as "nappy-headed hos."

Expressing concern about the "growing public outrage" over the use of such words in rap lyrics, Simmons said the words "bitch,""ho" and "nigger" should be considered "extreme curse words."

"We recommend (they're) always out," Simmons, the pioneering entrepreneur who made millions of dollars as he helped shape hip-hop culture, said in an interview Monday. "This is a first step. It's a clear message and a consistency that we want the industry to accept for more corporate social responsibility."

My question is, if there are "clean" versions, there must be "dirty" versions too. Why? Why not have just one version of these songs and stop the degrading talk altogether. Simmons' effort seems to be little more than window dressing if the music companies will still be putting out versions of their songs full of hateful language.

And what about the F-bomb? I don't see anything from Simmons suggesting that word, which makes up about 1/3 of your average rap song, be banned from further recordings.