Profanity in music, is it a problem that needs to be solved now or is it even a problem that we as a society have the power to resolve. There have been many different debates on the topic of profanity in music, but the question remains whether music should be censored. In his speech to the convention, Robert TM Phillips insists that we must act now to protect our society from the harmful effects of explicit music. Becky L. Tatum argues in her article "The Link Between Rap Music and Youth Crime and Violence" that the effects of rap music are fundamentally unknown and that extensive research needs to be conducted before making causal hypotheses. Martha Bayles suggests in her article "The Perverse in the Popular" that society is attracted to the evil or negative and therefore would not allow music censorship to succeed. So the problem is that we don't have an adequate answer to the problem. Bayles suggests that many of our ideas about popular culture come from three sources: communication theory, cultural studies, and traditional philosophy. Communication theory begins with the perception of a powerless society. Many communication theorists believe that media have the power to transform human consciousness. However, as Bayles points out, after studying the available evidence, W. Russell Newman observed that most human beings are resistant to any message that does not fit the cognitive makeup of the mind receiving it. Cultural studies focuses on the political and social impacts of media. . Cultural studies assumes that all cultural products are ultimately about power and are only valuable to the extent that they attack the established social order. Traditional philosophy emphasizes the eternal difficulty of maintaining excellence in a culture that seems...... middle of paper ......ences attitudes and behaviors. There is a nearly even split between studies that find music has antisocial effects and those that suggest those effects are minor or even nonexistent. Tatum suggests that thorough research should be conducted before drawing casual conclusions. We have three very different points of view here. There is Phillips who insists that we must act now to protect our society from the harmful effects of explicit music. Then there's Tatum who says the effects of rap music are basically unknown and more research needs to be done before we can say for sure there's a problem. Finally, Bayles uses the ideal of perverse modernism to show his readers that this may be a problem to which there is no acceptable answer. It may be that by trying to solve the problem we are creating a bigger problem..