As one of Chicagoland’s two dueling urban radio stations celebrated its first anniversary on Good Friday with a live remote broadcast on the city’s South Side, a group of sign-wielding feminists spent three hours withstanding a drizzle to rain on Mystikal’s parade immediately outside the event.
The women, from various part of the South Side, objected behind police barricades outside the Chicago Park District’s South Shore Cultural Center to Mystikal’s appearance on the nationally syndicated and Chicago-based “Doug Banks Morning Show,” maintaining that the Louisiana rapper degrades women in his lyrics and music videos.
The group’s lead organizer Janine Stone described Banks as an agent of misogyny for entertaining Mystikal’s appearance on his show. Banks has broken the monopoly that the rival “Crazy Howard McGee Show” of Chicago-based WGCI once held on the region’s morning drive time before Northwest Indiana-based Power 92 first began broadcasting last spring.
“We are asking people to resist ‘Shake That A$$,’” Stone said, referring to one of the picket signs she carried and Mystikal’s 2000 hit party standard and an accompanying video showing scantily clad women with gyrating buttocks. “Doug Banks contributes to the degradation and minimalization of women by giving a voice to Mystikal on his show. Mystikal is not the only one doing it in Chicago, but he’s the one here at the time.
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Stone promised that the South Shore protest would be the first in a series of demonstrations against hip-hop sexism at Chicagoland appearances of rap artists they find offensive to gender equality. Petey Pablo also appeared on the anniversary broadcast. Banks’ Hillsdale, N.J.-based publicist Sheila Eldridge had no immediate response to the feminist protestors comments about her client.
