Jenice Armstrong: Nas, Kelis and the n-word at the Grammys

THE PROBLEM with some folks in the news lately is that they go way too far to be considered cool. Take the rapper Nas, who showed up at Sunday night's Grammy Awards program in a black T-shirt with the n-word written across it in huge letters. His wife, the singer Kelis, was similarly attired.

I'll bet Nas thought he was being provocative and getting himself some valuable press. He's an entertainer and has a similarly titled album coming out soon that needs promoting. But this was prime-time TV, the biggest night of the year for the music industry. When I turned on my TV Sunday night, it was to enjoy myself - not to get assaulted with the n-word again.

Popular thinking in some circles is that you take the sting out of the racial epithet by embracing it and making it your own. But Sunday night, as I tried listening to Nas' "yada, yada, yada" to a CNN interviewer about his goofy getup, I was too offended to make sense of whatever point he was trying to make. As the great communicator Marshall McLuhan might have pointed out had he witnessed that red-carpet debacle, the medium became Nas' message. In trying to be provocative, his message was garbled.

MSNBC reporter David Shuster made a similar slip when he opined on-air that Chelsea Clinton was "sort of being pimped out in some weird sort of way." Now, it's clear what Shuster was trying to get across. However, the ensuing hoopla over his crass choice of language wound up overshadowing the point he was trying to make about Chelsea's being trotted out by her mother's campaign to help garner favor with voters.

Now that she's an adult and has thrust herself into her mother's presidential campaign, Chelsea is fair game and can expect the same kind of critique and analysis that any other public figure gets. Shuster's blunder was going about it in such a sexist and off-putting way. What has she done to be likened to a prostitute? Even though the term "pimped" has been homogenized, thanks in part to TV shows such as MTV's "Pimp My Ride," it's hard to imagine it's being used in the same way to refer to a man.

Just like Nas, I'm sure, Shuster thought he was being down, so to speak. But instead of showing off how hip he was with his use of street vernacular, he wound up getting himself suspended. And rightfully so, considering how heavily loaded the term is when referring to a woman.

Shuster probably would have stayed out of trouble had he just kept his jargon less sexist and more conventional. As Sen. Hillary Clinton pointed out in a letter to NBC president Steve Capus, "Surely, you can do your job as journalists and commentators and still keep the discourse civil and appropriate."

In a culture that has coarsened to the point where people mistake making headlines for making a statement, that's really not too much to ask.