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Last month, the editors of Essence magazine, the nation's oldest magazine for black women, announced a campaign to encourage the mainstream hip-hop industry to rethink its use of misogynistic lyrics and images. The "Take Back the Music" campaign includes a yearlong exploration of the topic in the magazine's pages, studies of the effects of the economics of the industry and the impact of music videos on young girls, and a town hall meeting at Spelman College between students, artists, industry executives and others February 25.

"We are mothers, sisters, daughters and lovers of hip-hop," Essence editors wrote. "Perhaps that's why we're so alarmed at the imbalance in the depiction of our sexuality and character in music … an entire generation of Black girls are being raised on these narrow images. And as the messages and images are broadcast globally, they have become the lens through which the world now sees us. This cannot continue."

National Public Radio's "Day to Day" was among several media outlets covering the fledgling movement (Note: the broadcast, which can be heard online here, contains explicit language). The magazine's campaign was inspired partly by another widely covered story: how some students at Spelman College, an all-female historically black college, threatened to protest rapper Nelly's planned appearance on campus to promote bone marrow donation unless he was willing to discuss his explicit music in a forum. He cancelled, but the students held their own bone marrow drive and registered 300 donors.

Predictably enough, I think the magazine's campaign is a good thing. As a Christian, and a communicator by trade, I believe in the power of words and their capacity to create realities. God spoke our world into existence, and we have a lesser creative power through our words. I believe, too, that pop culture's offerings are important. Those of us who choose to watch or listen to such offerings should do so with discernment—but also knowing they are significant because they take the temperature of a culture. Hip-hop and I are about the same age, and, oh, it's pretty obvious from my byline that I am both African-American and female. I have no small stake in the way black women are portrayed in culture.

Over the last few years, I've watched as the coverage of hip-hop in publications like Essence has changed. Roundup stories with titles like "Is Hip-Hop Harming Youth?" and scholarly publications in which writers compare the storytelling of the hip-hop artist to the wisdom sharing traditions of the African griots have given way to more personal narratives in which women (including Michaela Angela Davis, one of the founding editors of Vibe magazine) write about the genre with the ambivalent tone one takes in deciding whether or not to break up with a bad-for-you boyfriend. In her book When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost: My Life as a Hip-hop Feminist, journalist Joan Morgan, in her aptly titled chapter "From Fly Girls to Bitches and Hos," describes to a personified Hip-hop how difficult it's become for her explain her loyalty to the music that frequently demeans her:

" … I wax poetic about your artistic brilliance and the voice (albeit predominantly male) you give an embattled, pained nation. And then I assure them that I call you out on all of your sexism on the regular. That works until someone, usually a sista-friend, calls me out and says that while all of that was valid, none of it explains why I stayed in an obviously abusive relationship. And I can't lie, Boo, that would stress me. 'Cuz my answers would start sounding like those battered women I write about."

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