Mom of 4 Girls Shares Emotional Rant About Graphic Rap Lyrics

While driving her daughters to school, a young mom decided to deviate from her usual Christian music channel and tune in to her local top-40 station instead, mainly because her 11-year-old daughter loves it. That’s when she heard the 2015 rap track “Norf Norf” for the first time — and was so disturbed by its explicit lyrics that she immediately took to social media to express her concern. Now her tear-filled 11-minute rant has gone viral, and not necessarily in a good way.

“This rap song comes on and … guys, I could not believe what I was hearing,” the stunned woman says of the track by Long Beach, Calif., rapper Vince Staples. “Like, this is on our local radio station. This crap is being played. I couldn’t even believe the words that I was listening to. And as a mom, it infuriated me … I started to get tears in my eyes, it upset me so much. And my 11-year-old daughter listens to this radio station,” she says in the impassioned video.

To underline her point, the mother of four daughters then recites lyrics to the entire song, breaking down at certain lines she seemed to find misogynistic and violent, including lyrics about abortions, guns, and gang-banging. She adds: “That was on our top-hits radio station. Yes, the cuss words were bleeped out, but did you just hear that? My daughter will never listen to that radio station again, ever,” she says through tears. She compares the track to the “top hits” she heard as a kid, including Christina Aguilera, Britney Spears, N’SYNC, and the Backstreet Boys. “Nowadays it’s not the same, not the same at all.”

Genius points out that during the same time these more wholesome acts were charting, “Nelly went diamond singing about drive-bys, and Eminem violently murdered his wife” on tracks that also played on mainstream radio.

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Toward the end of the video, the emotional mom makes sure to clarify that she isn’t condemning the DJs playing the music — “I understand they have a job to do,” she says — or even the people who listen to it. “But as a mom … man. I’m raising four little girls, and that just breaks my heart that that is the kind of music that’s being played,” she says, pleading with other parents to “be aware that what your kids are listening to can have an impact on their lives.”

Though well-intentioned, the rant has largely backfired on social media. Instead of support, the video has garnered a mix of sarcasm and snark, including memes and even a remix parody. More earnest social media users, though, are accusing the mom of being ignorant to the music she’s hearing because of the cultural divide. “Two sides? 1. This is real life and She wouldn’t understand. 2. Rated R listening,” one person tweeted. “That white lady listened to #NorfNorf and said why encourage kids to run from the police. Pls sis. Pls,” another wrote, referring to the mom’s unnerved reaction to Staples’s lyric, “I ain’t never ran from nothin’ but the police.”

Others are even pointing out that the video unintentionally adds up to free marketing. “This just made me want to listen to more @vincestaples. Any publicity is good publicity, this is a win. #NorfNorf,” one person tweeted. Another called it “brilliant marketing” on the part of Staples’s team.

One person, however, did come to the mom’s defense, tweeting, “This video is haunting me, but I agree with everything she says completely.” Someone tweeted back, “Society is so messed up.”

The concerned woman has every right to her feelings about “Norf Norf.” That said, research into Staples’s background might help put the words into perspective and help inform her opinion a bit more. According to a 2016 profile by Fader, Staples “was raised between Long Beach and Compton, a quiet straight-A student with a photographic memory.”

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Like many recording artists, Staples raps about what he knows — and for him, that includes things like gang culture and watching his father get arrested on Christmas Day, according to Fader. A 2015 press release out of the Public Information Office of Long Beach, the city where Staples was partially raised, notes that Long Beach has “experienced a rise in both violent and property crime,” including an 18.8 percent increase in violent crime and a 15.9 percent in overall crime, since 2014.

At of the time of publication, the mom who recorded the video has not reacted to the backlash, and Staples has been quiet about the unexpected publicity. The dialogue, however — both the ridicule and the more acute insights — continues on social media.

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