Apparently there is a growing movement to clean up rap. Oh, I say.

Apparently there has been a march today in which numbers of people, including the Reverend Al Sharpton, marched from one place to another to demand that bitches, hoes and n*ggers be referred to more politely in future. Numbers of people, including the Reverend Al Sharpton, have apparently realised that those words that they have been listening to in rap records for the last twenty years are not nice.

According to Billboard, the Reverend Al Sharpton said “There’s a standard that says Ice-T can’t rap against police. There’s a standard that says you can’t rap about gays, and you shouldn’t. They had standards against Michael Jackson saying things anti-Semitic. Where is the standard against ‘n*gger,’ ‘ho’ and ‘bitches?”

Billboard also reports that

The march, which commenced in front of the Sony Music offices on the corner of 55th Street and Madison Avenue shortly after 6 p.m., was led by police escorts on motorbikes. Marchers held signs that read “No Justice, No Peace” and “Do I Look Like a Ho To You?,” as they chanted “dirty lyrics must go” and “record industries: you played yourself.”

Let us leave aside for a moment the discussion about why “dirty lyrics must go” is not a viable slogan in any imaginable context whatsoever.

Let us also leave aside any questions about whether the Reverend Al Sharpton’s statement quoted above makes any sense or not, and move onto his next remark; and to make sense of this we need to know that “five of James Brown’s children also marched with Mallory and Sharpton on what would have marked Brown’s 74th birthday”:

The next remark of the Reverend Al Sharpton was

In the last conversation I had with James Brown, he said to me, ‘We have to clean up the music,” Sharpton said. “This is a birthday gift for him.

Ah ha! Mister Brown said that, then, did he? In his final moments, with no other witnesses present, James Brown voiced his primary concern to the Reverend Al Sharpton, and it was that “dirty lyrics must go”?

Well, in that case, there can be no doubt: the Reverend Al Sharpton has been anointed by the Godfather of Soul, the Minister of Super Heavy Funk, the hardest working man in showbusiness, to carry on his righteous work on Earth, and thus he now has no option (no option at all) but to keep on getting headlines.

This week’s innocent bystander, by a unanimous vote: the Reverend Al Sharpton.