Liz Jones, Rape Music and How Rihanna Stole my Daughter

I'm no fan of the journalist Liz Jones and her middle brow school of faux moral outrage but when I read her hatchet job on Rihanna: Pop's Poisonous Princess in the Daily Mail, I clenched my fist and silently shouted "Yes!!!"

As the father of a girl yet to reach teenager-hood I am terrified and outraged at the wall of sonic porn that dominates the airwaves.

Indeed, fearing for her soul, I penned this cri de coeur last year:

"Dad?" asked my 10-year-old daughter from the back seat of the compact family saloon. "Yes, darling," I replied. "Dad, what's S&M." And at that moment I felt a little piece of my heart crack to the sound of bland, studio-manufactured R'n'B licks.

Now, I have read the article "embarrassing questions your child might ask" and they anticipate those tricky queries about sex but it fell short when it comes to explaining the very adult pleasures of the dominatrix's dungeon and the nipple clamp.

Hence, I did what so many parents do when cornered by a child's awkward question - I lied (it is a parental irony that, while our long term ambition is to raise children who value honesty, we often spin a web of little white lies and protective untruths to negotiate the early years).

"S&M, err, S&M? Err, It means Sad and Mad, darling." (Indeed, that's how I felt about the shocking imagery unsuspectingly emanating from her innocent little mouth).

I glanced in the rear-view. My daughter's brow was furrowed but she appeared to accept my explanation.

Not convinced enough, it would transpire. Later she went to Google - the digital Pied Piper, along with those other child-stealers Facebook, Twitter and Skype - that quickly usurped my parental choice in the time it takes to fire up the search engine. My child's childhood had started to draw to a close.

Who's to blame? Step forward the stiletto wearing, fish-net stocking clad, lascivious-smirk wearing, pelvis grinding and pretty-average talent that is Rihanna, the all-conquering queen of the incredibly lucrative music genre of pop R'n'B, aka Slut Pop.

'S&M' was the first track on Rihanna's album Loud sold by the truck load, with no Parental Guidance warning.

"Cause I may be bad, but I'm perfectly good at it/Sex in the air, I don't care, I love the smell of it/Sticks and stones may break my bones/But chains and whips excite me."

Not exactly the type of ditty one wants to include in the family sing-along on the way to Legoland.

Or what about this gem from Rihanna's school of sexploitation:

Come here rude boy, boy, can you get it up? Come here rude boy, boy, is you big enough?....Tonight I'mma let you be a rider/Giddy up, giddy up, giddy up babe

Turn it off, they say. But the point about a global superstar is they become ubiquitous. Stalin would have been impressed by the propaganda machine that powers a Rihanna, a Nicki Minaj or a Katy Perry-type sex kitten. With its dance moves stolen from lap dancers and YouPorn sensibilities turbo-charged by digital media, it seeps under the doors and through the cracks of your domestic defences.

The young DJs on Radio 1, Capital, Kiss and Choice - inevitably affecting a zany, anarchistic presentation style - are merely puppets of the playlist that demand RiRi etc are heard as often as legally possible. TV music channels are no different and YouTube is fully loaded.

Meanwhile, don't try and bamboozle me with claims that the music isn't aimed at pre-teens and tweenies. The corporate masters know my daughter's purse is bulging with pocket money, record/iTunes tokens and the 20 quid her granny gave her for Chanukah and they target it relentlessly.

Thus it ever was, is another argument. Ever since Elvis became 'the pelvis' fathers have been getting incandescent with rage about popular music corrupting their daughters. Must I accept I'm just a descendant of those puritanical men muttering about commies, long-haired lay-abouts and the decline of western civilisation?

Sure, ever since Little Richard's wild jive Tutti-Frutti and the Undertones created the ultimate pop song (according to his eminence John Peel) Teenage Kicks, sex has been the central story of pop, but the 'Rihanna movement' has abandoned all subtly, wit, originality or emotion for soul-destroying sleaze and foul mouth vulgarity where sex is a dogs-on-heat encounter (which is probably why all the women in R 'n' B-world are called "bitches").

It's a mind-numbing, cash-generating race to the bottom. Male and female artists compete to see who can be the crassest. Trey Songz's slightly sinister Two Reasons with the lumpen chorus: I only came for the bitches and the drinks/bitches and the drinks, is among the most cynically nauseating.

In a recent interview, 1980s songstress Cyndi Lauper remarked that a young female fan had thanked her for her soaring anthems as an antidote to the contemporary "rape music" clogging the charts. Indeed, that's why Rihanna and her 'sisterhood of the rampant rabbit' are that much more disturbing than her dick-in-their-hand male counterparts.

It's as if the female sex objects once condemned to just be eye-candy in the videos of horny rappers have finally been given the mic only to confirm that yes, they were in fact quite happy being called and acting like 'hoes'. Can you hear the sound of the suffragettes spinning in their graves?

Rihanna has not only embraced her inner slut she is also an out-and-proud doormat, adding another bad role model to her mainly female fans. The Chris Brown saga - where he beat her and she forgave him - is an embarrassment to all that is right between and man and a woman. The Guardian dubbed her latest album, Unapologetic, a "tonic for domestic abusers."

Nicki Minaj, who had the potential to be something a little more avant-garde, takes it one step beyond adding the crime of full frontal misogyny to her groove with anti-woman hate-tracks, with titles like Stupid Hoe.

But, bless her little bum implants, in an E! Entertainment profile, she admitted she was a bit nervous about her parents hearing her X-rated musical ramblings. My daughter, and millions like her, are fair game for her expletive rich, grotesque product but G-d forbid her dear old mum and dad get upset. The cheek of the Bit** - sorry, I mean, woman.

Julian Kossoff is the Managing Editor of the IBTimes UK