Last week, Fox News’ Sean Hannity tried to create a controversy over the rapper Common’s invitation to a White House poetry event. Citing a lyric in which Common criticized President Bush for lying to the American people and leading the nation into an unjust war, Hannity tried to paint the rapper as dangerous and "controversial,” the kind of person the Secret Service needed to vet. The lyric in question: "Burn a Bush ‘cause for peace he no push no button/ Killing over oil and grease/no weapons of destruction."
Drawing upon the concepts of metaphor and allusion many of us learned in seventh-grade English class, we can surmise that Common did not literally mean to "burn" Bush, and that he was making a reference to the biblical concept of the burning bush. In hip-hop, as in literature, this is called wordplay. And clearly the more important point of the refrain is "no weapons of destruction," referring to the lie that Saddam Hussein possessed WMD.
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