The most insufferable person you know thinks that they were born in the wrong generation. “They don’t make cars like they used to.” Understood. “Coke tasted better 60 years ago.” Sure. “I just can’t stand today’s music.” We get it.

“Remember when,” as the great philosopher Tony Soprano tells us, “is the lowest form of conversation.”

Yet, for the past few weeks, I haven’t been able to help but find myself longing for a bit of the past. Before spring break, the Spring Fling committee announced that artist NLE Choppa will headline Yale’s annual Old Campus music festival on April 26. With his gratuitous descriptions of sex acts and drug use, NLE Choppa’s lyrics are, to say the least, obscene. Is it wrong to wish we could return to a time when the Spring Fling act was just a little more tasteful? In other words: am I a prude?

In order to keep the Yale Daily News opinion page PG, I will avoid quoting NLE Choppa’s least palatable lyrics. But even doing that is difficult. In one of his more popular songs — titled “SLUT ME OUT” — Choppa pleads with the “bad b*tches” in the audience to “put your a*s in my face ’til I get pink eye.” In that song’s sequel — “SLUT ME OUT 2” — Choppa equates his penis to a firearm, asking women to “suck on my Glock ’til it bust / Suck on my balls, a must.” And let’s not forget Choppa’s offer to have sex with him “at the church, on the plane, at the basketball game.”

We censored those lyrics to publish them — the same lyrics that we will be dancing to on Old Campus come April.

At the risk of sounding too much like Tipper Gore, Choppa’s lyrics blur the line between music and pornography. Does this kind of rhetoric give female Yalies the respect that they deserve? How far is too far? And is there any irony to the fact that a performance is being given for Yale students — well known for their liberalism — by a musician who professes to be a part of the “guns clappin’, p*ssy grabbin’, Donald Trump militia”?

Our standards haven’t always been so low.

In 1979, Playboy photographer David Chan arrived in New Haven to capture lewd photographs of Yale students for the “Girls of the Ivy League” pictorial. While his visit was advertised in the News, the Yale Undergraduate Women’s Caucus mobilized a protest outside of the hotel where Chan set up shop. “Playboy has a history of making women into sex objects,” then-sophomore Amy Rossborough ’81 told the News. “It is a particularly big triumph for them to be able to show Yale women.”

When Playboy came back to campus in 1986, the News was once again put on the defensive for its choice to run an advertisement. In an editorial, the News acknowledged Playboy’s right to advertise — while also including a scathing critique of the magazine’s values. “As it exists, Playboy reflects a reprehensible strain in American society, namely an urge to define women only as sexual objects and to portray objectification as sum total of a far more complicated sexuality,” the Editorial Board wrote.

Those editors would have had a field day with NLE Choppa’s lyrics.

To be sure, I don’t mean to single NLE Choppa out. Today’s theme of hyper-sexualized, boundary-pushing lyrics transcends any one musical artist. Perhaps there is something deeply artistic about NLE Choppa’s lyrics. Perhaps there is an implicit cultural critique that’s gone over my head. And perhaps there’s value in music being an outlet for our more risqué proclivities.

I can already hear the distant rumbling of the campus warriors donning their armor and mounting their steeds to decry this article on Fizz — Yale’s anonymous social media platform. I know that, like it or not, NLE Choppa will perform outside my dorm on April 26. And, frankly, I will probably be in the crowd with my friends for the sake of making college memories.

I’m not calling for a ban on obscene lyrics — but a concert in the middle of our shared campus is something that students can’t avoid. What about the first years on Old Campus who oppose the objectification of women? What about devout Muslims who use their campus prayer room in the basement of Bingham Hall? Will they have to listen to music about eating p*ssy or forego their space on Old Campus? Maybe I am not a prude. Maybe I am just empathetic. 

MAX GRINSTEIN is a first year in Grace Hopper College. In his biweekly column “From the Archives,” Max scours through 130 years of digitized papers in the Yale Daily News Historical Archive to comment on the campus issues du jour. Max light-heartedly sees himself as a contrarian centrist in a sea of campus radicals on the left and right. He can be reached at max.grinstein@yale.edu.