Controversies tend to spiral in directions that few would have anticipated, so it probably shouldn’t be a big surprise that the dust-up over racist comments by radio shock jock Don Imus turned quickly into a referendum on the use of similar words in hip-hop music. “Like MySpace users and politicians and reality-television stars and, yes, talk-radio hosts, rappers are trying to negotiate a culture in which the boundaries of public and private space keep changing, along with the multiplying standards that govern them.”