Don’t refer disparagingly to my African-American origins, you of Caucasian descent! Whether you prefer Sly Stone’s original version of Don’t Call Me Nigger, Whitey or the early1990s version in which Perry Farrell of Jane’s Addiction and the rapper Ice-T square up and positively spit the insults at each other, it wouldn’t be the same if you removed the racist terminology.

But a ban on the use of the N-word, as well as “bitch” and “ho”, was proposed by Russell Simmons this week. After calling a meeting between his Hip-Hop Summit Action Network and various music-industry executives, Simmons, who can reasonably be called the godfather of modern hip-hop, issued a “recommendation to the recording and broadcast industries that they voluntarily remove, bleep or delete those three words”.

It is hard to imagine Simmons professing a similar point of view in the mid1980s, when he set up the Def Jam label with Rick Rubin, and launched Run-DMC, the Beastie Boys and LL Cool J. Early works by the Beasties such as She’s on It and Girls did, it's true, celebrate the fairer sex in puerile terms, and the immortal complaint, “Your mom threw away your best porno mag,” from their anthem Fight for your Right to Party did suggest the need for education. The Beastie Boys later became Buddhists and advocates of a free Tibet, so perhaps they just needed time to grow up.

Their unsavoury attitudes, though, were made to seem mere youthful exuberance when NWA came on to the scene a few years later. Their seminal album Straight Outta Compton, with its unambiguous track F*** tha Police, marked the beginning of gang-sta rap and the no-holds-barred expression of the most unappealing aspects of life in the inner city.

Public outrage was aroused in equal parts by the antisocial sentiments in their music and the use of the word Niggaz in their full band name (Niggaz With Attitude). But black people argued that they had every right to reclaim the word, and it quickly became common currency in rap, as did the angry lyrics that seem to be what Simmons is really objecting to.

The author Joan Morgan, a self-styled hip-hop feminist and commentator, makes the point that violence, homo-phobia, misogyny and sexism can easily be expressed with other words. But hip-hop has always been about attention-grabbing and graphic depictions of life’s seamier side. A scene in The Sopranos TV series in which an aspiring rapper begs one of the mob to shoot him in the leg to launch his career did not seem farfetched after 50 Cent’s rapid rise to stardom: he had been shot nine times, we were insistently informed.

Snoop Dogg, who has recently been in trouble – again – for possession of drugs and guns, has made a career out of being a bad ’un. His interesting CV includes a few years in the pornography business, and his appreciation of marijuana has never been hidden under a bushel. It is hard to imagine his sleazy delivery stripped of Simmons’s banned words.

Of course, not all rappers are devoid of a social conscience. The unstoppable Public Enemy may express themselves in strong terms, but they generally encourage progress and civil rights, not sex and violence.

Following Simmons’s logic, perhaps we should outlaw the depiction of drugs and guns. Out, then, go Clipse’s Hell Hath no Furyand Ghost-face Killah’s Fishscale, two of hip-hop’s most memorable recent records. And what about Nas’s dire threats in his hit Hip-Hop is Dead? Is threatening to exerminate America’s radio DJs really less offensive than using pejorative terms about one’s peers?

Hip-hop has always commented on and exaggerated the world around it, glorying in its squalor. What Simmons seems to be envisaging is a world in which racial and sexual disharmony no longer exist, where people have perhaps got bored with drugs and violence. In short, a world where hip-hop is no longer required.

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