Got a Problem? Blame it on Rap Music

By Broadside Opinion Editor Arthur Gailes

Whether it’s something Don Imus said, a crime involving a black athlete, or some other random calamity, rap has been an easy culprit in the past couple of years. FOX, CNN and even BET, which plays rap regularly, have all produced debates on rap’s negative effects on urban America’s psyche.

The attacks have come from every problem, especially those that effect black Americans. When Michael Vick was put under America’s microscope for dog fighting allegations, one of the first sources to be blamed was the culture that promotes violence, namely, the hip-hop culture. When Don Imus infamously delivered his “nappy-headed hoes” comments, rappers everywhere went under fire for their explicit lyrics.

For a moment, let’s say that all rap critics are right. Let’s say that it is a violent, sexist and despicable excuse for music. We’ll ignore the massive positive contributions that rappers have made within their communities. We’ll even ignore the ignorance that Bill O’Reilly and Oprah Winfrey display towards the incredibly deep and varied scene that makes up rap music and classify rap as 50 Cent and Snoop Dogg offshoots.

Even if all of their claims about rap are true, the weight that they give to it is utterly ridiculous. To blame music for any of our problems is obscene and should offend any clear-thinking individual on the planet. As an influence, rap ranks far behind parents, politicians, teachers and any of the several groups of people who have a direct effect on us. Rap’s effect, at best, is an indirect one.

For that matter, even ranking rap above movies and video games as an influence is unreasonable. 50 Cent’s “Many Men,” which is a paranoid song about people who wish him dead, is an auditory experience that lasts four minutes. Meanwhile, a child watching Live Free or Die Hard is witnessing an hour and a half of violent assault to both their eyes and ears. Assassins, an action game, enables its user to kill anybody they encounter in the street, as they see fit, without consequence.

Blame rap for the way an inner city child turns out. It’s much more convenient to attack say, Snoop Dogg, than to blame irresponsible parents, the viewers and voters for rap critics. It is also much easier to blame an artist’s point of view than it is to address the mentality and environment that created it.

Drugs, gang violence, profanity – these are all things that rap, at best, perpetuates. To attack rap music is to attack the symptom instead of the problem. The most violent and ignorant rap is nothing more than a representation of a sick mentality that infests urban America, one that many are scared to attack head on. Instead, we focus on a much simpler target.

Most rappers are young, black men from the ghetto, who are talking about their realities, dreams and nightmares. They’ve been ignored as Middle America’s ugly cousins, and when they gain notoriety, we try to dismiss them, as if that will make the problems go away. As rapper T.I. said, “You can't put someone in the jungle all their lives and then when they get an opportunity to get out, you're critiquing them for acting like they’re from the jungle . . . Do I think standards could be raised? Of course, but in order for you to expect them to act like they not from the jungle, you should’ve come and got them 20 years ago.”

If we want the profanity, violence, sexism and superficiality to go away from rap, we need to focus on taking those things away from every day life in the ghettoes that rap comes from. We need to hold city politicians more accountable for the gross mismanagement of the inner city communities, rather than holding the products of that mismanagement up as its culprits.