A lot of the folks who have been unloading on rap music and hip-hop culture in the last few weeks have been enjoying this beat-down just a little too much. Now it's true that some rappers have not been doing their music any favors. While verbal posturing has always been part of rap, just like it was always part of "Dirty Harry" and John Wayne Westerns, the fun stops when the guns are real and loaded. Firing guns at anyone is bad business.
But hotheads with guns don't define hip hop any more than steroid junkies define baseball, and for all the talk about a dangerous hip-hop "crisis" right now, that turns out to be a confluence of unrelated events spread over several years.
It started because the most popular rapper of the moment, 50 Cent, cultivates an image of danger. He's also funny and self-aware, and the fact he strikes up verbal feuds with fellow artists only means he's doing something that was done years ago by Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra and John Lennon.
But a few weeks ago, after 50 publicly criticized The Game, a member of Game's entourage was wounded by gunfire outside radio station WQHT.
This gave critics a twofer. Not only could they blast 50, they could pounce again on Hot 97, which they say fans the flames of conflict, making itself part of an axis of cultural evil.
Hot 97, in defense, says that its listeners demand the most popular records and demand that the station ask the tough questions of the most popular rappers. If Hot's deejays don't, their rivals over at Power 105 would be only too happy to step in.
More to the point, neither Hot nor Power created hip-hop culture and it's problematic how much they shape it. If they changed their formats tomorrow to German oompah music, hip hop would march along exactly as it's marching now.
But Hot 97 is a lightning rod for critics, who fold together a handful of incidents over several years, some serious and some minor, to give the rather misleading impression that every day at Hot 97 plays like the opening scene of "Saving Private Ryan."
It's safe to say the current "crisis" will subside, as did the trumped-up "rap concerts are war zones" furor that dogged Run-DMC in the mid-'80s and the "rappers are out to destroy society" furor that followed Ice-T's "Cop Killer" in the early '90s. Today, of course, Ice-T plays a cop on television.
But the criticism will continue, because a lot of people just don't like rap. They think it's noise, no melody, not music at all. You know, all the things people once said about jazz and rock 'n' roll.
And that's fine. Everyone gets to like what they like.
With rap, though, the dislike often seems to go past the music to the people who make it. Rappers are viewed as dangerous. Because of their visibility, they become surrogates for everything people find disquieting about young people, urban youth and white kids who pick up on black culture.
Some recent criticism pinpoints exactly who or what in rap has gone out of line. That's fair, at times accurate, and deserves serious discussion.
But much of the criticism indicts all rappers and further carries the insulting implication that rap fans take nothing from the music except swaggering self-promotion, derogatory slaps at women and verbal violence.
Sure, fans hear all of that. You can't miss it. They also hear a lot more, which critics don't.
The huge majority understand, for instance, that violence in entertainment is a device, not a behavioral blueprint.
From the ancient Greeks up through opera, folk songs, detective novels and television, entertainment media have focused on excess, that is, behavior beyond normal standards, as a way of making a point.
WHY IT MATTERS
Audiences get this. Rap audiences get this. If violent lyrics really had the direct impact its critics warn about, America's streets would be knee-deep in dead rap fans - just as movie theaters would have been knee-deep in corpses after "Beverly Hills Cop" and living rooms every Sunday night after "Deadwood."
What we really need to do is take a step or two back and remember why hip hop, a style that's been under constant fire for 30 years, not only thrives today but has become our dominant popular music.
Because it speaks to its listeners.
Over 30 years it has said an enormous number of compelling things, some profound and some not, to tens of millions of people of all colors and persuasions.
From the love songs of LL Cool J and Usher to the hard rhymes of Public Enemy to the humor of Snoop Dogg, with a hundred thousand party and road mixes in between, hip hop has survived because it matters to its listeners. When it doesn't, and not before, it will go away.
Originally published on March 27, 2005
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