After I stick ya, rip ya like a razor
Watch me erase ya, misplace ya ...
I throw a bomb through your window
Burn you up and your hoe
I catch your mama going to therapy
And cut her throat
You lil’ sister walking home from school
I abduct her, then I . . . etc
Depressing? Infantile? I agree with you. At least, I presume we agree. The sentiments are hateful and hate-fuelled, the language crude. Yet you may be surprised to learn that this is taken from what posh pop critics usually describe as a “seminal classic” — Hope You Niggas Sleep, by one of the giants of the “gangsta rap” scene, Christopher Wallace, otherwise known as “Notorious B.I.G”.
Or perhaps I should say former giant, since Wallace — conforming to the general tenor of his own verse, and the short but unusually accident-prone history of his chosen occupation — got himself shot dead six years ago. So did his chief rival, Tupac (or 2Pac) Shakur, the rapper who dreamt up the delightful couplet: “Time to die, say goodbye/Watch my eyes when I pull the trigger.” Both espoused the credo elegantly encapsulated by another master of the genre, Snoop Dogg:
Make ’em bleed is the motto that I live by
If you **** with me it’s a must you die
To the genteel ears of Middle England such verse seems reprehensible — though not, perhaps, as reprehensible as the attitude of EMI, Sony and the other record companies that propagate this foul stuff among the young for the enrichment of their shareholders. But can one credibly contend that mere songs incite teenage youths to kill, rape or deal crack-cocaine? That is the thesis advanced by Kim Howells, the Culture Minister, in the wake of the tragic shootings in Aston last week, and now reiterated by David Blunkett, the Home Secretary. “Lyrics don’t kill people,” Dr Howells said. “But they don’t half enhance the fare we get from videos and films. It has created a culture where killing is almost a fashion accessory.”
How valid is this? The grotesque misogyny of many rap lyrics, the racism, the all-pervasive implication that hard drugs are one of life’s necessities, the endless invitations to kill or to “**** tha police” (as the title of another “seminal classic”, by the group Niggaz With Attitude, pithily puts it) — all this makes sane grown-ups wince, if only on the ground of literary taste. And, as Dr Howells suggests, it does indeed seem to reinforce the glamorisation of explicit violence routinely served up by Hollywood.
But much of the worst stuff is now very passé. I wonder whether Dr Howells has ever heard a number called Cocaine Blues, in which the singer boasts that he “took a shot of cocaine . . . and shot that bad bitch down”. Womanhating, drug-crazed and violent, it’s a perfect example of the song-writing trait which he so deplores in rap. The trouble is that it was written in 1947, and made famous by Johnny Cash in the 1960s. Nobody raised an eyebrow. Nobody tried to pin the evils of society on it. The plain fact is that musicians and writers have always explored humanity’s darkest impulses. Most Jacobean tragedies are morally despicable. So is Don Giovanni.
Actually, in the songs of today’s rap artists (particularly on this side of the Atlantic) you are much more likely to find a questioning or hostile attitude towards the drugs and violence of the streets than Dr Howells seems prepared to admit. The usual tone now is: “Why does it have to be like this?” Even rappers like Trick Daddy who once gloried in their “hard” credentials seem finally to be engaging with the self-destructing futility of the gangsta life-style:
Howdy folk, who gon die next
Who’ mama gon cry next
Who’ sister get to wear the black dress
That’s how we livin though
Dead and gone before we 24
It’s certainly true that if you trawl through the cyber-sewers of the internet you can find rap lyrics that make the extracts quoted here read like A. A. Milne. But if you spend long enough on the internet you can find evidence of anything — even that the Blair Government, in its idealistic infancy, once had a cogent set of policies for dealing with social exclusion in Britain’s inner cities. And it’s surely because of the Government’s spectacular failure to tackle this unglamorous but essential task that its embarrassed ministers are now desperately huffing and puffing about the evils of pop songs.
If young men turn to guns and drugs, why? It surely isn’t simply because guns and drugs are ever more available, or that the kids have “picked up bad habits” from songs or films. These things are symptoms of malaise, not causes. For the latter, one must delve into problems that are impervious to quick fixes cobbled together at “summits”.
Problems, for instance, like the collapse of the family and the disappearance of positive male role-models from inner-city life. Most boys who end up in young-offenders institutions come from families without a father or even a father-figure. Most will never encounter a male teacher at primary school. They will fall hopelessly behind in the classroom because, these days, that’s what inner-city boys are expected to do. By the time they are 14, thousands will have dropped out of education, to the unspoken relief of teachers under huge pressure to improve their school’s GCSE results.
Nor will those dropouts come under the guiding influence of a church youth club, a scout troop or a cadet corp, because such “old-fashioned” institutions have largely been ridiculed out of modern life. They will have no mentors to teach them the difference between right and wrong, no prospects, no skills, no “stake in society”, no hope.
So they kick around the streets and the arcades, get sucked into a gang (at first as much for self-preservation as for kicks), slip casually into petty crime — mobiles and bikes, stolen and then traded for drugs — and then, imperceptibly, into the fullblown gun-totin’ gangsta image which, they truly believe, is the only way to gain “respect”, status and wealth in their circumstances.
Some will be caught and imprisoned. They are the lucky ones. Many will be dead long before their grandparents. In Tony Blair’s ostensibly egalitarian Britain, a white middle-class girl can expect to live 15 or 20 years longer than a black working-class boy. Much of that discrepancy is explained by the number of young black men who die violently.
To all of this, most of us (including government ministers) are content to turn a blind eye for most of the time, until some horrible incident — the Aston shootings, the murder of Damilola Taylor, the Bradford riots — reminds us that there is something rotten at the heart of what we erroneously call modern civilisation. It’s stupendously hypocritical. We rage about an A-level hiccup affecting a few hundred middle-class pupils, but whisper not a word of protest about the thousands dropping out of school unable to spell their own town. We want the authorities to be “relaxed” about cannabis and Ecstasy, since these are drugs favoured by rich teenagers in suburban discos. But then we expect the police to impose zero-tolerance on the same dealers when they peddle crack-cocaine on the estates.
We organise our own lives on a philosophy of unbridled me-first consumerism: instant gratification, unfettered by “fusty” notions of voluntary service or social responsibility. Then we profess horror when the same warped hedonism is aped by teenagers brandishing guns.
But why worry? According to this week’s government whitewash, there are no fundamental flaws in the educational system, no big social problems in Britain’s urban wastelands. No, our present woes are the fault of rap music! How comforting that must be to parents struggling to raise decent children on lawless estates. All they have to do is turn off their radios, and life will be sweet.
Or at least, that’s the Howells and Blunkett line. With minds as profound as theirs, they should go into the gangsta-rap business.
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