Rap music does not pull the trigger

The recent death of rap superstar Tupac Shakur has given the fascist element another opportunity to say, "I told you so." Shakur, who was gunned down on a Las Vegas street Friday, is the latest in a relatively short, but highly visible list of rap casualties. His street-influenced songs are laden with violence, misogyny and hedonism.

Shakur is a performer of a small but lucrative hip-hop sub-genre called "gangsta rap," which contains very few acts.

Most gangsta rap acts leave their threatening personas at the studio door, but some media individuals ignore the norm, and claim that rap is a business, and some people in the industry are prone to violence.

This sort of narrow-mindedness can lead people to the false conclusion that rap (or any other art form, for that matter) creates violence.

This is not to suggest that no one involved in hip-hip has violent tendencies; some do, as shown by recent jail terms for Dr. Dre (Andre Young) and Slick Rick (Ricky Walters), in addition to Shakur’s eight-month term for sexual assault.

But plumbers, stockbrokers, professional athletes and bill collectors exhibit the same tendencies. In fact, if people were so inclined, they could locate a propensity toward violence among any group of Americans.

The real issue, which the right seeks to avoid, is the fact that the subject matter differs from the Utopian image which is inculcated into each American from birth.

The attacks on rap are not the first attempt at sanitizing popular music; from the "sinful" label placed on 1920s jazz to the religion-led ‘50s attempts to ban rock ‘n’ roll, to the early-‘80s burnings of Ozzy Osbourne records, just about any music with appeal to younger listeners has been persecuted by right-wingers bent on keeping their collective thoughts in check. Fortunately, some people here have not forgotten the First Amendment.

Rap music has been around less than 25 years; violence has been around since the first time a caveman felt slighted by the way another grunted at him.

The rap genre started off as a peaceful endeavor by urban youth who wanted to make a "different" kind of music. And it is that faction, not the "gangstas," who make up the majority of hi-hop acts today.

For every Snoop Doggy Dogg or Ice Cube, there are a hundred "nonviolent" rap acts like Whodini or A Tribe Called Quest. To single out the genre as a whole in such a negative manner is equivalent to lumping everyone involved in finance along with Charles Keating and Michael Milken, who swindled investors out of billions of dollars. A certain reality applies to rap music as well as to life in general: "Good people far outnumber bad people, but bad people get all the attention."

The popular thing to say is that rap music glorifies or glamorizes violence. Actually, at most, rappers are guilty of mentioning it. It is up to the listeners to observe what is being said, and figure out for themselves what images are represented.

As Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger movies have shown, any individual with even slightly-less-than-average intelligence knows the difference between fiction and reality. Not everyone who buys one of Shakur’s albums is going to end up on death row.

Tupac Shakur is no more responsible for violence than Judas Priest is for suicide, than Sublime is for heroin use, or than Beavis & Butt-head are for arson. However, parents are responsible for the values their children absorb, and adults are responsible for their own behavior.

Let’s stop looking out, and start looking in. Instead of using hip-hop artists as scapegoats, we need to look at what kind of country we have that puts violence and misogyny on the charts.