Essays

Rap Music: Making Excuses for a Degenerate Culture

by Larry DeWitt
August 2005

This dialog originally appeared on the academic website HNet-History 1918-1945, "The New Deal Era and its Origins."

The dialog started as a commentary on an op-ed piece in the L. A. Times by Thaddeus Russell. The thrust of Russell's op-ed was to compare Rap music to the history of Jazz and to suggest that contemporary criticisms of Rap are just the same bias against innovation that Jazz was subjected to in its infancy. He also managed to slyly hint that the opposition to both was racist in various ways.

Thaddeus Russell's op-ed ("Is rap tomorrow's jazz? ") was republished on the academic discussion boards of the HNet online network. The full text of his piece can be read here.

This first segement of my essay is a commentary on the Russell op-ed.

Black Culture and Rap Music-

Thaddeus Russell's op-ed piece in the L.A. Times is another of those weird letters from the academic world that makes ordinary people suspect that Academia is a land on the fringe of our planet somewhere. Russell's defense of rap music against criticism of it by black leaders is yet another reminder of how out of touch with reality academics can become.

All cultural products are expressions of certain values. Rap music is characterized by greed and lust and vanity. Greed for money, and cars, and cribs, and bling-bling. Lust for a crude form of sexual gratification, that is not liberating, but is demeaning and dehumanizing. And a simple-minded form of boastful vanity that would be easily seen as vulgar if, say, a white teenager in Van Nuys exhibited
it, but that is somehow an admirable expression of racial pride if a sneering black rap performer prances about with his ego on display.

When did greed and lust and vanity become wholesome values? Is the success of the product all we have to consider? Does not the content of the cultural expression matter? Russell seems to admire the commercial and popular success of rap music, and its defiance of the dominant white culture. As if the content were irrelevant to our assessment of its contributions to culture. We might as well celebrate the "spirit of entrepreneurship" displayed by street-corner heroin dealers, since to do
so would exhibit the same kind of moral numbness.

Rap music is not all one thing, as indeed neither is Jazz. But it does have dominant expressions, and it certainly has degenerate expressions. Gangsta-culture is a huge part of the history and the current content of the rap genre. When a rapper like Ludacris crones: "I caught him with a blow to the chest. My hollow put a hole in his vest. I'm bout to send two to his dome. Cry babies go home!," is this the culture Russell wishes us to celebrate? How about Notorious B.I.G.'s posthumously released lyric: "Shot dread in the head, took the bread and the landspread. Lil' Gotti got the shotty to your body. So don't resist, or you might miss Christmas. I tote guns, I make number runs. I give emcees the runs drippin when I throw my clip in the AK, I slay from far away. Everybody hit the DECK," does this make Russell ever-so-proud? (This album sold 5 million copies in the U.S. alone, by the way.) If he can swallow all of this, how about these lyrics from Snoop Dog: "Nothing left to do, but buy some shells for my glock. Why? So I can rob every known dope spot. I got 19 dollars and 50 cents up in my pocket with what? With this automatic rocket. Gotta have it to pop it, unlock it, and take me up a hostage." Or how about these lyrics from Big Pun (also released posthumously): "I'm from where the guns love to introduce theyself. Reduce your health, little bulletproofs get felt. Make way for
krill, I don't play I spray for real. Blow your top with the glock, that's my favourite kill. Blaze your crib with like thirty shots. I'm already hot, but my last one is with some dirty cops. Blow a hole
through your ribs just for runnin your lips." Is this the black culture Russell is so confident will be the black musical genre of the future?

These lyrics are about murder, and its glorification. Real murder too, not just its imaginary variety-as if that would not itself be sick enough. Usually, black on black murder. Those of us who have attended
the funerals of young black men who are the murdered victims of rap culture know the reality of this in ways too awful to contemplate. I am not making the strong claim that the music causes the murder; but I am saying that no morally healthy human being can accept the celebration of murder, in the form of rap music or any other "cultural expression."

Why, by the way, do so many liberal academics-who are horrified by the nation's "gun culture" in the person of the NRA and Charlton Heston-not speak out with equal indignation about rap culture's glorification of "glocks" and "AKs" and "capping" this person and "popping" that one? What is going on with this double-standard?

Gangsta-culture and rap music are not accidentally associated-like Saddam Hussein's new-found fondness for Doritos and his career as a mass murderer. Gangsta-culture and its values were formative influences on rap music and remain so even today. It is not irrelevant to the cultural
expression that is rap music that Tupac Shakur and Notorious B.I.G. were murdered in rap-related beefs. It is not irrelevant that rappers from Diddy to Lil' Kim have been involved in gang-related shootings. It is not irrelevant to our assessment of this "culture" that many rap and hip-hop stars are literal gangsters, with criminal records of which they are often defiantly boastful.

As far as I know, no Jazz labels ever riddled each other's studios with gunfire in drive-by shootings, as happened in the long-running rivalry between Bad Boy Records and Death Row Records. My knowledge of Jazz musicology is not encyclopedic, but I do not recall any Jazz artists recording dueling albums of "battle raps" designed to insult other musicians, like 50 Cent and Ja Rule did-among many others. Indeed, I do not remember any period in Jazz history when artists created a whole sub-genre of "dis records" with the specific purpose of insulting other artists, as was common in rap during the 1980s and 90s.

Take a look at 50 Cent's album covers, or those of G-Unit, or any of dozens of other artists, and notice that they intentionally project an image of menace. What's up with that? What aspect of black achievement does this represent?

These manifestations of the world of rap are not something apart from the values of this musical genre, so much of which is riven with ego-based adolescent-level acting-out. These are expressions of the values of large segments of rap culture. If Russell does not want to condemn all rap music, then he ought to at least separate the positive forms of this musical genre from its degenerate forms. Instead, he praises all equally by attacking those who point out the self-destructive values at the core of so much of this music.

Rap music celebrates vulgarity. Indeed, it markets vulgarity; that is its product. It is the vulgar excesses of rap-the profanity, the over-sized jewelry, the naked acquisitiveness, the sexual
aggressiveness-that are its hallmarks. When did vulgarity become a wholesome value? Vulgar boasting cannot be healthy simply because it is done in the name of black self-expression. Every destructive act of human beings is a form of self-expression. The content matters. Positive
self-expression is wholesome and conducive to the healthy growth of people and cultures; negative self-expression is not, and the difference matters.

Rap is also defiantly demeaning to women and sexuality exploitative in crude ways. Indeed, its very crudeness is part of its supposed "self-expression." Have we learned no lessons from the feminist
movement? When white men exploited women (often in hidden ways) in the past we were outraged, and we demanded that it stop. Now openly exploiting women and treating them as sexual props in music videos appears to be acceptable if done by young black men. It seems we are so anxious not to offend the potential for racial pride that we are unable to call a sexist pig a sexist pig when he is a black rap performer.

Rap music is not a herald of social reform, and it is specious to even hint at such an idea. Rap music is a celebration of the opportunities some young black Americans are enjoying to be vulgarians and to make a highly-profitable living at it. When did being a vulgarian become something worthy of admiration?

Who knows whether our current penchant for violent movies and video games, and violent rap music themes, are poisoning our psyches, as some of us suspect. But no healthy human being ought to celebrate the glorification of violence for profit, which is what all these genres are doing. This exploitation of violence for profit is surely a rot in our culture, whatever else it may be doing to us.

Russell seems to think that the danger here is that blacks will suppress rap music in an effort to attain integration into white culture. The real danger is that blacks will swallow this garbage in the name of racial solidarity. As if anything popular in black culture cannot by definition be unhealthy or destructive. If this were true, it would make American black culture unique among all the cultures in the history of the world.

Cultures have positive and negative features, and the struggle for civilization is the struggle to acknowledge and encourage the positive and discourage and eliminate the negative. The largest theme in the study of history is the struggle in human lives and cultures between the better and the lesser angels of our nature. As scholars and historians and citizens we default on our responsibilities if we make no effort to separate these two traits.

Jazz, by the way, was never an expression of gangsta-values in the way that rap is. Jazz may have offended the establishment in its early years; and we can tell charming little tales of the black elders of the 1920s being shocked by the wickedness of Jazz. Jazz had its "unsavory" elements to be sure-its subtle and sly references to drug use, and, for some, its liberated sense of sexuality and its many clever euphemisms for sexual conduct. But no jazz artists that I know of ever sang the praises of murder; or celebrated life in thugish gangs. And if there were such artists, we should condemn them as well.

Jazz evolved in ways that "mainstreamed" it, both by dropping some of its more extreme forms (the celebration of illicit drug use for example) and by the broader American culture developing a more tolerant attitude toward such matters as expressions of sexuality. Perhaps the same thing will happen to hip-hop and rap, and maybe even some aspects of gangsta-culture. If so, that is all to the good. But we should never anticipate the future in ways that blind us to the realities of the present. It is simply the case that rap music culture contains within it, as prominent elements of its cultural expression, values that decent human beings cannot accept nor tolerate.

Perhaps black Americans do not need white culture telling them how to construct the values of their culture. Undoubtedly it would be better if black authority figures take the lead in this effort. But then, that is just who Russell is so anxious to attack. Even black intellectual and cultural leaders cannot criticize black popular culture in Russell's view, because to do so is apparently to offend racial pride. But pride is not a generic quality floating in space. It is pride of something. And rap music is not a fit candidate for black cultural pride.

Where is the joy of life in rap music? Where are the songs of love and tenderness? Where are the songs of our common humanity? Where is there any sense of the sacred? Why have we let a group of narcissistic stunted-adolescents define black culture?

We ought to celebrate the creative, the life-affirming, the generous of spirit, the beauty and preciousness of life, in every culture and in all modes of expression. We ought never excuse or justify the glorification of brutality, violence, misogyny, racism, greed and sexual exploitation in any culture or in any form of expression. And we should not be so thick and dull, and so anxious to promote racial achievement, that we fail to make a distinction between these two types of expression.

Perhaps the core madness of American culture in general is our tendency to admire the acquisition of wealth and fame without much thought about the morality of these acquisitions. This is in effect what Russell is doing with rap culture. Yes, the emergence of rap culture as a business enterprise has allowed hundreds of young black men (and a few women) to become obscenely wealthy. Yes, in America today uneducated vulgarians can now prance about in large homes, drive multiple expensive cars, wear necklaces the size of license plates, and engage in the kind ostentatious display of wealth that would have made them right at home in the Gilded Age. Some progress.

The acquisition of fame and fortune is not self-justifying. We have to take thoughtful care for what the Buddhists call the question of "right livelihood." Marketing violence, hate, misogyny, and obscenity is not right livelihood, and it is not the right way to build or celebrate black achievement. We should be enormously grateful to Bill Cosby and Jesse Jackson and Reverend Sharpton and the other black leaders who have the courage to tell the truth about this self-destructive strain in
black culture in the face of the kind of stifling political correctness represented by professor Russell's essay. Professor Russell is subtly calling them all Uncle Toms for standing up for decency in black life.
This is the price they have to pay for speaking truth to popularity.

"Is Rap tomorrow's Jazz?" Russell's headline asks. It had better not be, or American culture (black and white) is doomed.

In response to my critique of Russell, Stirling Newberry posted a rejoineder and defense of Russell's general viewpoint. His essay can be read here.

This next segment of my essay is my rejoinder to Newberry.

Stirling Newberry's long and interesting essay on culture and art can be summarized in three propositions:

1) Cultural/artistic expression which seem depraved may in another time and context be viewed as classics (the Iliad);

2) If we are cultural/artistic critics we throw our lot in with some fools from the past who played this same role;

3) Cultural/artistic expression is beyond rational critique since it is an expression of popular tastes (whatever people like they will support).

I think all three of these ideas are unsound and some of them are potentially dangerous. But before I try to make that case, I should perhaps state the one large unstated assumption in my analysis of
Thaddeus Russell's article, and this whole issue.

Assumed: Culture matters; artistic expression matters; words matter.

I will not argue this proposition in detail. I will only observe that most everyone believes it. Otherwise we would not take offense when someone uses racial epithets. Otherwise feminists would not be outraged and moved to action when writers use only male-pronouns in their prose. Otherwise we could not accuse racists of unacceptable discourse when they spew forth hate-filled prose. Culture matters; artistic expression matters; words matter. They are not just epiphenomena that are as
neutral as the air. So it matters what we accept and tolerate in our culture and in its artistic expressions.

First a point about "the classics": the Iliad may have violent metaphors and language but in the context in which it is now honored as a classic that language is not a call to a life of gangsterism, or the celebration of murder and mayhem. Whatever it may have meant in another cultural context, the Iliad's is now understood as an expression of the heroic in human nature, not the brutal and venal. So one cannot usually interpret artistic expression or language apart from its cultural context. Which
is precisely my point: the cultural context of much of rap music is
violent, misogynistic, and degenerate. Which is why the language =
matters.

The idea that the future will prove our cultural critiques to have been small-minded and petty is possibly true, but that should not restrain us from making them. Moreover, Newberry's argument comes dangerously close to suggesting that we cannot critique art and culture at all, on pain of
being lumped-in with "unsavory" critics. This is pernicious. Not all cultural criticism is morally or intellectually equivalent. It matters what the factual circumstances and cultural context are. I should think, to take an obvious example, that if we were alive during the late Weimar Republic in Germany that we would have been obliged to critique the cultural expressions of anti-Semitism that ushered-in the Nazi-era in Germany.

Finally, the idea that culture and art is immune from intellectual analysis and criticism because in the end the people will support whatever they like, is just a perfidious default on our intellectual and
moral responsibilities. The marketplace ought not be the master of our morality. "Whatever people like" is not a good enough standard of decency and wholesomeness in culture or art or society. Think again of the Weimar Republic if that helps one get the point.

Now, in the case of gangsta-rappers like 50 Cent, it should be undeniable that his artistic expression is not just pose and pretense and metaphor. 50 Cent and rappers like him fully mean to embody that
which they sing about. Indeed, one of the themes of gangsta-rap is the distinction between those rappers who merely talk about being violent thugs and those (more honorable!) rappers who live out their music. This prideful boasting about being a real gangster is why so many of the rap elite are involved in shootings and why so many of them are murdered.

In his new autobiography, "From Pieces to Weight," (which is a reference to guns and drugs, in case you missed it), 50 Cent celebrates his life as a drug dealer, explaining how it gave him his basic values and made him the man he is. Among the many mainstream cultural values he derides is education. On education, 50 Cent has this to say in his new autobiography: "I learned more on the street than a day in the classroom. I could break down a kilo of cocaine into ounces or grams. That's how I learned my fractions." And this too: "I knew all the math I needed to know after I divided my first brick [of cocaine]."

On his own cultural values, 50 Cent reports this: "A lot of times, you watch the same films over and over again to remind you of your code. You watch "Scarface," you watch "Casino," you watch gangster films a lot in the 'hood. I think that inspires you to bust a head or to pull your pistol out when the time comes."

Well, those are values I guess. The marketplace is clearly rewarding them. And maybe someday in some distant time some excuse-making academics will consider 50 Cent's autobiography and his music "classics" on the order of the Iliad. If so, that is a world I hope not to be alive
to see.

Following my reply to Newberry, Jacqui Shine offered an alternative defense of Russsell. Her essay can be read here.

This final segment of my essay is my reply to Shine.

Jacqui Shine makes some valid points regarding my post on rap music.

I concede that I did not emphasize sufficiently the positive forms of the rap/hip-hop musical expression. The rap/hip-hop musical genre contains creative elements to be sure: there is lots of creativity in free-style raps, and lots of energy and ambition throughout, and the creativity is worth admiring. I just think it is a shame that this creative energy is being squandered in some of the degenerate expressions it is taking. But my point is that if Russell wants to offer a useful critique of the critics of hip-hop culture he ought to start by separating the positive from the negative aspects of this cultural expression, rather than passing over in silence the mindless destructiveness, the crude acquisitiveness, and the depersonalizing sexuality that is all too prominent in this musical genre and its associated lifestyle.

True, gangsta rap is not the only form this music takes. We might want to make some distinctions here. And again, my point is that Russell implicitly defends all these forms of the art by declining to make any such distinctions himself and by refusing to condemn the unwholesome aspects of the genre.

I also readily agree that there are plenty of forms of degenerate, dysfunctional white culture-and I view them in precisely the same way. But this is a topic for another day.

As to what I call the "vulgarity" of much of mainstream rap music, spend a few evenings watching the music videos on BET and it will at least be clear what I have in mind, whether or not you agree it is best described as vulgar. This judgment, by the way, has nothing to do with prudishness, or some old-fashioned 1920s sensibility. I would say, for example, that Marques Houston's video for "Naked" is an expression of a mature approach to sexuality, one that is not depersonalizing or dehumanizing, or that treats women as sexual objects. Omarion's "I'm Tryna" is about love and relationships-traditional subjects in Jazz and almost all popular music, and entirely worthy of respect. When Bow Wow and Ciara flirt with each other in their "Like You" video, this is an expression of a joyfulness about life. Contrast this with 50 Cent's"Candy Shop" video in which he sings the praises of the sexuality of the whore house.

Why is it that 50 Cent's website features guns as its motif, two of which are smoking, and why is the page-turning sound that of a gun clicking into firing position, and why does clicking on some pages on
the site result in 50 Cent simulating shooting the user with a shotgun?

Those lyrics matter. Here is another reminder. This is from 50 Cent's newest album "The Massacre," and the track is "This is 50," in which the artist defines for us who and what he is:

"I got a itchy-itchy trigger finger, nigga it's the killa in me not to spray this shit
I got enough ammo shots to blow I put a hole in any motherfucker out this bitch
I unload to reload when you get hit I suppose you gon' be strong enough to take this shit
I'm in the hood ridin 'round with a fo'-fo' pound
Can you see through the limousine tints?
I do dirt, the gat bust, I get to kickin up dust 'fore the Jakes come around here kid
Niggaz get knocked if D's start askin question
My name end up in all types of shit
I'll be a gangsta nigga 'til I die fo' sho'
Whether I'm po' or I'm filthy rich
Now what you know about movin that Peruvian flake for that cake, I get rid of dem bricks"

So guns, drugs, money and exploitative sex is how 50 Cent defines himself and his world. It seems passing strange that professor Russell can mention 50 Cent without taking note of any of this.

The creation of culture is not just an effort to find out what the marketplace will reward and our friends admire. It is not just about being popular and making money. The creation of culture is the
cultivation of human souls. It is a moral undertaking of the utmost seriousness. Earnest men and women need maturity, thoughtfulness, and a sense of moral uprightness as they decide what forms of cultural expression to disseminate into society. We should not let a bunch of narcissistic arrested-development adolescents define any aspect of our culture for us, which is what is happening with much of hip-hop/rap culture. Some of hip-hop/rap culture are healthy expressions and some
are expressions of a morally degenerate set of values. The difference matters, and it is our obligation to speak out about the difference.

Finally, I think the Shine post exhibits the core error that I am trying to point out here. Shine, like Russell, is unwilling to condemn even degenerate expressions of black culture because to do so is thought to somehow reinforce the dominance of white culture. Frankly, this kind of moral defensiveness is of no help to anyone, and I think much greater service is being done for black America by the critiques of black leaders like Bill Cosby than can ever be achieved by defending rap music in the undiscriminating manner professor Russell does in his article.