In The Kingdom Of Crack Rap

The Literary Thug, a black moderate blogger, writes: "Probably the biggest question that needs to be asked in the wake of crack rap is the last one I asked: why has the cultural interplay between black and white men become one pathetic cuckold party? If one want to look at a prototype for the love affair between crack rappers and white teenage male America, they could look toward their parents' and grandparents' generation. Or to be more specific, the black nationalist movement and their Radical chic lapdogs. I will not engage in the common slur that black men are the most sexist men on the planet. It is impossible, however, not to see that something was lost in the black community when black militants decided to put a steel toed foot on the necks of Jews, women, gays and every black person to the right of H Rap Brown. Nor it is that difficult to see the outrages towards women that 50 cent and Ludacris espouse as part of a direct line from the even more gruesome outrages of Amiri Baraka and Eldridge Cleaver.

More than anything, it is impossible not to see a connotation between a generation of men adopting reprehensible visions of manhood and the numbers of black fathers in the home going from over 70 percent in 1964 to under 30 percent in 2004."He continues: "[The crack rapper] takes the rhetoric of black [E]nglish and creates a vocabulary for the privileged white teenager in which he makes the most vicious damage against black people seem like a day at the beach. In this vocabulary, he gives the white rap fan a sort of self reflecting mirror into black life, not enough [to] empathize with the black people that rappers are bragging about committing crimes against, but enough to trample on black people’s most vulnerable wounds and get away with it. If black music has been an artistic sanctuary from life, the crack rapper opens the church gates, burns the church down, and allows life to smack the parishioners around as they leave. This, along with numerous other things, is the reason that millions of black people want to throw Young Jeezy through a brick wall. The obscenities of crack rappers might soothe the ego of the rap fan who thinks the universe revolves around his musical genre, but don’t expect a people who have so long seen black music as Balm go a little haywire when people try and take that balm away."And more: "This anger or pain holds no quarter with the rich kids who listen to this stuff everyday in Bellingham [Washington]. These brats don’t listen to Common, Mos Def, or Talib Kweli. They listen to Joe Budden bragging about kicking a pregnant woman in the stomach. They listen to Young Jeezy and 50 [C]ent bragging about brutalizing their own people.

They, and MILLIONS, of other suburban teenagers, listened to the Ying Yang twins spew a 'catchy' little number about rape 2 years ago.....Can we suspend the idea that the wannabe that bangs 50 on his stereo somehow deserves a chair on the editorial board of the progressive? The problem with asking these questions is that if we did so, the white parents of these teens might have to take some responsibility for themselves and get their children to stop buying this garbage. In doing that, they might have to ask themselves some tough questions about the white hip hop fan’s incessant need to buy the most demoralizing images of black people and little else. And in process of asking those questions, these parents just might have to come to terms with how racist (and sexist) they and their children really are.....The only thing that the controversy over the Shock Jock has done is give millions of Americans what they love more than anything in the world, a phony oppression narrative.

White conservatives can entertain paranoid reveries of oppressive black rappers and Vachel Lindsay-esque fantasies about black pathology, while ignoring the fact that it is their children that buy their records and keep those fantasies afloat. The hip hop nation can hold on to the soggy notion that Jeezy and 50 are oppressed street poets while ignoring the pound of flesh they are taking on young black women everywhere. And every outsider looking in on all of this, or anyone who has any basic human feeling on the subject on race and gender, will continue to watch and wait for a day when this madness will someday stop."