Pop music
The rappers rapped
Marcus Berkmann
Pop music reflects its time, and no cur- rent genre seems more of its time than rap music. The brutal rhythms, the strutting arrogance of its performers, the baseball caps turned backward — it's hard to know what's worse. As a result, anyone over the age of 25 who says he likes rap music is either a) lying; b) a record company execu- tive, and so probably lying anyway; c) a rock critic, but that is the rock critic's par- ticular and terrifying fate, to be borne alone and in silence; or d) a professional rapper. You may like mainstream music, may tolerate heavy metal in short bursts, you may even quite like disco versions of theme tunes from computer games — bilt if you can shave, rap will almost certainlY remain beyond you. It's youth rebellion, class rebellion and race rebellion all whipped up into one indigestible whole. . But at least you and I can hate rap with honesty and gusto, and without t.h,e remotest vestige of shame. For others it s much harder. The white liberal rock estab- lishment, for whom rebellion is an ingrained part of pop's appeal, feel that they must find it within themselves to like rap music, or at least to approve of it. The conditions in those inner city ghettoes are, well, disgraceful. The only problem is that many young rap-persons tend to espouse opinions that, if one were to be charitable, don't entirely tally with those of white rap fans. Many rappers are, after all, youq American black males with large baseball bats, prone to profoundly illiberal senti- ments. For a while the fashion was to speak of women as mere chattels and vessels, and only last year the 2 Live Crew released an album which included tracks called 'Pop That Pussy' and `Up A Girl's Ass', amongst others that are too repellent even to think about. More recently, racial hatred has appeared on the menu, as Public Enemy and others have freely associated with anti- semites. Listening to a white middle-class rap fan trying to defend all this has come to provide matchless dinner party entertain- ment for rap-haters.
Suddenly, though, the stakes have now been raised. Encouraged by the rock estab- lishment's prevaricating, rappers have now started talking in serious and heartfelt terms of the benefits of killing policemen. Indeed, virtually every rapper worthy of the name now feels obliged to include at least one song on each album advocating the Wholesale slaughter of plods, and if it can be shown that he's actually 'dusted off a few at some point in the past, so much the better. Ice-T's wittily titled 'Cop Killer' Sparked off an enormous row earlier this year, which naturally sold vast quantities of records, and now it is the turn of someone called 2pac Amaru Shakar, a Californian rapper of unequivocal opinions. 2pac's mother was a Black Panther militant and his father was shot dead shortly after leav- ing jail, but now he's in real trouble. A Young fan of his was caught speeding along Highway 59 in a stolen car and promptly shot the arresting officer. Unfortunately, it turned out that he was listening to one of 2pac's most recent efforts on his tape machine. 'Cops on my tail,' rapped 2pac, So I bail till I dodge them/Remember Rodney King/And I bust his punk ass/Now I got a murder case . . . /What the fuck would you do?/Drop them or let them drop you?/I choose droppin' the cop.' Oh dear. For this tiny indiscretion has led, as most things in America seem to lead, to a multi-million dollar court case. The policeman's widow is suing the record company and the distribution company, Time Warner, for $100 million, while the young murderer is planning to plead for leniency, claiming he was unduly influ- enced by the music. Of course, other acts have been sued in the past for similar 'offences', but most of them were dim heavy metal bands who had inadvertently said something nice about Beelzebub. This is different. Suddenly, all those fine sentiments about freedom of Speech are looking mildly redundant. The Widow is said to have a good case, and if that's not bad enough, police pension funds have threatened to sell huge quantities of Time Warner stock unless matters improve. The rap world is reportedly aghast. For the dedicated rap hater, though, it's as though Christmas has come early: the sound of bucks being passed and petards being hoisted is music to our ears. And it's not rap music to our ears, either.
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