In The Kingdom Of Crack Rap Jun 16 '07    Write an essay on this topic. Tweet Popular Products in Music The Dirtchamber Sessions, Vol. 1 by The Prodigy From $11 Jersey Boys [Original Broadway Cast Recording] by Original Broadway Cast From $8 The Bottom Line Somebody has to raise a little hell at this section. Last march, I moved from a studio to a comfortable 2-bedroom apartment in the Bellingham suburbs. Like a lot of towns in the Pacific Northwest, Bellingham is a surrounded by waves of evergreen trees, and I am caught in one of those currents. Behind my building is a park with an array of nature trails. Two complexes to my left are woods that lead to a furniture outlet and a car dealership. Four complexes to my right is a large cauldesac leading up a forested hill. In front of me and a block across the street is another wave of beautiful evergreens and a trail that leads to Whatcom Falls Park . Every morning the sun hits my face and I wake up to this view. In every way imaginable, I am living well. I was walking to the store, trying to figure out in my mind what I wanted to write about Don Imus, when 2 kids-one white, one black-drove by in a black escalade, blasting music you could hear from a mile a way. The song they were listening to was a mixtape rap response to "Bag lady", a song from Erykah's Badu's sophomore album, Mama's Gun. The original, a R&B riff on an early Outkast song, is a nifty slice of female empowerment served on a plate of minimalist funk. Using the bag as a metaphor for a woman's personal baggage, Badu engages in a sort of inner conversation with a damaged sister, giving a mixture of tough love and compassion that only a woman has a right to do with other women. Bag lady is something that you can only listen to respectfully, and the fat bass line and slick guitar riffs make that task a treat. The response record I heard in the humvee, however, sent chills through my spine. The "gentleman" rapping in the response record to Badu's track was so incensed by her message of female uplift, that he decided to "Rap a song" about committing a violent sexual assault to a woman's mouth. The track captured the frightening sadism of modern gangster rap. This young rapper wasn't just a cad, or a clueless schmuck. he was a sadist, a sociopath who saw a vulnerable person trying to express their autonomy, and decided to steal their soul. Yes, there have been great artists who have been misogynists( Picasso, Davis, Roth), but there was no art here, and to even think of liking this reflects not only on the artist, but who ever is diseased enough to consume his work. According to the top 40, this scene is playing over and over all throughout America. If you live in a suburban neighborhood and are in the proximity of privileged teenagers, you probably know I'm alluding to crack rap, of which our mixtape compadre is a not too distant cousin. Led by Young Jeezy, T.I, Lil Wayne, The Clipse, Rick Ross, Cam'ron and various members of the Dipset, it is a form of rap where MC's brag about doing gruesome things to other black people and make it seem shiny and attractive to suburban teenage boys. Their gruesome tales get little play in majority black radio stations, and they are often referred by black intellectuals-and even many black hip hop fans- as social lepers for their tales of black on black violence. To the boys who listen to them, however, the random corpses that these rappers brag about going over-the snitches that they brag about destroying, the women they viciously dispatch in multivarious forms, or the dead mother or wife tormented over losing a son or a husband- have absolutely no consequence. To these young men, crack rappers are businessmen, successes in their field, and to quote Jeezy himself " go getta('s)". Watching these young men drive by, a swirl of ideas went through my head. Here were two people in a position of extravagant privilege. Unless there is some lost chain of black bluebloods in Bellingham that I don't know about, the brother probably came from a family that was a raging success story, a testament to America's democratic potential. They were two young men on a saturday evening, riding an expensive car in one of the most beautiful places to live in this nation. They could have gone to Sehome arboretum and watched the sunset over the San Juan's, taken a couple of women out for dinner and a movie, or just gone to Lake Padden to sit and meditate over nature. Yet amidst all of this natural and material wealth at their fingertips, they decide to listen to a snuff flick set to music. Even now as I'm writing this, I am puzzled by what I saw. With all this beauty, why were they listening to something so horrible? What spurred them to listen to something so horrible? And why is this horror on wax the only thing that black men and white men can bond over? 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. That does not excuse the outrages of these young rappers, however. What makes someone like Jeezy get under the skin of millions of black people lies in how he manipulates the vocabulary of black music to make his money. James Baldwin said it best here when he said that Negro speech is vivid largely because it is private. It is a kind of emotional shorthand--or sleight-of-hand--by means of which Negroes express, not only their relationship to each other, but their judgment of the white world. And, as the white world takes over this vocabulary--without the faintest notion of what it really means--the vocabulary is forced to change. The same thing is true of Negro music, which has had to become more and more complex in order to continue to express any of the private or collective experience. What the crack rapper does is turn this shorthand on it's axis. He takes the rhetoric of black english 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 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 please don't bring up the argument that black rap critics blame the genre for the state of Black America's troubles. It's a tired and brutally dishonest intellectual trope. No, Fiddy' didn't break down America's school districts. No, Lil Wayne didn't cripple the community policing programs that were so successful in the 90's. And No, Snoop Dogg didn't cause the mass exodus of black men from their families. Black America's problems didn't start from Rap Records, and if a magic wand was waved to clear every crack rapper off the air, those problems would still exist. So black people don't hate hip hop because they believe it is at the center of our American dillema. They hate it because it forces them to relive their deepest pain in 3 minute increments over and over and over. If you have no problem listening to a crack rapper add up his lyrical body count, god bless you. But why do you have to expect a person who has actually seen a body count to clap in approval? Why do rap fans always expect black folks like the people in my old neighborhood in Tacoma, a black community still traumatized by the memory of gangs, drugs and violence, to jump like pavlovian dogs at the site of Jeezy? And for the love of all things merciful, why do you expect people who are haunted by statistics like this (http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0411,davis,51847,1.html) and this (http://www.louisianaweekly.com/weekly/news/articlegate.pl?20070430m ), to kneel at the feet of Ludacris when he says "move b*tch get out of the way." This anger or pain holds no quarter with the rich kids who listen to this stuff everyday in Bellingham. 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 cent 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. Even if a mass of black men got their sh*t straight, Jeezy would still be rapping about selling crack, 50 cent would still have videos where he puts women in chains, and Lil Wayne would still be rapping about shooting innocent people for fun, simply because would still be a market for them. And could we be honest about the market for a change? Could we maybe entertain the idea that the sensibility of the white fan that gobbles up Snoop Dogg putting women in slave chains isn't on a level with that of freedom riders? Could we stop with the illusion that the fratboy who runs a pimp and ho party on Saturday night is chomping at the bit to spur an anti poverty initiative Monday morning? 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. In the end, however, the continued popularity of crack rap answers the question of what America has learned from Imus, hip hop and race: absolutely nothing . 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.

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