Does rap have a future? Will gangsta rap sink hip-hop?

Ebony, June, 1997 by Joy Bennett Kinnon

Poet and activist Nikki Giovanni has a similar viewpoint. She thinks rap is getting a bad rap, and that most adults need to butt out. Her latest book of poetry, Love Poems, is dedicated to the late Tupac Shakur. "A lover whose love was often deliberately misunderstood," beams the dedication. Giovanni is frustrated with those who would confuse the message and the messenger. "The violence didn't come out of rap, anymore than sex came out of Ma Rainey's songs," she says. "Rap is expressing the violence that's there, and we weren't even looking at that until rap came up and talked about it. It gave voice to the conditions that people are living under."

Rap at best, she says, is a "petition," a plea from young people to look at their lives. "That's one reason that beautiful boy [Tupac] is dead, because he tried to `keep it real.'"

Giovanni, who never met Tupac says that when he was killed, she got a "Thug Life" tattoo similar to the one Shakur had tattooed on his body. "These are our children; we can't treat them like the enemy. Tupac and Biggie are all our sons. We cannot walk away from them."

Dyson says the recent violence in rap is more than a wake-up call. "Every day thousands and thousands of kids are dying," he says. "What we have to do is say we just shouldn't be concerned about the Tupacs and the Biggies. We should be concerned about hose young Black people who on a daily basis are facing death."

Parents concerned about the possible effects of gangsta rap on their 'tweens and teens should get involved with what their children are listening to, Dyson and other experts say.

"The truth is, you can't shut the music down, and in a society like this you don't want to shut it down," says Comer. "On the other hand, you can make it less meaningful in the life of your children."

He and others suggest parents guide their children by getting involved. "When you guide the kids, you do things with them. You point out what's good and what's bad," says Giovanni. "As adults we ought to be very cautious in what we condemn and a lot more carefree in what we praise."

Dyson, who also is an ordained Baptist minister and a professor of African-American studies at Columbia University, says adults should give children an "internal moral sensor" to determine what's good about the music and what is potentially destructive.

He believes that much of hip-hop is worth saving, through more positive groups such as The Fugees, and that the recent violence in gangsta rap will spur a profound level of self-examination.

"Rap has to grapple with its own demons," he adds. "Like Jacob in the Bible it can no longer escape its past. But if it struggles like Jacob until the daybreak, it can have a new name."