Bad Raps: Music Rebels Revel in Their Thug Life

Insight on the News, May 21, 2001 by Suzanne Fields

Nothing in the culture wars makes a stronger argument for the defense of conservative values than rap music. Rap expresses the worst kind of images emanating from a postmodern society that has consigned a generation of young men and women to the darkest dramas of the desperately lost.

The megastars of this genre are not about to sing of "you and me and baby makes three." Their lyrics come from a world of broken families, absent fathers, illegitimate children and matriarchal dominance, often subsidized by welfare.

For the men who denigrate women as "bitches" and "ho's," this is not merely misogyny (though it is that), but alienation from common humanity and community. The lyrics employ vulgar street idioms because both the language and experience of poetry or romance are absent from the lives of the rappers and their audience as well.

Frank Sinatra grew up on the mean streets of New Jersey and he knew the Mafia well, but when he sang "You're the top, You're the Tower of Pisa.... You're the Mona Lisa" he aspired to sophistication and wanted others to see him as debonair. (Is there a rapper alive who knows the difference between the Tower of Pisa and a towering pizza?) When Frankie was bad, literally, he didn't want his fans to hear about it. He wasn't as innocent as his lyrics, but he cultivated that impression.

Rappers Sean "Puffy" Combs and Eminem, by contrast, must live like they sing. They're rich, but their attraction resides in perverse behavior on and off stage. When as adults they tap into adolescent rebellion, they dumb down both their emotions and their economic success.

Shelby Steele, a black scholar, has their number when he writes that to keep their audience they can't just sing about alienation -- they had better experience it as well, either with the audience or for the audience.

"The rappers and promoters themselves are pressured toward a thug life, simply to stay credible," Steele writes in the Wall Street Journal. "A rap promoter without an arrest record can start to look a lot like Dick Clark."

A rapper such as Eminem, who revels in affecting a white-trash identity, has defenders, too. They find irony, satire and poetic metaphor in his lyrics, but it's difficult to see how most of his fans take those lyrics as anything but straight. Lurking in them is a cruel depravity that seeks ways to go over the line by singing of macho brutality -- of raping women, holding gay men with a knife at their throats and helping a group of friends to take a little sister's virginity.

These lyrics are powerful, but the power resides in psychological defensiveness that provides a perverse rationalization for brutality: If you don't love you can't be rejected, so you might as well hate and rape.

Every generation since Elvis has driven through adolescence on popular music -- looking for the new sound and sensibility that rejects what their parents liked. Elvis was the cutting edge of the sexual revolution innovative then, but tame and hardly even titillating today. It's hard to believe that for his first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show, the maestro wouldn't allow the cameras to focus below the singer's waist.

Elvis brilliantly combined the black, blues and sex rhythms of the honky-tonks of the backroads South of his time, liberating teen-age rebels in dance and song. But nearly every music hero and heroine after him has had to push the envelope or raise the ante to be a big winner. For some teenagers the explicit meanness may provide an imaginary escape, the permission to act in a dark, forbidden drama of their imaginations. For these young men and women, the incentives to "act out" may be no more aggressive than dyeing hair purple or wearing ugly clothes. For others, "acting out" as in "men behaving badly," may be the preferred response in human relationships.

Rappers, rollers and rockers who tap into the big time with bite and bitterness draw millions to their records and concerts for different reasons. The teen-age and young-adult zeitgeist is made up of rebels with and without causes. It didn't hurt Eminem that his mother sued him for $10 million for using lyrics such as "my mom smokes more dope than I do." (It might have been Eminem's press agent's idea.) That's on the same track in which he ponders which Spice Girl he would prefer to "impregnate."

There are lots of other popular singers who get less notice by being less bizarre. They make up a popular lifestyle that eventually will morph into a healthy nostalgia. The pity is that the nasty stuff of violent rap may never reach the nostalgic mode but congeal into a brutal life perspective.

In one of Eminem's hits he sings of a deranged fan. Eminem suggests the fan get counseling, but the fan doesn't. Instead he kills himself and his pregnant girlfriend. Fantasy or reality?