Your children are rap victims

Spectator, The, Dec 30, 2000 by Delingpole, James

At least they are if you bought them Eminem this Christmas. The lyrics are violent and obscene. Does it matter? James Delingpole thinks the white rapper is a new Gerard Manley Hopkins

`QUICK, quick, the "Stan" video's on,' says my stepson, the Rat. So I hurry downstairs because this is an important part of my research. I'm trying to discover why middle-class teenagers are so heavily into rap music, especially the video's author, Eminem, who is the biggest rap star ever. Last year his Marshall Mathers LP sold 1.2 million copies in the UK alone, making it the second most popular record after the Beatles. If you didn't buy it for one of your teenage relatives or friends for Christmas, they'd probably like to know why.

Watching the 'Stan' video, it's not immediately apparent why the song went to number one. Sure the pasty-faced, bleachblond, 26-year-old rapper with `slit me' tattooed on his wrists has a certain low-rent, trailer-park chic; the video - in which Eminem plays both himself and one of his crazed fans - has quite a juicy car crash at the end; and the melody - which Eminem filched, as rappers do, from another musician: in this case a North London chanteuse called Dido - is naggingly catchy. But you're still left wondering how this guy sold more than ten million records last year, especially when you try listening to what he's saying and can't make head nor tail of it.

The reason for this, the Rat explains, is that the best bit is the words, and most of them are so offensive that they've been censored for television. (Not bleeped out in an obvious way but just slurred, so that it sounds as if Eminem has a speech impediment.) He offers to tell me what they are because, like most of his contemporaries, he knows them off by heart. But I decide to download them from the Internet instead.

So what are rappers on about these days? Since I earn part of my living as a rock critic, it would be disingenuous of me to pretend that I didn't have a rough idea: sex, drugs, violence, misogyny and homophobia, mostly. What did quite surprise me, though, was just how terribly rude a lot of these lyrics are.

Eminem, needless to say, is one of the worst offenders. His 'Stan' song is actually quite tame - an ordinary heartwarming tale of a suicidal fan driving into a river while drunk with his pregnant girlfriend in the boot. But when you look at some of his racier material, you begin to understand why there are `Parental advisory: explicit content' stickers slapped all over his records.

In `Kill You', for example, he suggests: `Fuck that, take drugs, rape sluts, make fun of gay clubs'; on `Just Don't Give a Fuck' he jocularly recalls how he `went to gym in eighth grade, raped the women's swim team'; while on `Role Model', he cheerily advises his fresh-faced listeners: `Follow me and do exactly what the song says: smoke weed, take pills, drop outta school, kill people and drink.'

The problem with quoting Eminem out of context like this is that it makes him sound merely foul-mouthed and braindamaged. These things may be true - he does swear a lot and he did once spend five days in a coma after being given a cerebral haemorrhage by the school bully - and they certainly go a long way towards explaining why teenagers so readily identify with him. Even so, I suspect that there's rather more to his popularity than that.

Clearly, one of his major attractions is that he's a white man who has succeeded in a predominantly black musical genre (hiphop), making him a vital role model for all those pale-faced middle-class teenagers out there who so desperately wish they had been born black. As Eminem once put it: `There are kids out there who, believe it or not, want to be the have-nots.'

The technical term for such people is 'Wiggers' (short for `White Niggers'). You only nave to looK at the popularity of Ali G (in real life a nice Cambridge-educated Jewish boy) to realise how widespread a phenomenon this is. Nor is it any coincidence that beneath his plausible black hip-hop patois Britain's most influential hip-hop DJ, Radio One's Tim Westwood, is the very white and middle-class son of the former Bishop of Peterborough.

`Demographically, hiphop's biggest audience consists of white suburban teens. Twenty years ago, they would have been playing guitar on their tennis rackets and listening to heavy metal. Now they're throwing up hiphop hand signals and talking like Ali G,' says Andy Cowan, editor of Hip-Hop Connection, who's also white and middle-class but at least doesn't speak with a silly accent. `They associate blackness with excitement and danger. They listen to hiphop as a form of escapism, vicariously living out lives they will never experience themselves. There's an undercurrent of violence to it; a toughness that you just don't find in other forms of music.'

As Cowan admits, some of that violence and gore is there purely for effect: `Hiphop is about theatre, exaggeration and braggadocio.' It's about boasting about how much bigger and tougher (and more verbally dexterous) you are than all the other rappers out there; about what unfeasibly vast quantities of dope you smoke (strong Californian marijuana, aka 'blunt' or `The Chronic', is every rapper's drug of choice); about how many niggas from the rival gang you've wasted.