IN art as in politics, entrenched institutions with an affinity for survival give off the scent of revolution even as they sustain a suffocating order.

                                Mark Helprin, "Against the Dehumanization of Art"

Nothing could be more obvious, it seems to me, than that art should be moral and that the first business of criticism, at least some of the time, should be to judge works of literature (or painting or even music) on grounds of the production’s moral worth. By "moral" I do not mean some such timid evasion as "not too blatantly immoral."

                                John Gardner, "On Moral Fiction"

The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter.

                                Humphrey Bogart, as Sam Spade in "The Maltese Falcon"

It may seem pretentious to include two high-toned quotations from serious writers in an overture to a discussion about rap music. After all, it’s only a popular art form.  But rap is pervasive and culturally influential. Its huge sales figures are a clear indication of its popularity across racial and class lines.  The few music videos shown on MTV, an accurate barometer of middle-class pop culture values, are almost exclusively rap videos. 

More important, rap, particularly gangsta rap, has the quality that theorists of late twentieth century art value almost to the exclusion of all others: transgressiveness.  The cultural atmosphere that asks us to accept as serious art such products as Robert Mapplethorpe’s sado-masochistic photographs and the work of British artists Gilbert and George, whose hand-dyed photographs feature images of bodily waste and fluids, leads inevitably to disturbing popular art.  Pop music critics maintain that we must also take rap seriously, for it expresses the desires and frustrations of a large portion of society that we have failed, inner city African-Americans.  Further, they insist that it presents an accurate and complete portrayal of urban culture.

For those of us who were around when rap first hit the airwaves, it seems impossible that we’re still hearing it twenty years later and that it is the predominant African-American popular art form.  Rhythm and blues singing is still around in the form of oversouled divas (Whitney Houston, et.al.) or, if what I hear on my local R & B station is any indication, an updated version of 70s sweet soul.  But the majority of black music, the music that gets played on urban stations and that thumps through cars in the small city where I live and its suburbs, is rap.

In form, the blueprint for rap was contained in "Rapper’s Delight," the 1979 hit by the Sugar Hill Gang.  The rhythm track was "Good Times," a hit for Chic earlier in the year, over which the Sugar Hill Gang rapped.  “Rapper’s Delight” established the pattern for the form: Take a familiar song, or a pastiche of familiar songs, remove the vocals, and rap over the music.  There have, of course, been some variations. Some rap songs are built on a programmed drum or keyboard track. And, to be fair, some of the rhythm tracks are ingenious constructions of sampled music. To my ears, though, what we have here is a novelty; a sub-genre of music and art that holds the same interest that, say, the combination of poetry and jazz did in the fifties.  A novel diversion, maybe, but folks didn’t spend the fifties grooving to Ken Nordine records.

Let’s cut to the chase here: There’s no melody in rap.  With rare exceptions, there are no musical instruments, or, at least, no instruments that haven’t been sampled from another recording.  A turntable is a wonderful thing for playing music, but, to state the obvious, it’s not a musical instrument, no matter how cool or interesting the sound you’re making when you fool with it. 

If my comments so far disqualify me from passing aesthetic judgement on rap as a form, that’s fine with me.  Life is short and I only have so much time to buy and listen to the small number of new pop releases that interest me or the jazz and R&B reissues that I grab before they go out of print again.  I’ve heard rap critics and historians discourse on the changes in rap over the last 20 years and I can’t hear much difference.  I just don’t hear a line that leads from one form of rap to another in the way bop leads to hard bop, for example.

What I do feel qualified to look at and speak out about is the content of rap.  I can't pretend to know anything about ghetto life. I don't live in the inner city.  Neither do Robert Hilburn of the Los Angeles Times nor Dave Marsh nor any of the other champions of rap who have no reservations about telling us that the portrayals of city life that rap gives us are absolute truth.  While some of rap’s content has its roots in African American culture, the extreme violence and perverse sexuality it exhibits in its most transgressive form, gangsta rap, have been encouraged, aided, and influenced by critics whose writing is informed by late twentieth century art theory and social activism.  Those critics are far less interested in rap as an art form than they are in its ability to offend polite society.   

Since rap as we currently know it is the product of a continuum, it might be instructive to consider a couple of artists whose work preceded the current crop, beginning with "Rapper’s Delight."  Its opening lines pretty much set the tone for the rest of the record: 

                I said a hip hop the hippie the hippie
                To the hip hip hop, a you don’t stop 
                The rock it to the bang bang boogie say up           
                Jumped the boogie 
                To the rhythm of the boogie, the beat

A little further along, we hear the familiar swagger we associate with the form:

                Check it out, I'm the c-a-s-an-the-o-v-a
                And the rest is f-l-y
                Ya see I go by the code of the doctor of the mix
                And these reasons I'll tell ya why
                Ya see I'm six foot one and I'm tons of fun
                And I dress to a t
                Ya see I got more clothes than Muhammad            
                Ali and I dress so viciously
                I got bodyguards, I got two big cars
                That definitely aint the wack…

Aside from the fact that we need something akin to the footnotes to  "The Wasteland" to understand what's going on (and "Rapper's Delight" is nearly as long as "The Wasteland"), there’s nothing in the tune that is particularly objectionable.  The lyrics are obviously aimed at an in-group that is familiar with the idiom, no outsiders allowed.  My only reaction when I hear "Rapper’s Delight" is a strong desire to listen to Chic, among the few bright spots of the disco era. 

As rap continued to gain popularity through the eighties, critics pointed to Public Enemy as true innovators who brought the form into the realm of art.  They frequently list the group’s 1990 album Fear of a Black Planet among the best pop albums of all time.  Public Enemy’s raps were overtly political and portrayed race relations in stark terms:

                Man you ain't gotta 
                Worry 'bout a thing
                'Bout your daughter 
                Nah she ain't my type 
                (But supposin' she said she loved me) 
                Are you afraid of the mix of Black and White 
                We're livin' in a land where
                The law say the mixing of race
                Makes the blood impure 
                She's a woman I'm a man
                But by the look on your face 
                See ya can't stand it ("Fear of a Black Planet")

In "Burn Hollywood Burn" Public Enemy expressed anger and humiliation at the stereotypes of blacks they see in America’s movies:

                As I walk the streets of Hollywood Boulevard
                Thinkin' how hard it was to those that starred
                In the movies portrayin' the roles 
                Of butlers and maids slaves and hoes 
                Many intelligent Black men seemed to look uncivilized 
                When on the screen 
                Like a guess I figure you to play some jigaboo 
                On the plantation, what else can a nigger do 
                And Black women in this profession 
                As for playin' a lawyer, out of the question 
                For what they play Aunt Jemima is the perfect term
                Even if now she got a perm 
                So let's make our own movies like Spike Lee 
                Cause the roles being offered don't strike me 
                There's nothing that the Black man could use to earn 
                Burn Hollywood burn

“Meet the G that Killed Me” painted a grim picture of drug  use and AIDS in the inner city:

                Man to man
                I don't know if they can 
                From what I know 
                The parts don't fit (Ahh shit) 
                How he's sharin' a needle 
                With a drug addict 
                He don't believe he has it (Either) 
                But now he does, he doesn't know cause he 
                Goes straight to a ho 
                Tell you what who was next on the but 
                Wild thingin' on a germ 
                Runnin' wild Yo stop 
                But the bag popped

Once again, the rhymes are suffused with enough slang to keep the uninitiated at bay.  Public Enemy presented a dark view of inner city life and forced its listeners to come to terms with that image.  As I read their lyrics, I was struck repeatedly by their sense of purpose, their will to communicate harsh truths without compromise.  They obviously set the standard for musical activism and reportage that critics point to as the ultimate purpose of rap, a standard those same critics set aside when other rappers focused solely on violence and sexuality without any purpose beyond sensationalism and record sales.  

I had assumed, unfairly, that Public Enemy also set the standard for the mind numbing repetition of profanity that is gansta rap’s salient feature.  While they were not reluctant to pepper their records with harsh language, they used it much more sparingly, and to greater effect, than rappers whose work dominates the charts today.  Let me pause here to point out that I don’t find profanity to be particularly bothersome.  The introduction of profanity into twentieth- century narrative art certainly aided in the realistic portrayal of some of life’s experiences.  It should not, however, be the sole measure of art or even of realism.  Used sparingly, at the right moment, it can be effective.  Overused, it becomes boring.  We’ve probably all had the experience of sitting through a movie and thinking, "Would they really swear that much?"  Gansta rap bludgeons us with profanity. 

The group that established the tone for gansta rap, the excessive profanity and romanticized violence, was NWA (Niggaz With Attitude), in a record that was released in 1986, two years before Public Enemy’s first album.  Here are a few lines from their controversial song "Fuck Da Police":

                Smoke any muthafucka that sweats me
                Or any assho that threatens me
                I'm a sniper with a hell of a scope
                Takin out a cop or two, they can't cope with me

Gansta rap, the form of rap popularized by NWA, Notorious B.I.G., and TuPac Shakur has reached a point where its sensationalism and vulgarity are not strongly felt cries of help from the oppressed but rather the rules of the game--it’s what sells records.  Gansta rap’s supporters tell us that the images and feelings expressed in these recordings are what the ghetto is like, reports from the front line.  Yet the macho posturing and the glorification of violence are excessive to the point of parody:  

                If I die tonight, I'm dying in a gunfight
                 I grabbed the AK, my homie took the 12 gauge 
                Load em up quick, it's time for us to spray 
                We'll shoot em up with they own fuckin weapons
                                                                ("Violent" Tupac Shakur)

                C'mere, c'mere [it ain't gotta be like that Big]
                Open your fucking mouth, open your... didn't I tell you
                Don't fuck with me? [*muffled* c'mon man]  Huh?
                Didn't I tell you not to fuck with me?
                (as we proceed) [c'mon man] Look at you now
                (to give you what you need) Huh? [c'mon man]
                (9 to 5 motherfuckers) Can't talk with a gun in your mouth huh?
                (get live motherfuckers) Bitch-ass nigga, what?
                (get live motherfuckers) [*muffled sounds, six gun shots*]
                (as we proceed...) Who shot ya?  
                                                                ("Who Shot Ya" Notorious B.I.G.)

Unfortunately, we can’t shrug gansta rap lyrics off as parody.  First of all, as I’ve already noted, rap artists don’t intend them as parody.  Second, rap outsells every other form of music.  Of the top twenty pop CDs listed on Billboard’s pop charts, nearly half are rap records or rap compilations.  The rest of the list is divided among country, rock and R&B discs.  To reach sales in such large numbers, rap must appeal and sell to a broad demographic spectrum, especially middle-class white kids.  According to a February 2, 1999 article in Time Magazine, more than 70 percent of rap’s sales are to white listeners. 1   The audience for rap forms its view of black, inner-city culture from the words of rap records and the images of rap videos.  Here, in addition to the words quoted above, is some of what they see:

                 Now, the title bitch don't apply to all women
                But all women have a little bitch in 'em (yeah)
                It's like a disease that's plagues their character
                Talkin' the women of America (yeah)
                                                                ("A bitch is a Bitch" NWA)

                I got a bitch that suck my dick til I nut
                Spit it on my gut and slurp that shit back up
                Ain't that a slut (HELL YEA) she even take it in the butt
                Fuck for bout a hour, now she want a golden shower
                You didn't know that we be pissin on hoes, bitch (BEOTCH)
                Luke and Biggie straight shittin on hoes, bitch (BEOTCH)
                Lick your toes, bitch? (BEOTCH) Fuck no, you must be crazy 
                                                ( "Big Booty Hoes" Notorious B.I.G.)

                Love the way you activate your hips and push your ass out
                Got a nigga wantin it so bad I'm bout to pass out 
                Wanna dig you, and I can't even lie about it
                Baby just alleviate your clothes, time to fly up out it 
                                                ("How Do You Want It" Tupac Shakur)

The message rap sends is that black men are misogynists, that they like cheap and easy sex, and that they are violent.  It’s a message that is being absorbed by white kids who will one day take their place as decision makers and voters who help make policy about aid to the inner city.  It makes you wonder if the Klan has moles in the music industry.

Rap has always enjoyed strong support from pop music critics.  Reviewing Tupac Shakur’s posthumous release R U Still Down? (Remember Me), Rolling Stone called Shakur’s work, "…a fantasy of beating every rap, avenging every insult and squashing every enemy.  Dismiss it as kid stuff if you want. But if you've ever had an enemy, Tupac's bravado can be truly intoxicating."2  CMJ Music review wrote of N.W.A.’s Niggaz4life, “you can't deny the questions it raises in anybody who really listens to it."3

In a nutshell, those are the two strands of argument in support of rap: It’s a guilty pleasure, not to be taken too seriously; or it’s very serious indeed and we are improved by addressing the questions it makes us face.  Sometimes critics embarrass themselves with the claims they make for rap, as did Time Magazine’s Christopher John Farley:

                Hip-hop represents a realignment of America’s cultural aesthetics. Rap songs deliver
                the message, again and again,  to keep it real. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote that
                “a work of art is good if it has sprung from necessity.” Rap is the music of necessity,
                of finding poetry in the colloquial, beauty in anger, and lyricism even in violence.4

The tired argument leveled against anyone who expresses reservations, let alone indignation, about rap is that he is advocating censorship.  I honestly think rap artists should be free to produce whatever they want and that records companies should be able to market it without government intervention. I like to think of myself as a First Amendment fundamentalist. But when pop music critics compare rap to Rilke, when they do it without shame, when they actually think rhymes that glorify violence and cheap sex actually bear comparison with great literature, then it’s time to dismiss them from the table so the adults can have a serious discussion. They’ve lost perspective and, more important, they’ve abandoned a primary responsibility of criticism: To tell us when something is bad or morally wrong.

And why shouldn’t they?  Pop critics want to be taken seriously and they often speak in the language used by critics in other fields.  It’s axiomatic of late twentieth century art that it should, above all, make us face things we don’t want to face.  The implication has been for some time that if art doesn’t make you uncomfortable, if it doesn’t shock you, it isn’t serious.  When the time comes to defend transgressive art, however, apologists invariably use the example of art’s past.  It isn’t enough, for instance, to say that a museum has the right to show a photograph of Robert Mapplethorpe with a bullwhip protruding from his rectum.  The photograph must also be praised for its “classical” composition, as it was by a defense witness, a curator of a museum, during The State of Ohio vs. the Contemporary Art Center and Dennis Barrie:

The human figure is centered. The horizon line is two-thirds of the way up, almost the classical
two-thirds to one-third proportions. The way the light is cast so there's light all around the figure.
It's very symmetrical, which is very characteristic of his flowers. . . . 5

In addition to the desire to be taken seriously, pop critics carry another burden: they want to be hip.  Older critics in particular remember when any challenge to the squares by rock heroes of the sixties was met with approval and was pointed to as proof of rock’s cultural and artistic worth.  They insist that there’s a line that leads from the Rolling Stones to rap and Nine Inch Nails, and suggest that any question about the content of current pop music is deeply hypocritical and a profound sell-out of the sixties ideal of liberation.

Writers who do express reservations can expect to be trounced.  Timothy White merely suggested in an article in Billboard Magazine that Eminem’s egregious CD The Slim Shady LP might give people some thought about the connection between rap and domestic violence 6 and he received this response in New Times LA’s This Week columnist, Bill Holdship:

                Meanwhile, upon the release of Eminem's debut album, First Amendment advocate Timothy White, the arrogant windbag who edits Billboard, publicly called for the CD to be banned by all free-thinking people in this great land of ours. 7

White didn’t call for anything like a ban on the disc.  He simply took Eminem to task for making an ugly record and called the rock press on the carpet for praising it.  But criticism of rap and its supporters results in charges of censorship or worse.  “On the censorship front,” Dave Marsh began a 1995 article attacking editorial comments about rap by Billboard Magazine and protests against rap’s content by William Bennett and C. Delores Tucker, and affixed this footnote to the word “censorship”:

All those who read Billboard and take its editorials seriously (especially the pompous, mealy mouthed blather in the June 17 issue) should feel free to substitute the words "artistic responsibility" for the word “censorship"… 8

There you have it: Point out artistic irresponsibility and you’re calling for censorship.  According to Marsh, “Without rap records, and the few rock records that follow suit, there would be no public discussion of any of these issues, at least not from the point of view of those who are the subjects of most American violence, who are mostly poor, young and black.” 9  Yet I’ve never read an article or review by Marsh where he actually quotes rap lyrics to illustrate his point.  It’s a lot easier to refer to C. Delores Tucker as someone “who heads the Quisling-style National Political Caucus of Black Woman” 10 than it is to quote the lyrics of “Big Booty Hoes” and explain to her why they don’t demean her and other African-American women. 

In a June 1996 column in “Addicted to Noise,” an online music magazine, Marsh trots out his usual argument against those who publicly criticize rap: “…they don't know shit about rap music and its lyrical contents, what they mean or where they are coming from.” 11  Go back and read the lyrics I’ve quoted above.  Or, go to a search engine on the web, type in “rap lyrics” and read the lyrics posted on one of the sites that come up.  What part of  “A Bitch is a Bitch” or  “Big Booty Hoes” might require careful explication?  Is there a subtext to “Fuck Da Police” that we need to study more deeply?

Yes, there are rap artists like Public Enemy that might bear some serious consideration.  But the artists who catch heat from William Bennett or C. Delores Tucker tend to be extremists like N.W.A. and Notorious B.I.G. or individual songs like “Cop Killer” by Ice Tea (not technically a rap song, but one by a rapper).  For all I know, Bennett and Tucker may not like Public enemy either, but they’re only moved to action by the extremists, those artists who go so far their opponents ask, “Must we accept this, too?”  And we get extremist artists when we decide that art’s ultimate purpose is to anger the squares--the bourgeoisie, the church, parents.  When the sole measure of value in art becomes its ability to anger, shock, or offend, artists have to keep raising the stakes in order to keep us interested.  Critic Roger Kimball addressed the issue of extremism in the visual arts in an article posted on The New Criterion’s web-site:

As the search for something new to say or do becomes ever more desperate, artists push themselves to make extreme gestures simply in order to be noticed. But here, too, an inexorably self-defeating logic has taken hold: at a time when so much art is routinely extreme and audiences have become inured to the most brutal spectacles, extremity becomes a commonplace…. Without the sustaining, authoritative backdrop of the normal, extreme gestures--stylistic, moral, political--degenerate into a grim species of mannerism.12

Rap singer Eminem is what you get when transgressiveness is brought to its logical, extreme conclusion. A few examples of his poetic genius, all from his newest disc, The Marshall Mathers LP:

                Bitch I'ma kill you!  You don't wanna fuck with me
                Girls neither - you ain't nuttin but a slut to me
                Bitch I'ma kill you!  You ain't got the balls to beef
                We ain't gon' never stop beefin I don't squash the beef
                                                                                                                 (Kill You)

                I'm the illest nigga ever, I told you
                I get more pussy than them dyke bitches Total
                Want beef, nigga?  PBBT!  You better dead that shit
                My name should be "Can't-Believe-That-Nigga-Said-That- Shit" 
                                                                                                                 (Remember Me?)

                I fucked my cousin in his asshole, slit my mother's throat
                {*AHHHHHHHH!*}Guess who Slim Shady just signed to Interscope?
                My little sister's birthday, she'll remember me
                For a gift I had ten of my boys take her virginity
                {*Mmm mm mmm!*}And bitches know me as a horny ass freak
                Their mother wasn't raped, I ate her pussy while she was 'sleep
                Pissy-drunk, throwin up in the urinal (YOU FUCKIN HOMO!)
                That's what I said at my dad's funeral
                                                                                                                 (Amityville)

At first, The Marshall Mathers LP enjoyed near universal praise in the rock press.  A typical view was Will Hermes’s in Entertainment Weekly: “…the first great pop record of the 21st century.”13  Other prominent critics weighed in: Robert Hilburn of the LA Times, Neil McCormick in London’s Daily Telegraph, Toure in Rolling Stone.  Everybody loved it, even if they found it disturbing (Rolling Stone: “ The Marshall Mathers LP is a car-crash record: loud, wild, dangerous, out of control, grotesque, unsettling. It's also impossible to pull your ears away from.”14). 

Small cracks began to appear in the facade, though.  Eric Boehlert, in an article published in Salon alongside a rave review of Marshall Mathers, wrote: “By defending and celebrating the likes of Eminem while willingly turning a blind eye to his catch message of hate, music critics continue to cheapen their profession.”15  Soon others began to express some doubts. Major magazines featured Eminem in stories about pop culture excess.  Brian Williams of MSNBC did a lengthy segment on the same topic, and again Eminem was the catalyst for the discussion. Even MTV felt compelled to interview him about the content of his lyrics:

                Kurt Loder: Also you're not a fan of gay people, I gather. Is that a problem you have in your life? 

Eminem: … the most lowest degrading thing that you can say to a man when you're battling him is call him a faggot and try to take away his manhood. Call him a sissy, call him a punk. "Faggot" to me doesn't necessarily mean gay people. "Faggot"   to me just means... taking away your manhood. You're a sissy. You're a coward. Just like you might sit around in your living  room and say, "Dude, stop, you're being a fag, dude." This does  not necessarily mean you're being a gay person.16

One had the feeling some pop culture observers were expressing long festering irritation with rap and found in Eminem a convenient outlet.  They finally felt free to vent because Eminem, a middle-class white kid, couldn’t lay claim to the right to express ideas they usually found offensive, at least not within the racial/social class guidelines they had established.  Eminem seems to have a talent for causing pop music observers to utter specious comments. In the MSNBC segment I mentioned above, an editor from Spin magazine said that Eminem was rapping about homosexuality and racism because kids were confused about those issues.  I’ll bet they are: MTV runs ads about diversity and tolerance, then gives over a weekend of broadcast time to Eminem’s hate-filled videos.  Similarly, Spin wrings its hands over racism and homophobia, but seems to think it should give Eminem a pass on those issues.

A culture’s best art offers us variety, the richness of life’s experiences.  We should expect the same from the best popular art, if on a more modest scale.  It is a lie to argue, as pop music apologists do whenever they are defending rap or the dark, violent broodings of bands like Nine Inch Nails, that the value of pop music comes down to this and only this: It has always angered parents, it has always offended the establishment.  

I don’t know if rap is capable of being more than it is now.  I am certain that it will never have the chance to be more if we are afraid to point out where it goes wrong and turns ugly.  We can’t really express surprise if our sons “objectify” women if we don’t tell them that it’s not acceptable for pop artists, regardless of their social or economic class, to call women whores.  Part of the job of being a critic is to hold artists responsible for the things they say in their books, poems, movies, or music.  Pop music critics should be held to the same standard.  That’s not to say that pop music can’t be, on occasion, disturbing and profane.  But it cannot be those things alone and those things alone cannot define its value. 

- Joseph Taylor