Liam Julian writes:
. . . The public, to its immense discredit, is less honest than it should be about rap’s pernicious influence. Those who foist upon hip-hop a legitimacy it doesn’t deserve, act carelessly at best, and insidiously at worst.
Paeans to hip-hop’s supposed noble origins and message of black empowerment notwithstanding, the sensible person would be hard-pressed to find anything but discouragement in most
rap libretto.
. . . Hip-hop’s message is one that advocates extreme social pathology on a mass level. Elvis’s hips may have scandalized 1950’s America, but surely they didn’t glorify stealing cars, selling drugs, and shooting one another.
. . . The worst of hip-hop isn’t changing and isn’t going anywhere, at least as long it has an audience that will pay. But let us not be under any illusions about hip-hop’s message — it’s a negative, unhealthy one — and let us not give hip-hop a place in polite society that it does not deserve.
Liam Julian concludes:
Hip-hop artists who do their part to further degrade urban communities should be treated as the social menaces they are, and their product should be received similarly.
Liam Julian is associate writer and editor at the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation and a fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution.