Music can make people do strange things. It can rouse them to action, as a performance of Auber's opera La Muette de Portici did in the Belgian revolution of 1830. Or it can make them want to pat people on the head, as Lenin once said of a Beethoven sonata. Yet for every enflamed Belgian or sentimental Russian, there are hundreds of others who will listen to the same music and then turn in for a night's untroubled sleep.
To blame gangsta rap for current gun violence is therefore also a bit of a stretch. There is, as far as we know, no serious evidence at all of any mechanistic causality between the two. That some of the young men who carry handguns in our inner cities spend a lot of their time listening to rap music is not in question. But so do millions of other people, black and white, gentle and not, who never dream of flirting with the gun culture at all. To blame the music for the shooting is simply to miss the target.
This is not at all to offer a free pass to some hip-hop lyrics. For all sorts of reasons - the attitude to women as much as the attitude to violence - the language of parts of the hip-hop culture of the past decade has fallen consistently short of the level of moral responsibility that should be expected of any human being towards its fellows, and especially expected of public artists.
For a culture with so much to say about the need for respect - a genuine need for all individuals and communities at any time - hip-hop can sometimes be shockingly disrespectful, in particular to women. But for every Ja Rule, for whom guns, women and cars are mere accessories of a morally compromised body of work, there is a Lauryn Hill or Common, as well as many underground artists, against whom such accusations cannot be made. In the end, the truth is not complicated. Artists, like all of us, have moral responsibilities to respect their publics. Hip-hop artists should discharge theirs. Respect is a two-way street.
