Barrett Kalellis
Tuesday, Feb. 11, 2003

Rap music should be outlawed even if it takes an Act of Congress to do it.

As a child of the fifties, I’m well aware of the fits that popular music caused my parents’ generation. Rock and roll was blamed for everything from teenagers’ Brylcreem ducktails to lewd dancing to juvenile delinquency.

Fifties rock and roll, though, seems high art compared to what saturates the airwaves today.

Back then, religious and civic leaders fulminated from pulpit and public square alike in condemning “the devil’s music.” In a famous and widely seen newsreel clip, the president of a citizens’ council from a Southern state insisted that “We shouldn’t allow our children to be brought down to this level.”

After listening to an hour’s worth of current rap music as represented by a performer who calls himself “50 Cent,” however, I’m beginning to think that this guy was unfortunately way ahead of his time.

I see nothing whatsoever to recommend this “music” to anyone; in fact, I think it is highly damaging to young people, and certainly subversive to art and civilization in general. It’s a “bad rap” for blacks to have this pernicious influence in their neighborhoods, and for this they have the media, venal businessmen and a gaggle of “black leaders” to blame, who do nothing to condemn it.

Among others, I accuse the major metropolitan newspapers, magazines and TV programs, particularly mediocre producers, editors and writers of the entertainment and features sections, who run story after story about the uneducated decadents who perform in and control this drug-infested industry. By doing so, they glorify this no-talent slime, unwittingly putting them in positions of successful role models for impressionable youth.

Eminem, Dr. Dre, Tupak Shakur, Ludacris, Jam Master Jay, P. Diddy, Snoop Dogg and the rest of the sorry lot are essentially a Sopranos-like organization of thugs who act and do business just like Tony, Ralphie and Uncle Junior. They lust after each other’s swag, cut into each other’s territories, and whack each other if someone gets dissed, all the while purveying noxious products.

Instead of Cosa Nostra dealers hanging around schoolyards, peddling coke and crank to school age children, rap moguls Suge Knight, Russell Simmons and lesser luminaries traffic in vulgar, immoral filth – infecting kids’ minds instead of their bodies.

Last Sunday, the Detroit Free Press spent five columns and a photo describing the star power of this “50 Cent,” noting that before he made it big in the music business, he was a crack dealer from Queens. Yet in the same issue, columnist Mitch Albom inveighed against rap vulgarity as entertainment. Didn’t this strike the editor as schizophrenic?

America’s newsrooms and TV studios are populated mainly by middle-aged scribblers, the overwhelming majority of whom, I would wager, have never listened approvingly to any rap music in their lives. If they did, we would question their intelligence and their sanity.

But they continue to give ink and air time to these “artists” because they think it’s somehow a trend that must be reported and they think it will interest their audiences. They mistakenly presume that educated persons who read their newspapers and watch their programs want this trash paraded before them.

In their heart of hearts, if these people don’t think this music has any merit, their attitude can only be compared to that of the drug-dealing don in “Godfather I” who reasons that it’s OK to peddle drugs only in certain neighborhoods: “Let them lose their souls.”

In other words, “If I don’t allow it in my house, who cares if others want to listen to it?” They are thus blind to its destructiveness.

Has our culture become so debased that righteous people will not take a stand for what is patently immoral, degenerate and childishly posturing? Do we want young children to talk like they live on the wharf? Do we want them to regard women in lewd and degrading ways? Do we want to forgo inspiring youth to higher forms of artistic merit and expression by celebrating the untalented dregs?

Is there any other business where employees gain advancement by exhibiting and bragging about their rude, thuggish and criminal behavior?

In the fifties, certain novels were “Banned in Boston” because of their salacious language and sexual content. As misguided as these efforts may have been, they were based on a widely shared belief that there do exist bad influences on the moral fabric of society.

I challenge you, dear reader, to listen to the “music” of “50 Cent” and tell me that a diet of this stuff can’t rot children’s minds or perhaps give them brain cancer, or if nothing else, won’t certainly deaden their souls. \ Barrett Kalellis is a columnist and writer whose articles appear regularly in various local and national print and online publications. You may reach Mr. Kalellis at kalellis@newsmax.com.

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