As I have said Elsewhere, James:

Think about this seriously for a moment. Have you ever seen a hip hop CD or for that matter, any kind of rap â??musicâ?? literature, where the pictures on them have smiling people in them? Iâ??ll tell you point blank, I havenâ??t. The reasons are simple enough. The kind of music weâ??re dealing with is all about anger, and power and the grabbing of it. . Anger against everyone and everything that stands in the way of instant and total gratification, be it sex money, whatever. It all represents POWER.

My point here is not a racial one; Black music certainly isnâ??t the only to have fallen under this spell of anger. I would point to what passes for todayâ??s heavy metal, speed metal, etc. acts, for examples of the problem on the white side of the aisle. Just a few years ago now bands like Boston, Deep Purple, Yes, Zepp, or before them Uriah Heep, and that crowd, etc., were considered out on the edge of the metal scene. A comparison of musical content and lyrical content between that generation of bands and this, is downright startlingâ?¦ even for those who have followed or been part of the music scene for the last 30 some odd years. Whenâ??s the last time you heard a metal band playing an uplifting tune of the stature of Triumph doing â??Hold Onâ??, for example?

Mind you, in either case, I donâ??t see the music as an instigator so much as a carrier of this anger. Rather like germs, it has the ability to infect the listener, to the point where the listener and eventually believes the nonsense heâ??s being fed in the music.

However, the music wouldnâ??t exist without the angerâ?¦. And the music is not the root problem. The music is but a symptom of the anger. The anger is, as I have said previously, cultural in nature, and that â??anger cultureâ?? advances as it is able to break down our existing American culture.