“Rap music is the CNN of the ghetto.” – Chuck D

Rap began — Chuck D nailed it — as news from the streets. Rap riffed ghetto life, syncopated in hard rhymes and dense metaphor the raw reality of the ghetto. In Ronald Reagan’s America, blacks in the ghettos from Harlem to Bed Stuy to South Central formed what George Bataille called the heterogeneous element of society — or the unassimable byproduct of a culture, born of that culture, upon which the culture rests. In plain English, rap was the art of the dispossessed, and as the art of the dispossessed, it tells us the truth of the trickle-down economic era from the mouths of those who were held far beneath the place where the trickle dried up.

Rap began as a linguistic pissing contest — and it has been always more than news. It is also poetry, entertainment and resistance. As news, it is largely unwelcome. As poetry, it is mad rich and ripping angry. As entertainment, the joke is always right-on the money, and as resistance, it is unbeatable because, instead of setting the ghetto on fire, it creates from the ashes — the shit and the garbage — the nothing, going nowhere despair of the reviled and the forgotten.

Much has been made of rap then and rap now. Rap, the argument goes, has been mainstreamed, even atomized. In this process, it has lost its political edge and anger. At the same time, critics ask rappers to grow up, to mature, to stop singing about bitches and hoes. Unsurprisingly, these tendencies contradict each other — and instead of choosing between the two lines of thinking, we note that the paradoxical attitude is a way of still not knowing quite what to do with rap.

Consider two themes that still dominate rap — swagger (and all that comes with it) and brutality. Rap still deals in race and racism, and, I believe, its critical reception is . . .

Read more: Rap as News or Art?