In perhaps the most astoundingly idiotic theory yet espoused by a musican, Alicia Keys has stated that ‘gangsta rap’ is a genre invented by the US government as a way to ‘convince black people to kill each other’, and that murders such as those of Tupac Shakur and Notorious B.I.G. were designed to ‘stop a great black leader from existing’. (In an interview with Blender magazine.) News Hour is reminded of Aids being engineered to wipe out the gay population, or the government killing thousands of its own people to justify the war in Iraq.
Such a conspiracy would have to be impossibly complex to exist – let alone succeed – and its formulation has the mark of that strange modern mindset of both distrusting and yet vastly overestimating the capabilities of modern administrations, a beholden attitude that only serves to fuel that which it perceives. It appears surprising, for instance, that Barack Obama has made it as far as he has. Or that the government allowed the famously administration-friendly Fox network to have positive black role models in 24.
Is gun crime also a conspiracy? Are LA gangs all created by the government, secretly peopled by painted G-Men on deep cover, killing each other in the name of repressing the black man? Also, one must consider that while the majority of ‘gangsta rap’ is about shagging, power, drugs and guns, some of it is genuine street poetry, and to claim that the genre is simply a paranoid invention does its more noble practioners a disservice.
One can only hope that Keys is on a wind-up, stirring up a storm to promote some album or other.
News hour, with Jerry Caesar 