My rap problems--and yours?

William O'Rourke teaches English at the University of Notre Dame

July 30, 2006

First off, I am an OAF, an Older American Father. I considered creating an organization, OAFS USA, but I decided I didn't want to spend a lot of time with geezers like myself. I got married late, in my early 40s; back then, my wife-to-be kept pointing out that less than 10 percent of men had never been married by age 40. She is an economist, a fan of numbers. A few years after we were married we had a boy, Joe.

Joe is now 15 (and I am 60) and he is overscheduled, which I don't mind, except that it makes me overscheduled. I often drive him around and he plays CD compilations consisting mainly of rap tunes on the car's player.

"I'm gonna get my gun!" Around our neighborhood here in South Bend, Ind., young folks do often go and get their guns.

I, of course, dislike Joe's taste in music, but can't keep from recalling that my parents abhorred my music. The Beatles? Janis Joplin? So, I try to temper my criticism--I don't want to sound like too much of a hypocrite. So, I let Joe listen to his music of choice. The sexual content and language of a lot of it shocks me--me, a child of the '60s! Petey Pablo's "Freek-A-Leek" is one of the worst offenders.

We live in what's called an "urban" neighborhood, which translates into poor black people living within shouting distance of the white college professors. So I make Joe listen to my anti-rap tirades. My tirades sound pretty much like the anti-rap speech the character played by the rap star Ludacris makes in the film "Crash." Oh, the irony, Ludacris' character sounding like Bill Cosby, or for that matter Bill O'Reilly, attacking rap for what it does to black culture, shortly after he and his buddy have carjacked a monster luxury sport-utility vehicle. I wondered, after "Crash" won the Oscar for best film this year, if a white screenwriter had penned that anti-rap monologue, or if a black writer had done it. In any case, the gangsta rap group Three 6 Mafia won the Oscar for best song, "It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp." Pick your irony.

Joe has forced me to listen to Eminem and his band D12, and after a while I began to realize M&M (my preferred spelling) has some talent.

But, most often, I just listen and think perennial parental thoughts: What is the world coming to?

Joe is an only child, so he gets a lot of attention--and slack. I encourage him to listen to the Public Radio jazz station (he is in a jazz band), but, no, he wants to listen to hybrids like Linkin Park, Black Eyed Peas, and other rap-lite groups, which I criticize less.

But, everything is more of the same. When I was a teenager, Norman Podhoretz made a splash with an essay titled "My Negro Problem--and Ours," writing about the pervasive racism he and his white friends weren't able to shake, though they often denied its existence.

Here I was, some 40 years later, denouncing rap music, being superior to all its parts, ranting on about how its commercialization was as cynical and as damaging as McDonald's diets to poverty-level blacks. My son's generation doesn't think like mine and whatever is racist in his cohort doesn't look like it did in the 1950s or '60s, even if the results might be the same for so much of black youth: separation of the races, lower test scores, higher dropout rates and the chance of being jailed.

"I'm gonna get my gun!" bounces again from the car's CD player. When I was a kid, my father would have changed the station on the radio. I do shut off the CD player every once in a while when I can't stand it any longer. But the technology made things a lot easier in the 1950s. Now we all make our own music, carry it with us. I choose to listen along with Joe--instead of him listening alone on his iPod. His world: a mystery to me, his liking what he likes, as it makes him who he is, who he is to become.