"In my view, (c)rap is to music what Schwarzenegger and Stallone are to film - both are cases of an art form in the service of machismo. And if I am to do some racial stereotyping of my own, both express the quintessential characteristic of white machismo and black machismo."
I think that the emergence of rap has a lot to do with the disappearance of music/orchestral programs in the public schools. We're looking at a generation of kids with no musical training and very little experience of social merry-making, while at the same time commercial music and all its hi-tech infrastructure comes to the fore. Rap also blossomed in a period of hyper-consumersim. It's a lot easier to buy a boom box than to learn to play the guitar, and there's nothing in your culture that attaches more value to being an artist than to being a consumer of art. I remember seeing a teen movie some years ago in which the young male teen comes a courting, not to strum his guitar under his love's window, but to hold his boom box aloft, with music blasting....to woo her. Pathetic.
I withhold judgement on the value of all rap music. My son (20) listens to it and likes some of it quite a lot and he has pretty good taste in music over all. I think the gangsta stuff is only a part of the rap genre, though it is the part that is featured on commercial radio.
As for interracial dating...it's much, much more common in the Bay area than I've ever seen it before. I'm guessing this varies across the U.S.
Joanna