Jim:
> BTW, white audiences seem to buy much more rap music than Black ones.
> I don't know if it's disproportionate or not.
My understanding is that initially, when the genre first emerged in the 1980s, the conventional black stations refused to play the stuff, and it is white college stations that started promoting it, evidently because it was sufficiently weird and countercultural. A few years later, this niche swallowed the entire industry (just like the Nike shoes) and the genre became more "acceptable" by the establishment, to the point that whites (line Eminem) could do it. My unscientific observation is that this genre has an appeal to mostly adolescent crowd, both urban blacks and suburban whites, because of it shock value and vulgarity. I also observed that for many suburban whites it is basically a "safe" form of saying "fuck you" to teachers and parents when played on their car radios - but otherwise these folk feel very threatened by blacks, and would not set their feet in the inner city.
My beef is not really with the genre itself, some of which seems interesting, especially when it fuses with reggae, but with how it is being used in this country's culture: a silly regression to adolescence that seem to dominated the US pop culture and use music (not just rap, but rock in general) for its in-your-face shock value - as an obnoxious noise and an expression of male aggression rather than an art form. The same thing can be said about dress - as "Pornification of America" piece in Boston Globe posted earlier to this list suggests. It is understandable when adolescent boys and girls do that, but it becomes truly pathetic when adults, chronologically in their forties and fifties but regressing to the mental age of 14 embrace this form of cultural values and behavior.
I generally find the US culture to be high on bombast and hyperbole, and lacking finesse and nuances - everything seems to be right in your face and over your head with hammer to make sure that everybody gets it. Americans also tend to be louder and more obnoxious in public places than most other nationalities. Therefore, this cultural regression to adolescence seems to be yet another manifestation of the US silliness and arrogance - which I (an most foreigners) find highly annoying.
Wojtek