#gansta rap

all of the west coast greats

Upon first thought, these two things don’t seem to be connected in anyway. Indeed they have no connection in origin, likeness, or message. However, they are both examples of how human beings view morality through a broken lens.

Let me start with gansta rap. I’ve mentioned in passing before that I have a somewhat sorted past. There was a time when I followed the evangelicals LOX and Tupac preach the gospel of fast money. I disturbed my family greatly, but I was indignant to their criticisms of rap. Although they generalized greatly about the genre of rap as a whole, they had good points about gansta rap in particular. How could any sane person listen to and enjoy music about killing, crime, and willful social ignorance? Remember, we’re speaking of gansta rap specifically. This is something kids in both urban areas and suburbs have been soaking up for years now, and there is a real detachment from the listener and the actual message of the music. As any of the old school greats will tell you, most of these kids are making up fantasies of gansterism, drug dealing, and gun play. But we know for sure there are figures like LOX, Biggie, DMX, that were not telling lies by any means. These people are true thugs and killers, that would do things 90% of their listeners would never dream of. 

When we look at kids who casually flaunt this gangsterism like a Saturday morning action cartoon, we can see a compartmentalization happening, where the grittiness of the actual message is sectioned off and ignored, while a vision of harmless hyperbole is created in it’s place. I think specifically for suburban kids, that what is discussed in gangsta rap is so foreign that it truly doesn’t feel real, like when we watch mob movies and root for mobster. However, in urban areas, we see the deadly effect of people actually living these lives and then teaching it to kids through music, so that it is not only normalized, but encouraged.

For everyone, this is a faulty approach. There is no argument to defend praising someone who promotes murder, abuse, crime, and so on. You cannot erase statements like this with a couple lines about peace and love. If you knew someone personally who could be fun to party with, but every now and then he shot people at night, you wouldn’t consider him a moral person based his fun loving party attitude. The murder would clearly override that in importance. 

Today, I still enjoy rap as a genre, but I stay away from gangsa rap, because I can’t resolve the words with my own morals, and consciously ignoring it makes no sense either. 

So, what does this all have to do with scripture? For our purpose here, there a couple differences between scripture and GR we need to observe. GR is a sub-genre of the umbrella Hip-Hop. Because genres do not carry unified messages or opinions, and literally each song is varied by the individual and there mood, then music, no matter what genre, is infinitely diverse. So the genre itself cannot be judged by what individuals may do with it. More importantly, musicians do not claim to be perfect, and many do not even claim to be good people. Scripture on the other hand is a package deal that cannot be separated, and it is claimed to be the perfect word of a perfect god. 

When judging the morality of scripture, like judging a specific rap song, the lowest projection of morality is what matters most. If I wrote a book on morality, claiming to show a new way to live, no matter amazing my ideas were if there were a chapter about encouraging child marriage you would toss my book out the window. I would demonized all over social media and none of my other ideas would be given any credence. But this is exactly the situation we have with scripture. Both the Bible and Quran have wonderful little parables about love and kindness, but they both endorse murder, abuse, rape, war, and list of other immoralities. To say that we must look past all of this and not judge scripture based on those claims is no different than saying we should ignore the killing and abuse of women in gansta rap, because there’s a few cool lines. 

No, that shouldn’t be how morality works. Scripture is more accountable, because it is presented with all the books as cannon and claims to be perfect. There is no excuse to let any of this pass by. However, humans are naturally adept at rationalizing and justifying what we want. The next stage in humanities moral progress, will be to end this trend and truly challenge ourselves and others to be consistent. Let’s face it, we are not morally consistent in America, and we’re surrounded by so much wrong doing it feels impossible to deal with it all. So we don’t. If we want to make our societies last and advance them, then we will need to learn to deal. Something such as scripture and gansta rap are abundantly obvious areas to start. 

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