SHORT TAKES : Critics Rap Newsweek on Rap

More than three dozen of the nation’s music critics have sent a joint letter to Newsweek protesting the news magazine’s recent “Rap Rage” cover story. In a letter to the editor, drafted by Greg Sandow of Entertainment Weekly, the critics lambaste the magazine for “lurid distortion” in a four-page essay, “The Rap Attitude,” by Jerry Adler. The essay preceded a three-page cover story on “Decoding Rap Music.”

The critics say Adler’s essay reduced the genre to one violent dimension, making rap “seem gigantically more violent, obscene and confrontational than it is. . . . Even artists who might be controversial were misrepresented.”

The letter also says that Adler barely mentions serious, constructive rap songs on the market, overlooks its women practitioners, and fails to place rap into any musical, social, cultural or historical context, choosing instead to invent “a nightmarish--and racist--fantasy about ignorant black men who scream obscene threats.”