Rap Music’s Real Roots Are in the Best Tradition of Protest

If Tupac Shakur’s posthumous “The Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory” replaces the Beatles’ “Anthology 3” as the nation’s best-selling album on Wednesday, as expected, it will be one more sign to millions of Americans of the bankruptcy of rap music.

More than one disgusted observer will grumble, “How could anyone buy a record by that thug?”

Millions of Americans have decried rap music as a dangerous glorification of immorality and illegality since its arrival on the pop scene more than a decade ago, but the view has greatly hardened following a series of ugly high-profile incidents involving Death Row Records.

The Beverly Hills-based company’s primary stars, Shakur and Snoop Doggy Dogg, and its owner, Marion “Suge” Knight, have seemingly spent more time in courtrooms than in recording studios.

Part of a long history of violent confrontations, Shakur was sentenced in 1995 to up to 4 1/2 years in a New York prison after being convicted of the sexual abuse of a 19-year-old woman in a hotel room. After being bailed out of prison by Knight, Shakur was awaiting the appeal of his case when he was fatally wounded by unknown assailants while riding in a car with Knight in September near the Las Vegas Strip.

Knight, with a considerable police record of his own, was soon in jail in Los Angeles after missing a drug test required by probation--the result of pleading no contest in February of 1995 to two counts of assault against two aspiring rappers in a Hollywood recording studio.

And, there was Snoop, who, along with his bodyguard, was acquitted Feb. 20 of murder charges in the 1993 shooting death of a young man in a Palms park.

Isn’t all this confirmation of the emptiness and corruption of rap?

Not at all.

There is much that is troubling and ugly about the rap scene, both in the music, which frequently overflows with violent and misogynist overtones, and the lifestyles of some of its elite.

But the most powerful and purposeful rap, like most great art, tells us something about the times and, in this case, even the society in which we live.

The music speaks so strongly to a young, active record-buying audience that albums by superstars, such as Shakur, can generate $50 million to $75 million in sales. Even rap artists almost unknown to the general pop community can regularly break into the national Top 10 after just one week in the stores.

Only a fraction of the albums are worth critical attention, yet that fraction is deeply rooted in the valuable, protest tradition of the blues, folk music and rock ‘n’ roll. If starting their careers today, Robert Johnson and Leadbelly, Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley would be rappers.

When Bob Dylan brought the politics of folk music into the mainstream rock world in the ‘60s, many adults were as outraged as rap opponents today, especially when he wrote antiwar songs, including “The Times They Are A-Changin’ ” at a point in history when the nation was gearing up for Vietnam. His words are now looked back upon as poetry, but they were considered by many in the ‘60s to border on subversion.

The best rap stirs and provokes with the same tenacity as Dylan. And not everyone ends up absorbed by the gangsta lifestyle. The two artists who did the most to infuse rap with social commentary are New York’s Chuck D. and Los Angeles’ Ice Cube, and you won’t find their names on a police blotter.

It was Ice Cube who largely wrote “F--- Tha Police,” the 1989 track by the group N.W.A. that escalated the public outcry against rap and was called incendiary by some law enforcement groups.

Like much of hard-core rap since, the words, which articulated underclass hostility at police oppression, bore an explosive edge--framed by startling gangster images that Ice Cube and other rappers found so captivating in mobster-themed movies such as “The Godfather” and, especially, “Scarface.”

Chuck D. is an even more direct link with Dylan. In the rapper’s albums fronting the group Public Enemy, the first released in 1988, he raised fiery questions about race relations and power in America. Though controversial at the time, they carried an almost scholarly edge when measured against the gangsta rap tradition that has stretched from N.W.A. to Shakur.

In “White Heaven . . . Black Hell,” he spelled out the contradictions that he saw around him in a series of simple images:

Black athletes . . . White agents

Black preacher . . . White Jesus

Black entertainers . . . White lawyers

Black Monday . . . White Christmas

From the start, Chuck D. was conscious of his role as a teacher, saying his records were the ‘hood’s equivalent of CNN. Eight years after his debut album, he is now a frequent guest on TV news programs. On election night, New York’s WOR-TV enlisted his services as a campaign analyst.

Shakur was another Dylan descendant, though a deeply troubled one who couldn’t escape his own demons. But, as he showed in the 1995 hit single “Dear Mama,” Shakur could also be compassionate. Mostly, though, his music lashed out at the world, both at enemies within rap and society’s power structure, with an uncaged fury.

During an interview with MTV shortly before his death, Shakur, 25, spoke at length about his optimism that racial and economic injustice will be overcome--not that he would be the one to do it, but maybe, he said almost wistfully, someone who is inspired by his music. Shakur didn’t use the same words as John Lennon in the song “Imagine,” but he shared the vision.

Where Chuck D. gives us the reason of rap, Shakur’s mission was to remind us of the rage. While this rap messenger is gone, his message remains as a reminder of the sometimes soul-destroying divisions in our society. However tragically, his mission was accomplished.