Rappers kill themselves and culture

There are those who will see the murder last week of the rapper known as D.O. Cannon as something about which we can say little other than, "There they go again." The victim, a largely unknown figure who worked for the Murder Inc. label, went down before achieving any kind of notoriety. He is now no more than an indication of another rap war.

But it seems to me that we should do more than expect rappers to now and again bump each other off. We should better understand what they have brought into the world of popular entertainment.

Perhaps the grandest irony is that there is absolutely no violence at all in the place from which the thugs of gangster rap get their ideas, their philosophy. Their so-called gangster esthetic comes straight out of Hollywood, particularly Ernest Dickerson's film "Juice," which starred Tupac Shakur as a neighborhood menace who modeled himself on the psychopath portrayed by James Cagney in "White Heat."

Films such as "The Godfather" and "Scarface" are treated as training films for living the treacherous, gaudy life of a criminal. Michael Corleone is something akin to a folk hero, fictional though he might be.

When these ignorant knuckleheads with gold teeth are visited at their mansions on "MTV Cribs," their "art works" are almost always movie posters for gangster films!

That they have terrible taste and are inarticulate clowns of one sort or another does not make them that different from most of the people in popular music.

What does make them different is that their lives are often on the line. The putting each other down that was once considered a lot fun when rap was young can actually amount to a battle cry.

Most of all, whenever another rapper is killed and everyone else in the field beefs up security and travels in custom-made bulletproof gear, we should remember that the stars of all those Hollywood action films - people like Sylvester Stallone, Charles Bronson, Clint Eastwood, Bruce Willis and Al Pacino - have never faced hails of bullets off-screen. If they had, they would have taken different roles.

We know, however, that two of the biggest rap stars ever, Shakur and Biggie Smalls, were killed gangland-style. Their murders and that of D.O. Cannon last week prove that there are still people in the world of gangster rap who slaughter like the fictional scum they admire.

Rap scholar Baz Dreisinger observes, "Some of these people, like Snoop Dogg, were not really gangsters. When Snoop claimed to be a Crip, his supposedly being an authentic criminal was very good for his career. In the process, he became something that he wasn't."

So if you are lucky and the public's taste is bad enough, pretending to be a criminal can make you rich. If your luck is bad, however, you could be killed.

Our entertainment culture has never been in a place like this before. Let us do whatever we can to make sure that it does not remain there much longer.