Well, Chris Cooke, I think there's a responsible running acknowledgment of the limits of our experience, and therefore the limits of our claims. That said, yes indeedy, I'll re-affirm what I said about what is called "rap" on mainstream radio, and I do bleeve I've heard enough and more. Very secure in my judgment of it. It's mass culture crap, like pretty nearly everything else on mainstream radio, except the rest of it doesn't play the race card or claim to be folk, and I'm hostile to those claims when I find them to be dishonest, because they attempt an end-run around criticism. I think there's a very serious distinction to be made between countering criticism and declaring something off-limits to criticism.

I have no argument with the hostility to mass culture, white-culture, the enunciation of young blacks' experience in the roots of rap, and in music which I haven't heard and therefore don't take it on myself to judge. But the mall-hip crowd, the eight-mile crowd (I spent my teen years crusing Eight Mile)? Puh-leeeze. Those are different claims.

Somebody else can take the trolled bait about the CIA inventing crack.

Adam