Thanks, Kat, you said it better than I did. Mando man, I don't think you and I will ever agree on the fine points of this discussion. I will tell you that for the kids I worked with in prison, rap was a very big part of their identities. They did it all the time. When they weren't actually regurgitating rap albums, they were doing the beats on desktops, windows, whatever. Maybe it's just in South Carolina. I don't have direct experience with imprisoned kids in Watts or Bed-Stuy. But I can tell you that in South Carolina, rap and rappers are monumentally important to just about all of my students in the prison, black, white, Latino, and other. The only notable exception is a small subset of white kids who were heavily into Death Metal. I will also tell you that I counted a lot of those kids as my friends. I miss them terribly (I am not too macho to say). And while I was there, rarely did a whole month go by that I didn't hear that one of the ones who went home was dead. Teenagers. I will not get over that, nor, I hope, would you, and I will condemn anything that contributed even a small percentage to lives that never got to be lived.

I guess we might as well stop, Chet