Chet, I just finished writing and had clicked to post a response when aol dumped me off line, claiming some kind of server problem. I'll see how much of it I can remember:

For a long time I have found rap unmusical and offensive in message and particularly in attitude--the medium is the message, indeed. Where I differed with you is in whether the message was political or not, and that's a semantic difference, at most. But you did bring me to the realization that I was probably identifying too strongly with my students in their anger at a system which serves them not, strongly enough that I--at least on one level--accepted rap and hip-hop culture as being valid expressions of their feelings and their experience. I couldn't listen to it, but I couldn't strongly oppose it, either.

Rappers and hoodlums are definitely not romantic outlaws, they're robber barons, taking whatever they can squeeze out of their communities, just as did Rockefeller and Morgan and their ilk, and just as do their contemporary equivalents, the multi-nationals, which derived their capital more from the brains and sweat and blood of the workers they abandon than from their investors, the only ones to whom they feel any responsibility.

But I got a bit carried away in my last posting: folkies aren't going to have much influence in the inner city. We speak a different language. We aren't loud enough. I've never heard a boom box or a car's big subwoofer throbbing with the sound of banjos and mountain dulcimers, and I don't think I ever will. Or would ever want to.

If our music is going to have an effect, it's going to be with people who like the sound of it: we know the country and the world are full of people who are afraid of their futures, afraid for their children, appalled at their governments' cozy relationships with the scum of the world for the sake of helping the multinationals make a buck. Maybe our music can persuade a voter here and there to ask what their representatives stand for before giving them their votes, and persuade a non-voter or two to vote.

And Art, I don't think I have read a posting to this thread which is calling for a communist revolution. I think most of us would like to believe our governments and political parties have our best interests in mind, rather than those of whoever can slip them the most soft money; we'd like to believe our leaders could stop supporting the most repressive governments for the sake of stability for corporate exploitation of third world labor and mineral resources; we hope that our governments and the corporations come to recognize that the world is all too finite, that the ecosystems cannot continue to absorb all the poisons we dump into them, that the air we breath needs refreshing via photosynthesis provided by rain forests and ocean algae...I do tend to ramble.

--seed