Continuing my screed from above, I guess this, Chet, is why I can't get and stay quite as incensed about rap as you: I recognize how destructive it is to the community from which it derives, but it exists only because that community has been the prime victims of the corporate rape of our economy, our society, and our world. Gangsters are nothing new, neither are those who romanticize them--they are natural products of poverty culture. Mass media (corporation controlled, motivated by profit--assuredly) gives this romanticization a far greater audience, but the root cause is the same, and the solution is the same--if the society, the economy, and the government were just, there would be no problem. --seed