Interesting point raised a while back: is rap folk music? If so, most of us would be troubled by rejecting it, not because we're in love with the label, but because there's an ethic of self-restraint that kicks in when you approach the material of another folk. I'm thinking I would react very differently to the same material I took away from my kid (Tupac, Eminem) if it were being played live (and in a club or other intimate, human-scale venue, rather than a stadium-size concert). Nope, what's on the radio is mass-produced crap, poisonous posturing. You hate to court charges of racism by rejecting a form of music considered "black," but I know more than a few black people who resent the hell out the identification of rap culture as black culture, and cheerfully reject the "culture" of adolescent hedonism, violence, sexism, indolence, arrogance, grandiosity, laziness and the self-indulgent pose of despair, along with the mystifying assumption that all of this shitheadedness is supposed to be exitentially heroic.

Several noted that more traditional folk music (sure, call it "white" folk) deals with ugly stuff too. But not in celebratory ways, and here's the really important point: it comes from a different economy of music, pre-recording; its dynamics assume face-to-face presence, reciprocity and equality between singer and listeners. Under those conditions, there's a back-&-forth that makes the song a communal production, and imposes mutaul contstraints -- constraints which ARE the warrant by which such music is called "folk." What makes a music folk is not the performer or the style, but the total interactive event (though styles, once sufficiently invested in this dynamic, can summon appropriate responses from those listening even to recordings, at least until the original event-types or venues which trained the listener in this type of response disappear altogether). Rap, on the other hand, is a one-way communication, rooted in individual, personal aggression and the tawdriest of ambitions -- superstardom, celebrity without reference to the value of what makes you notorious.

Or a completely different level of rejection, and maybe too deep for me this late: aesthetics has always been a branch of philosophy because it's always been understood, intuitively, that what you think is Beautiful must be closely linked to what you think is True and to what you think is Good. Rap, at least the commercial stuff which is all, I admit, I'm acquainted with (and that as little as possible) makes noxious propositions on all three.