As Marsalis puts it in the title of a 2006 song, when you look at the underclass, it seems that all the progress blacks have made is to go “from the plantation to the penitentiary” and to be, as the song puts it, “in the heart of freedom...in chains.”
Those chains are not only the chains that bind prisoners but also what the poet William Blake called “mind forg’d manacles”—beliefs, attitudes, and habits of feeling that imprison you even when you are outwardly free. For the underclass, those manacles are the beliefs that they’re victims, that they’re entitled to be angry and resentful, that the law is an oppression,
Rap didn’t cause [the disintegration of the black family], but it doesn’t merely reflect it, either, just as it doesn’t merely reflect ghetto lawlessness. It is part of a culture that reinforces, normalizes, and perpetuates a self-destructive, pathological way of life.
From soul to funk to rap the descent is steep.
Posts
