STANLEY CROUCH Rap's lure false for young black men

Gangster rappers are not what they seem. They do not represent "black culture" any more than the Mafia represents Italian-Americans. Ignorance of the black tradition is their specialty. Black hoodlums and rappers twist Malcolm X's saber-rattling slogan, "by any means necessary."
The black dropout rate can be as high as 50 percent in urban areas. We feel fear and pity for those young black men who have been taken in by the slim dream of becoming athletic stars or rappers. How, pray tell, will you succeed in life, young man, since you dropped out of school and are functionally illiterate?
"By any means necessary."
They are fresh meat unaware that their time for being mashed on the hot grill of society is coming soon. They have followed the wrong "black culture."
These young black men assume that the anti-intellectual stance and the misogyny that they hear screeching from rap recordings is purely black. It is not, by a long shot. It has, in fact, nothing at all to do with black thinking, which has been focused on education and honest self-betterment since the end of slavery.
This other "black culture" is purely and deeply white, its roots going back to the 1800s. The anti-intellectual stance entered American life as a way of rejecting Europe and elevating the so-called common man after the War of 1812, which was fought with Britain and stirred great hostility toward Europe and European things.
Refinement was out. The point was to be an American, not a European. The worst of the early figures in American popular art appeared between 1833 and 1856, in fictional tales growing out of the life of Davy Crockett. Like a gangster rapper, this folklore character had no sense of fairness and fought without any rules other than winning.
Exhaustion
This Crockett also bragged himself into exhaustion. He opened the way for rappers when, in an 1837 story in "Davy Crockett's Almanac" he said, "I can walk like an ox, run like a fox, swim like an eel, yell like an Indian, fight like a devil, spout like an earthquake, make love like a mad bull, and swallow a n----- without choking if you butter his head and pin his ears back."
So when you next see some gold-toothed Negro strutting with a microphone, cursing, bragging, expressing hatred for women, realize that he is not doing anything black at all. He has fallen for the lowest version of white culture and, like the ignoramus he is, has absolutely no idea about his roots at all. Just like Davy Crockett, he should be wearing a coonskin cap.
X Stanley Crouch is a columnist for the New York Daily News. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.