How long will we tolerate this music

It was 25 long years ago that I first heard NWA. They exploded on the scene. Visceral,succint and stylishly unforgiving, they brought a fresh dimension in black expression that seemed to feel ahead of its time

In excitement I said to my best friend, "isn't it great that we have a medium whereby we can talk to each other saying exactly what we feel and think without compromise”?

My friend Paul’s response was, "don't forget, it’s being filtered through a white power structure"

And that's the point. Decades on we have millions of middle class kids worldwide in corporate designer hip hop attire, coveted in unofficially exclusive clubs, postulating like their favourite glossy hip hop anti heroes, arms and wrists in that cat-paw style, cheerfully chanting the songs' sociopathic anthems about black urban crisis

The n word, the knot in every rope around a lynched brother's neck to say the least and the most loaded insult in a single word devised by man, has become the sexiest fashionable word in the world, legitamised and meaning anybody with brown skin, and this, while families and victims still bear the pain

So, why do we allow it? Would we have a youngster entertain us at dinner singing about n's and pimping bitch ass hoes and shooting each other? ! No

But while we have had thousands of hip hop tunes made about positivity, only a few have been pushed ( i.e where is the love), because "they are being filtered through a white power structure"

The whys and hows are a no brainer. Everyone knows that the black power movement was destroyed largely by the government’s supply of cocaine into the black community.

Everyone knows that there are no major black gun makers or designers, but there are so many black on black shootings that every nationality celebrates our home spun sing along songs glorifying it, spawning a lucrative off-shoot in fashion paraphernalia

In Darfur, the guns maintaining the civil war are coming from china in exchange for oil... go figure. Vehicles for our demise will never be to far away from us

And how long will we tolerate this music? Until we have the guts to fully realise the entire range of issues facing us. Only then can we truly challenge them and put them to bed