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 l l 5 Training and Humiliation Teenagers turned trick, pimped by pedophile labels. —El-P in Company Flow, “Blind,” Funcrusher Plus, 1997 In all of 1990s New York rap, there is perhaps no better example of its emphasis on lyricism than Nas’s song, “One Love,”1 which came out the same year as “Things Done Changed.” Written as a letter to a friend in jail, the song describes changes in the neighborhood since his friend’s incarceration , and recounts, for example, who had been shot, who was now selling drugs, and who had been arrested. In the last verse, though, Nas turns to the listener, and details coming back home to the neighborhood after taking a short trip to get away from the pressures of new school violence . Needing “time alone,” he takes a “two day stay,” leaving his 9mm pistol in order to relax “his dome.” When he returns, however, nobody is outside except for a twelve-year-old crack dealer. Nas befriends him, and they hang out together on the youth’s drug turf. The boy addresses him, explaining that, since people routinely shoot from the project rooftops, he wears a “bullet proof” and holds a “black trey-deuce.” Nas then takes the opportunity to school the boy, and provide the young street soldier with a way to reign in the intensified, hard-to-control new school violence that, by necessity, had become so thoroughly imbricated into community life that the boy had to wear a bullet-proof vest. “I had to school him,” Nas tells the listener, explaining how he told the boy not to be fooled by those who advocate for blind retaliation. He then goes on to underline the fact that the spray of new school violence can cause profound loss when not reigned in, too easily turning to bad “luck” as whole families get “fucked up.” Nas’s last bit of advice to the youth, therefore, takes the form of a warning against the spray of new school violence: since bad luck occurs far too often in the crack era, Nas tells him to “take heed,” and wait till  x Training and Humiliation his target’s alone so the “right man bleeds.” To be sure, Nas’s advice is no beacon of nonviolence; it is still a lethal vision of community life. Indeed, his last words to the youth concern ways of killing someone. Fundamentally , however, the song communicates an effort to restrain the spray even while lethality remains a necessary regulatory mechanism in the crack era. Problematically, though, those who too readily dismiss depictions of violence in rap misrecognize the “fact” of violence as a lack of morality— as cold-hearted predation. Rather, what “Things Done Changed,” “One Love,” and many other songs suggest is that the death of old school violence has been anything but easy for those who have been forced to take part in its killing, and who have been engaged, instead, in a very serious effort to reign in the wild lethality that the crack era engendered. Thus, Nas’s song communicates in lyrical form what many researchers have concluded in academic form: that a significant influence on the steady decline of lethal violence in the United States since the mid-1990s has been the growth of “powerful anti-crack norms” that were “catalyzed first and foremost indigenously—that is, from within the street drug scene itself.”2 In effect, many researchers suggest that the profound difficulty of living with the ever-presence of lethality on a daily basis has helped to “make crack a dirty word and vilify those who use it.”3 All too often, however, debates about rap seem to turn on an assumption that the violence it depicts is somehow just an “easy” gimmick, and that, more than anything, such violence exemplifies the seriously detrimental effects of “bad parenting.” Youth, in these assumptions, play little or no role in influencing their own lives for the better. Recall Bill Cosby and Juan Williams, for instance, who have placed almost sole responsibility for the problems of the inner city on this notion of bad parenting. But what is it about parenting that so consumes such critics? And how is it assumed to operate in such a powerful way in combating the criminal proclivities of young people? In fact, since the latter half of the twentieth century, parenting has figured prominently in academic explanations of crime and criminality. And, in many ways, recent criticisms of rap’s...

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