Word: cop
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...song Cop Killer is as bad as they come. This is black anger -- raw, rude and cruel -- and one reason the song's so shocking is that in postliberal America, black anger is virtually taboo. You won't find it on TV, not on the McLaughlin Group or Crossfire, and certainly not in the placid features of Arsenio Hall or Bernard Shaw. It's been beaten back into the outlaw subcultures of rap and rock, where, precisely because it is taboo, it sells. And the nastier it is, the faster it moves off the shelves. As Ice-T asks...
Much of this is posturing and requires no more courage than it takes to stand up in a VFW hall and condemn communism or crack. Yes, Cop Killer is irresponsible and vile. But Ice-T is as right about some things as he is righteous about the rest. And ultimately, he's not even dangerous -- least of all to the white power structure his songs condemn...
...danger" implicit in all the uproar is of empty-headed, suggestible black kids, crouching by their boom boxes, waiting for the word. But what Ice- T's fans know and his detractors obviously don't is that Cop Killer is just one more entry in pop music's long history of macho hyperbole and violent boast. Flip to the classic-rock station, and you might catch the Rolling Stones announcing "the time is right for violent revo-loo-shun!" from their 1968 hit Street Fighting Man. And where were the defenders of our law- ( enforcement officers when a white British...
...compact disc for their sociology lessons. To paraphrase another song from another era, you don't need a rap song to tell which way the wind is blowing. Black youths know that the police are likely to see them through a filter of stereotypes as miscreants and potential "cop killers." They are aware that a black youth is seven times as likely to be charged with a felony as a white youth who has committed the same offense, and is much more likely to be imprisoned...
Menacing as it sounds, the fantasy in Cop Killer is the fantasy of the powerless and beaten down -- the black man who's been hassled once too often ("A pig stopped me for nothin'!"), spread-eagled against a police car, pushed around. It's not a "responsible" fantasy (fantasies seldom are). It's not even a very creative one. In fact, the sad thing about Cop Killer is that it falls for the cheapest, most conventional image of rebellion that our culture offers: the lone gunman spraying fire from his AK-47. This is not "sedition"; it's the familiar...