It's been a while. I was reading the Daily News y'day on my way to the firm, and this is what I saw in the letters (Voices of the People) section, evidently about recent events at SHot 97: Middle Village: You never heard of Led Zeppelin threatening Jethro Tull, or Black Sabbath waiting outside a radio station for Rush with .38s, or the Beatles looking to bust up the Stones. Let these damned gangsta rappers kill each other, already. Any time one of them had an appearance in a major city, tax dollars of law-abiding citizens are spent on police protection, and for whom? For well-paid thugs who contribute nothing, and I mean nothing, to society and habitually destroy their culture and urban youth. -- Michael Gibbons Jr.
I had to reply to this load of crap (which was not the only offensive letter in the bunch, so we gotta write a lot more letters to the editor). I wanted to mention that the writer seemed to have forgotten that Elvis tried to frame, upstage, and eventually deport the Beatles, but I thought it better to talk about something as violent and disturbing as the history of black metal:
Dear Editor, On Wednesday, March 9, Voicer Gibbons claimed that the rivalries between so-called gangsta rappers has no parallel in the rock world. Maybe he hasn't heard about the multiple murders and church burnings in the Norwegian black metal scene. He could argue that black metal is on the fringe of rock. Gangsta rap is on the same fringe of hip-hop.
I wonder if the focus on the violent fringe of hip-hop in the media and the voiced desire by others like Gibbons that "these damned gangsta rappers just kill each other, already" has a more insidious root in racism. -- Ravi Abraham
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