y cannot see the lines when someone of their same ethnicity challenges their stage image or street credibility as an artist. The lesson and the bravado are not lost on black youngsters. Violence, alley sex, drugs, and lawlessness flourish as cultural values. Disrespect becomes more important than self-respect. Muhammad thinks the ghetto violence and abuse of women borders on a pathological self-hatred born of desperate and violent circumstances.
On the other hand, some intellectuals attempt to elevate popular passions to their own service. Alan Krims (2000) addresses hip-hop in a high-flying manner as the poetics of identity, and treats it as solemnly as an academic would treat the history of epics. He argues that a great deal of popular music scholarship dismisses music analysis as irrelevant or of limited value, but that it is crucial to cultural theory. As perhaps the first scholarly study of rap and hip-hop, his study weaves together perspectives from music theory, musicology, cultural studies, critical theory, and communications. Most academic musicologists, although they recognize the social symbolism of hip-hop, remain skeptical.
On a less theoretical level, Christine Hall Hansen (1995) reports that studies show the effects of gangsta rap on ideas and behaviors are predictable. Two controlled groups watched "gangsta rap" music videos, and the feedback from both suggests that the social themes contained in rap music videos can produce potent and predictable effects on viewers' subsequent impressions and social judgments through the mechanism of cognitive priming. Observers have made the same assumption for years. Mainstream media critics and religious leaders have labeled gangsta rap as intensely violent, sexually explicit and sexually violent, misogynistic, drug and gang oriented, and politically radical, if mere attitudes make a political program. Hansen does not tiptoe around the culturally and racially sensitive issue: