rap music, including trials in which violent offenders claimed they had been motivated by rap music and trials of certain violent rap musicians themselves.
The relevant theory to be examined is the theory of mass media and how a news story snowballs until a similar story is being told across the country, day after day, in a variety of different media. The media duly reported the views of both critics and defenders, but the critics were louder in the media as a whole, while the defenders were louder through the music itself and not very effective in spreading a non-musical message outside that realm. The behavior of many rappers reinforced the primary media message that their music created violence and that they themselves were violent and thus were poor role models. The meaningful symbols of the event began as semantic through the words of Tucker and Bennett, but they soon shifted so that the primary symbols were dramatic and so more powerful, with the behavior of rappers themselves being featured in the mass media in such a way that more and more people were persuaded that their music did indeed have not just a violent content but a violent effect.
That this story has had an effect cannot be doubted given that Time Warner responded eventually by divesting itself of its half of Interscope Records, identified in the media as a major distributor of hard-core gangsta rap by rappers such as Snoop Doggy Dog and Tupac Shakur. Time Warner had a $100 million stake in the company and sold it back to the founders, who were in turn expected to sell it off to a Dutch record company, Polygram N.V. (Streisand and Geier 48).
The music under discussion is ubiquitous in American culture today. Chappell calls it "the in-your-face music of the '90s" (Chappell 25), and in addition to the songs themselves are the complaints about the songs from outraged wom
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