YOUR CHILDREN ARE RAP VICTIMS

At least they are if you bought them Eminem this Christmas. The lyrics are violent and obscene. Does it matter? James Delingpole thinks the white rapper is a new Gerard Manley Hopkins

`QUICK, quick, the "Stan" video's on,' says my stepson, the Rat. So I hurry downstairs because this is an important part of my research. I'm trying to discover why mid- dle-class teenagers are so heavily into rap music, especially the video's author, Eminem, who is the biggest rap star ever. Last year his Marshall Mathers LP sold 1.2 million copies in the UK alone, making it the second most popular record after the Beatles. If you didn't buy it for one of your teenage relatives or friends for Christmas, they'd probably like to know why.

Watching the 'Stan' video, it's not imme- diately apparent why the song went to number one. Sure the pasty-faced, bleach- blond, 26-year-old rapper with 'slit me' tattooed on his wrists has a certain low-rent, trailer-park chic; the video — in which Eminem plays both himself and one of his crazed fans — has quite a juicy car crash at the end; and the melody — which Eminem filched, as rappers do, from another musician: in this case a North London chanteuse called Dido — is naggingly catchy. But you're still left wondering how this guy sold more than ten mil- lion records last year, espe- cially when you try listening to what he's saying and can't make head nor tail of it.

The reason for this, the Rat explains, is that the best bit is the words, and most of them are so offensive that they've been censored for television. (Not bleeped out in an obvious way but just slurred, so that it sounds as if Eminem has a speech impedi- ment.) He offers to tell me what they are because, like most of his contemporaries, he knows them off by heart. But I decide to download them from the Internet instead.

So what are rappers on about these days? Since I earn part of my living as a rock critic, it would be disingenuous of me to pretend that I didn't have a rough idea: sex, drugs, violence, misogyny and homo- phobia, mostly. What did quite surprise me, though, was just how terribly rude a lot of these lyrics are.

Eminem, needless to say, is one of the worst offenders. His 'Stan' song is actually quite tame — an ordinary heartwarming tale of a suicidal fan driving into a river while drunk with his pregnant girlfriend in the boot. But when you look at some of his racier material, you begin to understand why there are 'Parental advisory: explicit content' stickers slapped all over his records.

In `Kill You', for example, he suggests: `Fuck that, take drugs, rape sluts, make fun of gay clubs'; on 'Just Don't Give a Fuck' he jocularly recalls how he 'went to gym in eighth grade, raped the women's swim team'; while on 'Role Model', he cheerily advises his fresh-faced listeners: 'Follow me and do exactly what the song says: smoke weed, take pills, drop outta school, kill peo- ple and drink.'

The problem with quoting Eminem out of context like this is that it makes him sound merely foul-mouthed and brain- damaged. These things may be true — he does swear a lot and he did once spend five days in a coma after being given a cerebral haemorrhage by the school bully — and they certainly go a long way towards explaining why teenagers so readily identify with him. Even so, I suspect that there's rather more to his popularity than that.

Clearly, one of his major attractions is that he's a white man who has succeeded in a predominantly black musical genre (hip- hop), making him a vital role model for all those pale-faced middle-class teenagers out there who so desperately wish they had been born black. As Eminem once put it `There are kids out there who, believe it or not, want to be the have-nots.'

The technical term for such people is Wiggers' (short for 'White Niggers'). You only have to look at the pop- ularity of Ali G (in real life a nice Cambridge-educated Jewish boy) to realise how widespread a phenomenon this is. Nor is it any coinci- dence that beneath his plau- sible black hip-hop patois Britain's most influential hip-hop DJ, Radio One's Tim Westwood, is the very white and middle-class son of the former Bishop of Peterborough.

`Demographically, hip- hop's biggest audience con- sists of white suburban teens. Twenty years ago, they would have been play- ing guitar on their tennis rackets and listening to heavy metal. Now they're throwing up hip- hop hand signals and talking like Ali 0,, says Andy Cowan, editor of Hip-Hop Con- nection, who's also white and middle-class but at least doesn't speak with a silly accent. 'They associate blackness with excitement and danger. They listen to hip- hop as a form of escapism, vicariously liv- ing out lives they will never experience themselves. There's an undercurrent of vio- lence to it; a toughness that you just don't find in other forms of music.'

As Cowan admits, some of that violence and gore is there purely for effect: 'HIP' hop is about theatre, exaggeration and braggadocio.' It's about boasting about how much bigger and tougher (and more verbally dexterous) you are than all the other rappers out there; about what unfea- sibly vast quantities of dope you smoke (strong Californian marijuana, aka 'blunt' or The Chronic', is every rapper's drug of choice); about how many niggas from the rival gang you've wasted.

At the same time, though, hip-hop is a genre which prides itself on authenticity and though rival East- and West-Coast rappers no longer murder each other — as they did in the mid-Nineties hip-hop wars which claimed the lives of Tupac Shakur and Big- gie Smalls — it certainly helps to have some sort of gangland pedigree if you want to be taken seriously. Being shot helps too. The bullet wounds Tim Westwood suffered in a drive-by shooting last year provided the ulti- mate seal on his hip-hop credibility. Like many of the best rappers, Eminem has a court case pending. Two, in fact. One is for the rather banal reason that he is being sued by his mother for $10m after having alleged that she took even more drugs than he does. The other is for having threatened to shoot two rappers who called him gay. His rough Detroit background – he was born Marshall Mathers III (hence the name: M 'n' M) to a 15-year-old girl and an absent father in a predominantly poor black neighbourhood — was considered suffi- ciently 'street' for him to be taken under the wing of hip-hop godfather and record pro- ducer Dr Dre (pronounced `Dray'). If it hadn't been for Dr Dre, Eminem might well still be living in his seedy Detroit trailer-park and working as a chef in a suburban family restaurant, as he was before the sudden success two years ago of his The Real Slim Shady LP. He had tried making a career in hip-hop before, but despite coming second in the 1997 Los Angeles Rap Olympics, he had failed to secure a record deal. Then, just after a sui- cide attempt, he received his life-changing offer from Dre's Aftermath label.

`The endorsement from Dre was key,' says Andy Cowan. As the founder of the most influential hip-hop outfit of the Nineties — Niggaz With Attitude — Dre invested Eminem with the hip-hop credibil- ity that no white man could ever have earned on his own. And though Eminem is by no means the first white person to suc- ceed in the world of hip-hop — the first hip-hop album to reach number one in America was made by upper-class whitics the Beastie Boys — he is probably the first to have been accepted as an equal by the black hip-hop fraternity. Which, of course, means that anxious young white boys can buy Eminem records without fear of being thought uncool.

But perhaps the main reason Eminem is so successful — and the one that is most commonly overlooked amid all the fuss about his vile language and amorality — is that he is a genuinely brilliant rapper. To the untrained ear, most hip-hop may just sound like people shouting rude words boastfully to a thumping beat. But it's a rather more subtle art form than that. As Cowan explains: 'It's about how clever your rhyming is and about flow and delivery; about the jokes you fit in and the metaphors and similes.' And Eminem is very good at this. In fact he's probably the best there is.

Here he is, for example, in one of his cleaner moments: 'My thesis will smash a stereo to pieces/ My a capella releases plas- tic masterpieces through telekinesis/ And eases you mentally, gently, sentimentally, instrumentally/ With entity, dementedly meant to be infinite.' The internal rhymes, the mellifluous verse, the vocabulary have more in common with Gerard Manley Hopkins than the rantings of a foul- mouthed yob.

He's terribly funny too, in a sick, adoles- cent but endearingly honest way. Perhaps his best comic line is the one from 'My Name Is': 'I can't figure out which Spice Girl I want to impregnate.' But almost all his work has a strong vein of black comedy, such as 'My Fault', in which Eminem gives a recovering heroin addict magic mush- rooms. Naturally, the addict freaks out, leading to memorable lines such as 'I'm over here, Sue, you're talkin' to the plant.'

Teenagers, quite naturally, respond to this sort of puerile humour. And they appreciate the fact that, when he's not being bleeped by the censors, Eminem speaks so clearly and naturally that they can understand and learn every word he says. Especially the bad ones.

Is there anything parents can do to stop this evil menace? Not really. Not when Eminem is merely articulating what most teenagers say among themselves in private anyway. Not when there's a copy of the Marshall Mathers LP in virtually every teenage bedroom in the land. Far more sensible, I think, is to do what I did — sit down and give it a proper listen. With luck you might find yourself as pleasantly sur- prised as I was. This rap stuff: it really is much much better than you'd think.