When Lyrics Go Beyond Fantasy......

It looks like this is a moment when I have to quote the Michael Corleone character from the third installment of The Godfather franchise-"Just when I thought that I was out they pull me back in." If you take a gander at the above snippet, it's from the MTV2 hip hop program, Fight Club. Instead of this contest being one where the contestants' verbal dexterity and alliterative ingenuity are tested, it has regressed into some updated and twisted form of the dozens. If anyone is familiar with the African-American mainstay known as the dozens, it is essentially an informal forum developed to trade barbs with an adversary. How these "snapping" (another term for the dozens) contests rarely ended up in fights defies the imagination-if one were to make comparisons with today's climate of dysfunctionalism. But in actuality, I decided to use this clip as segue tool for a far less innocuous and tragic story pertaining to the "lyrics versus violence" debate.

A Staten Island jury recently arrived at a guilty verdict against Ronell Wilson, 24, a reputed gang leader for the execution style killing of two undercover police officers. This is an inverted version of the Sean Bell shooting incident that fails to garner the attention of those that attend the Reverend Sharpton's School of Racial Polarization (no relation to Ice-T's Rap School). What makes this tale even more disturbed is that when Mr. Wilson was initially arrested, police found self-scribed and grammatically decimated rap lyrics detailing how he killed these officers. It is high time for the other side of these street tragedies to be told, if not analyzed. How long will it take for our clergy, politicians, educators and PARENTS to start to put "two and two" together regarding gangsta music propaganda and what it is clearly doing to our youth. Let's hope that Wilson isn't offered a record deal before he gets a lethal injection (sentencing is next month)-anything is possible in this dystopic melodrama. Oh and least I forget, Happy Holidays. For more on this story check the links below:

Prosecutors use rap lyrics to boost case

Guilty in Killing of 2 detectives