Myron Magnet is the author of The Dream and the Nightmare: The Sixties' Legacy to the Underclass. City Journal has now published and posted Magnet's biggest essay since The Dream and the Nightmare, updating the argument of that book to address rap and hip hop culture. Magnet's essay is "In the heart of freedom, in chains." Magnet indicts gangsta rap for its role in perpetuating a destructive underclass culture. Toward the end of the essay he cites Wynton Marsalis:

Wynton Marsalis’s scathing critique of rap understands how hip-hop relates to the larger problem. Leaving aside the lyrics, rap is musically “ignorant,” Marsalis says. “Rhythms have to have a meaning. If the rhythm is corrupt, the music is corrupt and the people become corrupt.” (And, one might add, rap also subverts music’s aim of creating a realm of harmony and beauty.) As for the lyrics, Marsalis says, “I call it ‘ghetto minstrelsy.’ Old-school minstrels used to say they were ‘real darkies from the real plantation.’ Hip-hop substitutes the streets for the plantation.” In its conception of black authenticity, rap perfectly embodies the cultural tragedy of the ghetto underclass. As Marsalis puts it in the title of a 2006 song, when you look at the underclass, it seems that all the progress blacks have made is to go “from the plantation to the penitentiary” and to be, as the song puts it, “in the heart of freedom...in chains.”

Those chains are not only the chains that bind prisoners but also what the poet William Blake called “mind forg’d manacles”—beliefs, attitudes, and habits of feeling that imprison you even when you are outwardly free. For the underclass, those manacles are the beliefs that they’re victims, that they’re entitled to be angry and resentful, that the law is an oppression, that the larger community owes them a living, that education is useless, that sex is without responsibility or even emotion, that they’re not responsible for supporting and nurturing their children, and that because they’re victims they never need to be ashamed of anything they do.

Magnet particularly emphasizes the role of gangsta rap in ghetto culture. Does the music form or reflect the culture? Magnet argues:

Rap didn’t cause [the disintegration of the black family], but it doesn’t merely reflect it, either, just as it doesn’t merely reflect ghetto lawlessness. It is part of a culture that reinforces, normalizes, and perpetuates a self-destructive, pathological way of life.

I don't think the same can be said of the soul music of the sixties. That music nevertheless formed the musical setting of the underclass culture that originally drew Magnet's attention in The Dream and the Nightmare. Yet that music sounds like the product of a golden era. From soul to funk to rap the descent is steep.

The sixties soul artists, of course, grew up in a healthier time, frequently under the formative influence of the church. Perhaps music is a lagging indicator. In any event, Magnet has written a provocative and thought-provoking essay on an important subject.

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