Rap Music

The Austin, Tex., jury that sentenced a Texas teen-ager to death Wednesday for murdering a state trooper rejected his claim that violent rap music caused him to pull the trigger--but the jurors did believe the music influenced his action.

In the wake of last month's Ice-T "Cop Killer" furor, top executive ranks within the recording industry are re-evaluating their commitments to the marketing of violent and sexually explicit rap music. At entertainment giant MCA, women employees pressed top corporate management to pull one rap record back from retailers.

Gangsta rap may be continually criticized for glorifying violence and sexism, but few of the potshots come from the rap community itself. Even "G-rated" rappers seem to accept gangsta rap as a legitimate force--or worry about speaking out and being branded as wimps. But not Ahmad, a small, wiry 18-year-old Los Angeles rapper whose introspective--and G-rated--"Back in the Day" is one of the season's biggest rap singles.

Can a rap song with words like rumbustious, shambolic and ombudsperson find true happiness on MTV's Top 10? Can lyrics like, "So I tapped my well of diction . . . And discussed some metafiction" possibly describe what happens when a love-struck guy tries to show a girl how smart he is? Does anybody who is not doing some really weird drug think that Ice-T is going to start rapping to the strains of--yegads!--the dictionary?

The tale of the rapper and the prosecutor is a twisted one now, bent into strange shapes by scandal, celebrity and murder music, but once it was a story of straight lines and simple roles. When they first met in 1994, the rapper, Anerae Brown, was one of four gang members on trial for a spasm of early-morning violence that had left a grandmother dead in her home.

"Rap is the TV station that black people never had," Chuck D said a couple of years ago. The frontman for the political-rap group Public Enemy was referring to the art form's ability to convey the unedited African-American experience to vast numbers of people in a country where the mass media are almost exclusively white-controlled, as in the way an N.W.A song tells black kids in South Carolina a little bit of what it's like to be a black kid in...

As night falls on this city of 11 million, the electronic billboards flicker into life, illuminating Day-Glo flying saucers and cups that scroll across giant screens, advertising a host of Japanese products. It is rush hour, and the subway disgorges waves of businessmen headed for bouts of ritual-like drinking. But the youths milling in front of the Cay Club seem oblivious to their Blade-Runner-like surroundings.

Media giant Time Warner Inc. is under fire again--this time for its alleged involvement with a rap album said to contain artwork and lyrics advocating the assassination of President Bush. Officials at the New York State Sheriffs' Assn.

Rap singer Snoop Doggy Dogg turned himself in to face a murder charge after eluding detectives long enough to announce a winner at the MTV awards ceremony, Los Angeles police said Friday. The singer, whose real name is Calvin Broadus, was wanted in the shooting death of Phillip Woldemariam on a street in the Palms district last month. "The deceased was a 25-year-old male who apparently had been in a verbal confrontation with Snoop Doggy Dogg," said Lt.

Rap artist Eazy-E, a major figure in the commercial development of "gangsta" rap, has AIDS, his record company announced Thursday. Eazy-E, co-founder of the Compton rap group N.W.A., is one of the first major music performers to announce he has the disease.