Pop's baddest bad boy,
Marshall Mathers III, aka Eminem, has begun a short tour of Britain. He has brought a hugely controversial disaffected, white, lower middle class, whining, suburban sensibility to rap, the traditionally black inner-city genre.
Q: What are rap's origins?
A: It goes back to the 1940s when Louis Jordan and Slim Gaillard played about with words and sounds in a rapidly synchopated, rhyming fashion. Jordan's ''Choo Choo Ch-boogie'', for instance.
Q: Like Rex Harrison singing The Rain in Spain in My Fair Lady?
A: No.
Q: How did rap become
associated with guns, drugs, and gangsters?
A: Rap is the soundtrack to the inner city. It became linked with urban criminality because it was easy for kids to rap about what was going on around them: shooting and shooting up. Rap is a cheap form of music-
making. All you need is a record player and records to scratch, or your friends to make scratching sounds vocally. You rap on top of these sounds. Rap's fans say it is urgent, insistent, and cool.
Q: Is it poetry?
A: It can be, although the content is frequently misogynistic and homophobic. Rap artists tend to pander to their audiences, which can be intellectually challenged. But the best are pretty acute poets who parody unattractive prejudices. The worst are just empty braggarts like Snoop Dogg, the late Tupac Shakur (gunned down in a dispute between rival rap camps) and Vanilla Ice, the only other white rapper.
Q: Does it have a future?
A: Despite its unhealthy obsession with violence it is massively popular and shows no sign of ending. It has crossed over into white music (viz Eminem). Rap underpins the other current big-selling genre, nu metal, in which vocalists perform or declaim
in a rap style to a repetitive heavy-metal guitar backing. So there.
Q: Does it have a uniform?
A: Baggy trousers with a crotch that begins at the knee; expensive trainers that are
discarded with the first scuff-mark; winter-weight jackets worn indoors; and home-made, prison-style tattoos around the stomach with
mis-spelt words (''tha'' for ''the'', for instance).
Q: Can you rap?
A: ''I can rap
Coz I got angst
You can tell
By my baggy pantz.''
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