John McWhorter on Conscious Rap

I'm not a huge John McWhorter fan, but this is an interesting article about him, and his new book. This paragraph also caught my eye.

Nothing could be further from the truth, McWhorter argues. Far from being truth-tellers, he says, so-called “conscious” rappers recycle endless clichés and conspiracy theories about inner-city blight, the drugs trade and Aids. Instead of generating a desire to change the system, rappers and their acolytes in the media and academia simply encourage a sense of passivity. “Insisting that things are still so simple that black people need to get together and rise in fury against an evil oppressor makes for entertaining hiphop,” he writes. “It sounds good uttered fiercely and set to a driving beat. But this way of parsing things does not correspond to what black America really needs today, as opposed to what it needed 50 years ago.”

I'm thinking he's thinking even of Kanye West when he says this. Maybe even especially Kanye.

Before you ask me to go get a job today,
can I at least get a raise on the minimum wage?
And I know the government administer AIDS,
So I guess we just pray like the minister say
Abu Akhbar be throwin' some hot cause(?)
things we seein' on the screen not ours
but these niggas from the hood, so these dreams not far
where I'm from the dope boys is the rock stars
but they can't cop cars without seein' cop cars
I guess they want us all behind bars, I know it, uh

Don't have a lot to say about this, but I'll read the book and give him an open mind. I have a knee-jerk reaction to McWhorter for partly ignorant preference reasons. I don't like theories of behavior that focus almost exclusively on external/environmental stimuli, and my understanding of McWhorter's writings on Black culture seem to do that. I see culture as mostly endogeneous to people's preferences, and place a somewhat smaller belief in our preferences being shaped by our environments. But that's probably led me to ignore McWhorter when I shouldn't have. So I'm sorry John! I'll read the book and give it a chance!

Update: Glenn Loury and John McWhorter discuss this new book on bloggingheads.tv.