The absence of a single word

One of my favorite Mark Twain isms is "The difference in the right word and the almost right word is really a large matter - it's the difference between the difference the lightning bug and the lightning."

Once again I find myself reluctantly defending hip-hop culture from a broadly generalized assault.

I say reluctant, 'cause as an old school hip-hop head who grew up on the deep rhymes of KRS-One, and Public Enemy, the cool guy tunes of L.L. Cool J, and the fun party songs of Run D.M.C., I am sorely disappointed at where rap music has gone today. Ninety percent of new material dumped on the public comes from inarticulate guys bragging about cars they don't own, houses they don't live in, women they don't have, drugs they've never used, and crimes they may or may not have witnessed or committed in recent years. So much of the music is bad these days...but not all of it.

So I have to defend it, when I hear people attribute the woes of society on rap music. It's the same thing folks did back in the day when rock music was becoming popular. People complained that all of it was the Devil's music and that it was causing young people to act up.

Anyway, I was watching MSNBC over the weekend and marveling to myself at how they get away with constantly replaying the same old crap on "MSNBC Investigates" week in and week out. Don't the advertisers care that every Friday, and Saturday and Sunday night the network replays the same episodes featuring inside looks at prisons that it has been airing for months (maybe a year or more)? Well, to my temporarily pleasant surprise I flipped to another channel and then turned back in time for a different episode, a replay of a recent Dateline, in which Matt Lauer interviewed Debra LaFave, one of the young, blond, female child molester teachers.

Lauer prefaced a question to LaFave by telling her that the writing was on the wall and that prior to her getting busted people around her were concerned that she was becoming a hellion. He pointed out to her that folks thought she was rebelling, because, among other things, she started dressing provocatively and "listening to rap music."

You may think it's a small thing, but that type of broad generalization is the reason so many younger people think some news folk are full of you know what.

I was disappointed, 'cause I thought Matt Lauer had more sense than that. LaFave is a woman in her mid 20s. She grew up in a generation whose collective CD rack probably contains an even balance of rock, alternative/folk, and hip-hop and R&B tunes. If he wanted to make a point he could have asked LaFave about a newfound interest in gangsta rap or crunk or trap music, or whatever. But by not being more specific about the type of rap, Lauer just showed that he's bought into the hype that a genre of music is a sign that the bogeyman has arrived. He gave LaFave an out, some musical scary thing to blame some of her outrageous behavior on.

Bad clothes and bad music are not signs of anything but bad taste.

I think that TV news hosts and news magazine contributors are clueless. Wait, scratch that. I think that the clueless ones are, well, clueless. Don't want to lump them in with those who actually make sense.