In The Male Prison, his review of Andre Gide's notebooks that appears in his brilliant collection of essays titled Nobody Knows My Name, James Baldwin said that "To deny another person's humanity is to deny one's own."

Specifically, he was talking about the French Nobel laureate suppressed love for a woman named Madeline, of which Gide hid beneath a veil of extreme contempt. Baldwin's broader point, however, was about sexism: that when men do not give love to women, and I'm talking about a a broader, more plural, more encompassing love than the pleasures of the flesh, they do a brutal amount of damage to the women they are with, as well as themselves. I am reminded of this quote every time I turn on the radio and hear crunk, bounce, or any other kind of thug music over the past couple of years. For the imagery in their lyrics has been brutally inhumane, even for rap. Where do you want to start? Lil Jon's obsession with sexual dehumanization ( all you b*tches crawl, skeet, skeet, skeet) 50 cent's vicious lyrics combined with an antebellum image of a black woman in chains? Triville and the Ying Yang Twins' fetish for reducing women to their body parts and abusing those body parts afterwords? And to top it off, Lil Weezy's sick obsession with crack and rape?

For the sake of not attempting to score easy points by only saying how those messages are wrong, let me clarify myself. The misogynist rapper and rap fan has enclosed himself in a prison that is similar to the prison of the nihilist, in so much that both of their foundations are built by a dark paean to and concern for the self. But the walls of the thug rapper/fan's prison are made by an obsession with "real manhood." This brand of "manhood" is always "under attack" by women, black men who aren't "real" like them, white people, and pretty much anybody who doesn't think he's the greatest thing since sliced bread. This ever present sense of "danger" always makes their lives tenuous: since they believe they are always under assault by the slightest offense, their only forms of expression are a phony rage at the women who slighted them, and a glorification of material things in order to cauterize their wounded egos.

But pretty soon these thugs find out that their macho healing elixir is poisonous. In my old neighborhood in Tacoma, there is a place called Peoples Park, built for children but usually populated by thirty something ex gangsters, men who were lucky, or in some cases, unlucky enough to survive the early 90's blood/crip/piru/sucka wars that terrorized black Tacoma and Lakewood. If you listen to them, you hear a great deal of anger and sorrow over children they had left behind and baby momma's they had a hard time loving.

A block away, there is the Indian Bar and Grill, where those thug's spiritual, and sometimes actual fathers drain the insulin out of their kidney's with liquor, fill their noses and lungs up with toxic white powder, and grouse on how bad of players and pimps they were back in the day. Each of these men in the park and in the bar have turned away from the women in their lives and the moral responsibility of sexual equality and reciprocation. Their anger and hatred for women, combined with their immersion in a demonic gospel of self pity, has robbed them of the ability to love anything, not even themselves, and reduced them to empty vessels of rage and deep, deep regret. And if any of the rap fans who read this ends up adopting the psycho sexual politics of crunk and gangsta rap music to heart, someday those men will be you.