Is there a link between rap music and violence?

In the light of a rise in violence among young Britons, fiction writer Dreda Say Mitchell analyses the influence of music on behaviour. "Rockers have had their day as a threat to the nation's young. If you're bang up to date, you're blaming rap, specifically gangsta rap, for guns and gangs. ... In fact there's very little violence or guns in mainstream rap. ... The real problem with rap is that far from undermining society's values it's reinforcing them, and the most fundamental of all our society's values at the moment is that you are what you own. Commercial rap's money and success ethic won't do any harm to middle-class youth; they have access to the professions and property where they can participate in it. For working-class youngsters, taught by our culture since the 1970s that they're losers and failures, it's part of a profoundly poisonous cocktail of attitudes. Pride and self-respect are at the heart of this debate and it's the lack of those, or the wrong sort, that's really driving the violence on our streets."

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