Critics of gangsta rap, put in front of my optical, create more pain inside of my brain

On 11 September, the Greater London Authority hosted a conference on black children in the city's education system. More than a thousand black parents attended, reflecting their anxieties on this issue. Evidently their offspring are not as anxious. They stayed away, by and large.

The conference fielded Garth Crooks, the ex-Spurs footballer, Trevor Phillips, chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, and the actor/singer Kwame Kwei-Armah as examples of successful black men whom our black youths should emulate. From these three, we heard that black boys had their minds polluted by rap music. They implied that academic success can be realised once gangsta rap is out of the way.

Then, on BBC2's Daily Politics programme, Kwei-Armah debated with a Tory peer, a Labour MP and a young black rapper. Kwei-Armah ranted against "white rapper Eminem". He said: "I would not allow Eminem to be played in my home." He argued that record producers were ultimately responsible. They encouraged the pollution of black youth for profit.

The Tory peer, Lord Onslow, intervened with superior wisdom. Bow-tied but not tongue-tied, Onslow pointed to Strauss's waltzes. When they were first played, he said, commentators warned that they promoted licentiousness and prophesied that it was the end of civilisation as they knew it. The young rapper, having found an unexpected ally in the old duffer, observed that "you can never tell a book by the cover".

Eminem's lyrics are remarkable for their poetic flow. His is an authentic telling of tales: of his childhood conditions, of the development of his nihilism, and of the demons of doubt that invaded his mind. He was inspired by the late Tupac Shakur, a towering figure in gangsta rap. Tupac spent much of his youth in Oakland where, in the 1970s, the FBI shot up the Black Panthers. Eminem still calls Detroit his home and there, at roughly the same time, the black and white working-class movement in the automobile industry was defeated.

Imagine that Eminem's lyrics refer to Kwei-Armah or Phillips or Crooks: "Life is like a big obstacle/put in front of your optical to slow you down." And after I had heard Kwei-Armah on the BBC? Over to Eminem again: "More pain inside of my brain, than the eyes of a little girl inside a plane/Aimed at the World Trade." Let the music rip, I say.

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