Gangsta rap (1986- ) is the main form of hip hop music listened to by white Americans, who buy most of it. It is the sort of hip hop done by acts like Ice T, NWA, Ice Cube, Dr Dre, Snoop Dogg, Jay-Z and Eminem. It is famous for holding women and the law in low regard.

Gangsta rap is a white form of hip hop. Sure, the performers are nearly all black, but who is the audience? Follow the money. It is not music by blacks for blacks, but by blacks for whites.

When it comes to race, America has changed hugely since 1950. So maybe whites at last can enjoy black music in and of itself and not in some form that has been changed for them.

But if whites are suddenly so colour-blind, then why does gangsta rap play to the worst images that whites have about blacks - as violent and oversexed? Is it because they are true? Is this what KRS-One meant when he said the essence of rap is to interpret the consciousness of the people? Or is it just what white people like to buy and hear?

Look at the cover of Snoop Dogg’s “Doggystyle” (1993), the album that made his name. It has a naked black woman sticking her head in a doghouse. This is just how white men have seen black women for hundreds of years: as animals, as faceless sex objects, as something to rape. It looks like something straight out of the Jim Crow museum. The minstrel show is back in town.

Gangsta rap did not create racism, but it has become its well-paid handmaiden. Helping white people everywhere feel good about themselves. And putting pictures in everyone’s heads about black people that will be there for a long, long time.

But what about all those songs about violence against the police? Surely they at least are “black”.

Blacks in cities have no great love for the police, it is true, but songs about killing them is not natural to black America. Music is something that comes from churches and clubs where such themes would be out of place. But they are not out of place for a 13-year-old white boy sitting in his room, hating how he has to listen to his parents, his teachers and the law. It is as old as rock music.

The themes common to gangsta rap - women as sex objects, drugs and violence - come from rock music by way of the Beastie Boys, not from black music.

The general sound and feeling of gangsta rap is so close to rock music that Jay-Z and Linkin Park, a rock band, could do a song together. It sounded surprisingly natural. Ice T, one of the founders of gangsta rap, even had a heavy metal rock band, Body Count.

Not all of gangsta rap is a coon show, of course. Tupac Shakur is an example. But too much of it is - and the rest of hip hop is not completely innocent either.

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