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—and comically—demonstrated in 1995, when presidential candidate Bob Dole denounced various rap albums and movies that he considered obscene and then recommended certain films as wholesome, “friendly to the family” fare. Included among the latter was Arnold Schwarzenegger’s True Lies, in which every major female character is called a “bitch.” While in real life Arnold may be a virtuous Republican, in the movie his wife strips, and he puts her through hell when he thinks she might be cheating on him. In one gratuitous scene she is humiliated and tortured for twenty minutes of screen time. Schwarzenegger’s character also kills dozens of people in sequences more graphically violent than a rapper could describe with mere words.38

Even within the confines of American popular music, rappers are far from the first violently sexist fictional heroes. Historians have pointed out that in country music there is a long tradition of men doing awful things to women. Johnny Cash, in an adaptation of the frontier ballad “Banks of the Ohio” declares, “I murdered the only woman I loved/Because she would not marry me.” In “Attitude Adjustment” Hank Williams Jr. gives a girlfriend “adjustment on the top of her head.” Bobby Bare, in “If That Ain’t Love,” tells a woman, “I called you a name and I gave you a whack/Spit in your eye and gave your wrist a twist/And if that ain’t love what is.”

Rock music too has had its share of men attacking women, and not only in heavy metal songs. In “Down By the River” amiable Neil Young sings of shooting his “baby.” And the song “Run for Your Life,” in which a woman is stalked and threatened with death if she is caught with another man, was a Beatles hit.39

Just a Thug

After Tupac Shakur was gunned down in Las Vegas in 1996 at the age of twenty-five much of the coverage suggested he had been a victim of his own raps—even a deserving victim. “Rap Performer Who Personified Violence, Dies,” read a headline in the New York Times. “‘What Goes ’Round ...’: Superstar Rapper Tupac Shakur Is Gunned Down in an Ugly Scene Straight Out of His Lyrics,” the headline in Time declared. In their stories reporters recalled that Shakur’s lyrics, which had come under fire intermittently throughout his brief career by the likes of William Bennett, Delores Tucker, and Bob Dole, had been directly implicated in two previous killings. In 1992 Vice President Dan Quayle cited an antipolice song by Shakur as a motivating force behind the shooting of a Texas state trooper. And in 1994 prosecutors in Milwaukee made the same claim after a police officer was murdered.40

Why, when white men kill, doesn’t anyone do aj‘accuse of Tennessee Ernie Ford or Johnny Cash, whose oddly violent classics are still played on country music stations? In “Sixteen Tons” Ford croons, “If you see me comin’/Better step aside/A lotta men didn’t/A lotta men died,” and in “Folsom Prison Blues” Cash crows, “I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.” Yet no one has suggested, as journalists and politicians did about Shakur’s and 2 Live Crew’s lyrics, that these lines overpower all the others in Ford’s and Cash’s songbooks.41

Any young rap fan who heard one of Shakur’s antipolice songs almost certainly also heard one or more of his antiviolence raps, in which he recounts the horrors of gangster life and calls for black men to stop killing. “And they say/It’s the white man I should fear/But it’s my own kind/Doin’ all the killin’ here,” Shakur laments on one of his songs.42

Many of Shakur’s raps seemed designed to inspire responsibility rather than violence. One of his most popular, “Dear Mama,” was part thank-you letter to his mother for raising him on her own, and part explanation of bad choices he had made as an adolescent. “All along I was looking for a father—he was gone/I hung around with the thugs/And even though they sold drugs/They showed a young brother love,” Shakur rapped. In another of his hits, “Papa’z Song,” he recalled, all the more poignantly, having “had to play catch by myself/what a sorry sight.”43

Shakur’s songs, taken collectively, reveal