A policeman for the defense of rap music
I don't know if you've ever read anything like this before, but I think that what follows will be unique: a policeman comes to the defense of rap music and hip hop. Actually, I write this because it is fair, because I really dislike injustice. But also because of the obvious widespread ignorance of a style of music I always loved, and understood.
Before I continue, I need to give those who haven't been following this a background. In mid-October, award-winning journalist Malou von Sivers interviewed the rap artist Einár. Einár sat on the couch with his mother and was interviewed about his success and enormous popularity. He told about his upbringing, schooling, life at home and about the love for his mother. So far, all right.
About two months later, it was time for another young, popular rapper to sit on the couch with Malou, Alex Greekazo. Alex had to sit alone on the sofa for about five minutes before joining. The company was not a friend or family member but the newly created documentary filmmaker Anders Öfvergård. Anders, better known as Arga Snickaren, has saddled around and made a documentary series about drugs.
Now to the wreck that followed and never seemed to end. Anders and Malou take turns interrupting and bombarding the young, polite artist with questions about how negative he is doing. How he contributes to a destructive culture and dangerous social development. They snatch words out of his texts and put him in charge of them. They were question his role as a role model and impose on him a responsibility that is not his to bear. Anders wants to work together with Greekazo to solve Sweden's drug problem and eradicate all gangster romance.
Never before has the gap been wider. Some even think that racism has not been clearer either. It's hard not to agree. For what is the difference between Einár and Greekazo, really? Yes, you can't find it in their drugs, weapons and gangster romanticizing texts. I really don't think Malou or Anders are bad racist people, I just think they were unlucky when they thought.
For anyone who knows anything about hip hop culture or rap music understands that music is a product of the society it is in, not the other way around. Rap music depicts the contemporary, it does not create it. If you do not like it, it is hardly the music that should be held accountable, but rather those who created the society, who in turn created the music. Capishe? Giving up the music is like trying to cure cancer with Alvedon, it might work as a placebo, a distraction, but it does not improve anything. On the contrary, it will focus on the basic problem while creating more and more infected cells in the hidden. Extremely selectively selecting and attacking individual culture carriers and answering them is so blindly controlled, stupid and ignorant that I am genuinely provoked. Not seeing the devastating opposite effect of such an act is directly irresponsible. Stigmatization 2.0.
Imagine a country that turns its entire housing back, pulls away and stigmatizes. That gives drug dealers, extremists and gangsters free play to come back and play responsible big brother much later. When the components boil over for several years and explosive cause huge societal problems that spill over to the larger society. To first create a monster and then bark on the monster for it to be just that, a monster. An individual product of a sub-community is not the root of the problem, but rather a symptom. The reason for the problem is the structures that created it. Structures that are maintained, underpinned and reinforced in one of Sweden's largest television channels, at the authorities and at the highest political level.
