Stop shooting from the hip and start listening

The ugliest parts of hip-hop emerged when the civil rights movement was seen to have failed

The public debate following the shooting of four teenage girls in Birmingham last Friday has followed a troublingly predictable pattern. The Government says it was planning to crack down on guns all along, announces some draconian-sounding measures that will mean more people being banged up for longer and then cheapens the argument further by some tabloid point-scoring.

The offender this time is the Culture minister Kim Howells, who dismissed the whole artform of hip-hop as "these hateful lyrics that these boasting macho idiot rappers come out with". He described the most popular musical genre with young British men as "a big cultural problem. Lyrics don't kill people but they don't half enhance the fare we get from videos and films. It has created a culture where killing is almost a fashion accessory".

It is tempting to dismiss these comments as the ramblings of a poorly-briefed junior minister, but Howells is becoming a serial offender. Last year, he erupted into an ill-informed rant about contemporary art on the evidence of one Turner Prize exhibition and a long-ago course in watercolours. Howellism, indeed, can now be identified as a whole approach to life: a facile populist attitude to the new, representing itself as "common sense" and dismissing anything it doesn't understand as "rubbish", "idiotic", or "crap". This is especially unhelpful when it comes to hip-hop (a US youth culture movement increasingly popular in Britain, associated with black subcultures) for so many reasons that it is hard to know where to begin.

There are, of course, very ugly aspects to hip-hop, and it is cheap – as well as wrong – to dismiss these concerns as racist, as some did yesterday. (Howells is a fool, yes; a racist, no). The claims by many hip-hop artists that they are merely reporting the realities of life in the US's black ghettos is disingenuous at best. Many of these artists are describing a reality that they have very little experience of – for example the Detroit born rapper "Boss", aka Lichelle Laws, grew up in a middle-class Detroit neighbourhood where she attended ballet and piano lessons and went to private schools.

It is, of course, possible that at ballet classes in the classier suburbs of Detroit, the dying swan is in fact HIV positive and the Sugar Plum Fairy from The Nutcracker massacres the badass dudes from Swan Lake, but it seems unlikely. Even some of those with authentic experience of ghetto life make the squalor of gun crime and drug addiction seem attractive.

On top of this, there are hideous strains of misogyny and homophobia in some hip-hop music. The terms "bitch" and "ho" are still used to characterise black women, with the male artists serving as their pimps. The depiction of gay people is often even worse: the attitude of a member of the rap group Public Enemy, speaking in 1990, is typical. "There's not a word in any African language that describes homosexuals," he said. "There are no such words. They [both the words and the gay people] don't exist."

Homosexuality is portrayed as a Western perversion that only rarely infects the black community, and gay-bashing is openly incited. The Jamaican DJ Beenie Man, for example, blatantly promotes the execution and murder of gay men and lesbians. On the track "Damn" he sings: "I'm dreaming of a new Jamaica, come to execute all the gays." In his recent hit "Bad Man Chi Chi Man" he instructs his listeners to chase gay DJs off stage and kill them.

At this point, Howells is probably sounding like a man to admire. How can I criticise a man who stands up to these bigots? Well, Howells has not bothered to find out that there are substantial movements for reform, attacking these very flaws, within the hip-hop movement itself. Feminist hip-hop is a boom industry: my favourite is a song entitled "Your Revolution" by Sarah Jones that fights back against the idea that black political revolution is somehow intimately connected to black women being easy lays. The opening lyric is: "Your revolution will not happen between these thighs." Anybody who wants to know more about feminist hip-hop and black women fighting back against misogyny (rather than than being the passive victims that critics like Howells assume) would be well advised to read Joan Morgan's impressive book When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost... My Life as a Hip Hop Feminist.

Gay hip-hop is also establishing itself as a sub-genre, with groups such as G-Minus and D/DC, who says on one track: "What we got at stake is, when I'm chillin, whether or not I'm willin to fake where the break in my wrist be." This information has always been out there for anybody who wants it. But like those who write off all Israelis as supporters of Ariel Sharon's brutality, thus alienating good and decent peace activists such as those of Gush Shalom, Howells alienates these progressive aspects of hip-hop by writing the whole shebang off simply as "idiots".

And our bold and courageous minister of state also didn't bother to inform himself about the social activism that most of the hip-hop movement has united behind in the last few years. In New York, hip-hop stars (including Sean 'P Diddy'Combs) and their fans united to protest against plans to cut the city's education budget – a move that would have hit poor black kids hardest – and succeeded. The Hip-Hop Summit Action Network, convened in 2001, campaigns against censorship, racist policing and black educational disadvantage to powerful effect. The American tradition of black civil rights activism is now expressed through this movement. We must not forget that several hip-hop stars have roots in the radical black tradition: Tupac Shakur's mother, for example, was imprisoned for her role as a Black Panther activist.

The ugliest parts of hip-hop – gang tribalism and gun culture – emerged anyway when the civil rights movement was seen to have failed, and black political identity disintegrated. These dark undercurrents plopped out, the rancid afterbirth following the still-born dreams of Martin Luther King Jr. It was the failure of progressive movements to engage black communities and offer them hope which gave birth to the ugliness Howells laments. Now that it is spreading to Britain, he should ask himself why; is it because of a lack of economic opportunity for young black men, even in a country with such low unemployment? He should not try to depress or bully away the fresh political activists who are emerging from hip-hop movement.

Instead of raging against the whole movement, why doesn't Howells suggest that radio stations dedicate more time to progressive hip-hop artists? Why doesn't he suggest that the National Lottery offer development grants to young women and gay men in the black community to expand further the horizons of hip-hop culture? But then, it is so much easier to tap into the fear of black people, of young people, the new. And it is so much easier to rant against hip-hop than to admit that guns and gangs are the inevitable byproduct of putting our profitable recreational drugs industry into the hands of criminals.

Legalise drugs and have them properly sold in chemists and off-licenses, and there will be no money to buy guns. When prohibition of alcohol ended in the US in the 1930s, most gangs (then associated with the filthy Irish and Italian immigrants, of course) went bust, and Chicago's florists could look forward to Valentine's Day again. Next time Kim decides to diss hip-hop to the Today programme posse, he might actually make an effort to find out about the music, or he will deservedly get his ass kicked.

johann@johannhari.com