Out of tune with popular culture

If music causes violence, the '1812 Overture' must have sparked off a spate of drive-by cannonings

If the growing affection for guns really is caused by hip-hop lyrics from America, what sort of hardcore gangsta rap must Tony Blair be listening to? George Bush must be sending him videos of rappers riding across basketball courts on tanks, thrusting their fingers into the camera and yelling "Boom boom in da Iraqi boy's head" and "My solution's execution without no UN resolution."

If music has been the cause of violence, then New Labour should be prepared to go much further than attacking rap. Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture must have done untold damage, probably sparking off a spate of drive-by cannonings throughout Europe in the 19th century. And who knows what carnage was caused by the wartime music-hall song "Run Rabbit Run" with its line "Here comes the farmer with his gun gun gun." Maybe the original was accompanied with a video in which the farmer and his posse brandished their guns across their shoulders, and sang "I'm not gonna get by without no muthafuckin' rabbit pie" while the farmer's wife wiggled on a tractor in a bikini. Possibly this was what caused the whole war. Gangs in Germany got hold of bootleg copies and the next thing was the blitzkrieg into Poland.

Then Tom Jones sang of how to deal with the Delilah he couldn't have – "She stood there laughing/ I felt the knife in my hand and she laughed no more." This must have been what inspired the knife-fighting gangs of the Sixties, as the Pussycat posse reaped terror across the Green Green Grass of the Homies. We will also have to ban reggae, for being inspired by someone who boasted of how he shot the sheriff, though the So Solid Crew probably think Bob Marley was chicken as he did not shoot the deputy. In fact the song we should encourage our youth to listen to most of all is "Come As You Are" with its healthy chorus "I don't have a gun", beautifully sung by Kurt Cobain.

I presume Tony Blair is also going to insist that the church bans its weapon-happy macho tract known as "The Bible". For example, the book of Kings tells us that when some boys shouted "Get out of here, baldy" at the prophet Elisha, he "cursed them in the name of the Lord. Then two she-bears came out of the woods and tore 42 of the boys to pieces." And the book of Esther celebrates how on one occasion "The Jews struck down 500 of their enemies with the sword, killing and destroying them, and they did what they pleased to those that hated them." With that sort of influence it's a wonder every harvest festival doesn't end in a bloodbath. You can almost hear the vicar shouting, "Give it up for the notorious MC G-O-D, keeping it real with the omnipotent massive."

No branch of culture is entirely one-way. No musical trend can be completely violent, or completely peaceful, completely progressive or reactionary. And the division isn't just between the musicians but within the same musician. Reggae is often at one and the same time a cry of personal defiance against racism and slavery, and a cry of support for a dictator and a religion that categorises women as unclean. Similarly, hip-hop developed as a means of conveying the rage of black youth against Reagan's America, but also contained the gangland gun-waving and woman-hating that infested the ghettos following the demise of the Black Panthers.

Nonetheless the rage was real, and when articulated by rappers it became exciting, if often misdirected. This is the point about most adolescent rage: the tension and angst is painfully deep, but can go off in every direction at once. I remember being in a fury for weeks in 1975, and being unsure whether the cause was the war in Vietnam or because I was besotted with Cheryl Jackson and she was going out with this tosser from Caxton House. Now there's probably a psychoanalytical name for this condition, like "confused napalm/erection syndrome".

So it's not surprising that modern soulless politicians should be clueless as to the appeal of something driven by passion. Eminem may sing a lot of appalling nonsense about women and gays, but his appeal is that when he screeches about what it was like to be broke, you know this is coming from someone who knew what it was like to be broke.

The condescending voice of New Labour can't even enter this debate, because to most people who listen to rap they appear as the sort of people whose opinion on almost any music is "THUD THUD THUD turn that bloody racket DOWN." Of course they don't see it like that because they're New Labour, and they like to think they're "with it" because they occasionally jiggle from one foot to the other and clap while singing along to Celine Dion or "Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow" by Fleetwood Mac. You can see Kim Howells saying to his teenage kids "I don't see why these 'rappers' can't sing about nice things like gardening, or getting a new carpet delivered."

But happily they'll soon be ready to implement their other technique for reversing the trend towards adolescent reverence for guns, by sending thousands of them off to war.