The Blues came from the heart of black slaves. Michael Jackson and his trend-setting Pop music was Motown’s pride. Hip-hop, the present craze among the youth brewed in American ghettos. I wonder what the music scene would be like without the experimental music of the blacks. I am not even thinking of Robert Johnson whose hallowed guitar blues influenced Eric Clapton and the likes. That was 80 years ago. He was blue, but his grand children were red with rage.

The new generation of Afro-Americans was an angry lot who expressed themselves aggressively. They put aside their blues and went tongue-lashing at anything and everything that bugged them. They did this in a quick beat and called it rhythm and poetry, or rap in short. I don’t know how much of Dr Dre can be called poetry, but this new form is music to most teenagers now. They call it hip-hop. Don’t ask me why, but rapping is the key to hip-hop.

The only time I thought rap was poetry in rhythm indeed was while watching the film, The Renaissance Man, when a class of army men rapped Shakespeare’s To be or not to be. To all those Hamlet fans, this is the easiest way to remember the lines.

Rap, or hip-hop, was a black underground movement that did not surface completely until only a few decades ago. The first rap song I remember was, ironically, white rapper Vanilla Ice’s Ice Ice Baby. Baba Seghal later confidently and conveniently made that, Thanda Thanda Pani. M C Hammer’s You can’t touch this was a rage too. But by the time I was out of school, rap had become hip-hop and baggy pants became saggy and low-waist. Black rappers had got another white member — Eminem.

I believe with Eminem, black music became acceptable to the white man. He was the guy who rapped while Sir Elton John played the piano and sang the chorus to Stan at the Grammy awards. Stan was no doubt different from the regular hip-hop. It had a disturbed story line with Dido’s soothing voice.

However, Eminem had a disturbed childhood. His father left while he was still a child and he had to do odd jobs to survive. He made a good candidate for a genre that was all about venting pent-up anger. His tongue-lashing ability gave the black rappers a run for their money. Eminem did not spare anyone. From his mother, Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Michael Jackson and president Bush all got a piece of his mind. When he sang My words are weapons, they couldn’t agree more.