by Stanley Crouch
Knight Ridder-Tribune
If the murder of Jason Mizell, known as Jam Master Jay, is connected at all to the world of hip-hop, then things have gotten even worse than they already were.
It is extremely bad news if hip-hop is at the point where even apparently good guys like Mizell - family men who speak out against thuggish behavior and drugs - can find themselves targets for goons in ski masks.
And that is exactly what Mizell became.
Those two men who came into his Queens recording studio Wednesday night were not there to argue, threaten or fight. They were there to kill a man in particular. Their purpose was so clear to them that they merely wounded the man who was with Mizell. He was shot in the leg.
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There are, of course, rumors circulating about the shooting having nothing to do with the entertainment business or the murder over the weekend of rap promoter Kenneth Walker or opinions about the world or anything else like that. Some girl's angry guy somewhere is what they are passing around in phone calls. This one having heard it from that one who heard it from that one. And so on.
Unfortunately, even that could be traced back to the opposite end of the genre from the one that made Mizell a pioneer in rap as the turntable man with Run-DMC. By the opposite end, I mean the part of rap that has combined the porno film, the minstrel update and the monster movie. This version of rap is given to sexual vulgarity, the celebration of the "bling-bling" of expensive and tasteless goods and the depiction of young black men as ruthlessly brutal thugs.
Chuck D of Public Enemy is one of the strongest critics of that extreme. At the New York rap summit organized last year by rap mogul Russell Simmons, Chuck D went after the crude values of that material. He recently was quoted criticizing popular entertainment at large as well as hip hop for fostering violent attitudes in young black people.
"Gun talk and gunplay is part of the landscape," he recently was quoted as saying.
Jason Mizell might well have been a good guy, but he could have been taken to the morgue for one of two reasons - something that had to do with the dark end of rap or something that came out of the kind of world that the dark end of rap celebrates.
Either way, his murder and that of Walker are aspects of a far more pervasive and deadly kind of oppression than black people have ever experienced - far more than when the Ku Klux Klan was so high and so mighty and could so easily dip its white sheets in hot, sticky blood.
