838 Chapter 31 From Boomers to Millennials
extravaganza, Thriller (1984), transformed the
genre. Its surreal images, disjointed editing, and
frenzied music set a new standard. Pop music
acquired a harder beat and more explicit lyrics. In
1988 the American Academy of Pediatrics expressed
concern that teenagers on the average spent two
hours a day watching rock videos. Over half featured
violence and three-fourths contained sexually sugges-
tive material.
A new sound called “rap” then emerged from the
ghetto. Rap consisted of unpredictably metered lyrics
set against an exaggeratedly heavy downbeat. Rap
performers did not play musical instruments or sing
songs so much as convey, in words and gestures, an
attitude of defiant, raw rage against whatever chal-
lenged their sense of manhood: other young males;
women, whom they derided in coarse sexual epithets;
and the police. Predictably, raps such as “Cop Killer”
and “Illegal Search” contributed to the charge that
rap condoned violence and crime.
“I call it crime rhyme,” explained rapper Ice-T,
“rhyme about actual street events.” Some “gangsta”
rappers dressed in stylized prison garb—beltless pants
and “do-rags.” Several major rappers were murdered,
and others ran afoul of the law.
The appeal of rap quickly spread beyond black
audiences. When Dr. Dre (Andrew Young), founder
of a gangsta rap group and head of a record firm,
discovered that whites bought more rap CDs than
blacks, he promoted the career of a young white
rapper, Eminem. Born Marshall Bruce Mathers III,
Eminem attracted attention with songs such as
“Murder, Murder,” “Kill You,” “Drug Ballad,” and
“Criminal.” He bashed women, gays, his wife, and
nearly everyone else. His lyrics were of such surpass-
ing offensiveness that he became an overnight
celebrity and instant millionaire. His fans, whom he
treated with scorn, were delighted by the universal-
ity of his contempt. The list of those suing him
included his mother.
By the 1990s improvements in computer graph-
ics led to the development of increasingly realistic—
and violent—video games. “Grand Theft Auto,”
which by 2005 had sold over 35 million copies and
generated over $2 billion, was the subject of a
60 Minutesspecial. Journalist Ed Bradley described
the game this way: “See a car you like? Steal it. A cop
in your way? Blow him away.” Bradley recounted the
story of Devin Moore, an eighteen-year-old who
played the game “day and night” for years. On
June 7, 2003, he stole a car; when apprehended he
grabbed a gun, killed three policemen, and fled in a
police cruiser. When finally caught he said, “Life is
like a video game. Everybody’s got to die sometime.”
Several states passed laws prohibiting the sale or
rental of violent video games to anyone under the age
of eighteen. (Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, for-
mer star of the extraordinarily violent “Conan” and
“Terminator” films, signed the California law.) But
federal courts struck down such laws as incompatible
with the Constitutional right of free speech.
The violation of social norms has long been
part of adolescence. In the 1830s boys devoured
“Davy Crockett” tales that championed sadistic vio-
lence and bawdy sexual antics; even during the pre-
sumably “conformist” decade of the 1950s young
people enjoyed the scatological humor of Mad
Magazine, the suggestive gyrations of Elvis Presley,
and the rebellious sexual innuendo of nearly all
types of popular music. Anthropologists have sug-
gested that in Western societies adolescence is a
transitional stage in which young people delight in
“cultural inversions” that turn the social order
upside down.
Most consumers of pop violence in the 1990s
and early years of the 2000s, like the readers of the
Crockett comics or Mad Magazine, had little diffi-
culty distinguishing between cultural fantasies and
everyday life. But for those who had grown up in
ghettos where gangs ruled the streets and where
friends and relatives were commonly swallowed up by
the criminal justice system, the culture of violence
seemed to legitimate the meanness of everyday life.
Violence and criminality had become so much a part
of popular culture, and popular culture of adolescent
life, that some retreated wholly to imaginative worlds
conjured by movies, video and computer games, TV,
and pop music. To them, the world of parents and
teachers seemed duller and less responsive—less
real—than the one inside their heads.
America, it seemed, had become seemingly
filled with menace. At night, few ventured down-
town and many avoided public places. Car alarm sys-
tems became standard. The popular phrase—“your
home is your castle”—took on an eerie reality.
Americans reinforced doors with steel, nailed win-
dows shut, and increasingly hunkered down in their
own private spaces, which they locked up and wired
with alarms.From Main Street to Mall to Internet
In 1960 civil rights protesters picketed six stores in
Richmond, Virginia. Within several decades, all of
the stores had closed. So had most of the lun-
cheonettes,5&10cent stores, bus stations, and
community swimming pools that had been sites of
civil rights protests during the late 1950s and early