some random thoughts:
Rap does seem to be bad in that it *does* infuence the kids at least a bit. Not so much the music and lyrics, but the culture of violence and money and drugs and hoes and whatnot that comes with it. Bearing in mind all I know is stuff wot I read on the interweb, but for example, theres a blog by a black teacher in a school with mostly black poor kids and even they admit to her that its hard to succeed at school when their role models are people like 50 cent. A lot of the critism of raps influence seems to come from people who are actually effected as opposed to the white middle class objections like "games are the evil and make kids burn things!11!"
On the other hand, I love metal :-) Metal is weird, but its all about anger and violence and darkness, but its *good* anger...
eg: a moshpit looks incredibly violent, but if you fall over, you never hit the floor, because immediately everyone around you grabs you and picks you back up again.
Theres just something about the anger in metal that feels right, I'm not sure why. Possibly its because you're accepting that side of yourself instead of trying to pretend its not there and the whole world is lovely and fluffy.
besides, most metal lyrics tend to be random strings of cool sounding phrases which completely fail to make any sense (I'm looking at you metallica :-p), let alone enough to encourage you to do anything specificly bad ;-)
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