... Is it real freedom, though: a world where Chuck D. can serenade his Uzi in art exactly because in the S. Bronx 'Uzi's' such a perfect metonym for irresistible force? For all the exciting formal innovations and transformations of rap, what's finally, for us, its most affecting quality is that it's the first pop genre to countenance a peculiarly modern American despair, one for which popular music, maybe any popular art, can no longer be a palliative—all the putative 'freedoms' such art invents and exploits and rips off and wastes finally resembling most closely, to-day, the prisoner's COMPLETE FREEDOM to beat his head on the cell wall just as much as he likes. Serious rap's the first music to begin creative work on the new, (post-) postmodern face the threat of economic inequality to American ideals is wearing: the dreadfully obvious one: viz., 'freedom' becomes not qualitative but quantitative, quantifiable, a cold logical function of where you are and what you have to exercise it on. For the unfree citizen, U.S. freedom now equals the very 'power' it invented itself against. Little wonder that in rap the constitutional watchwords of white public discourse detach, emptify, float: oh Jesus surely freedom can't be just the wherewithal to buy and display. If it is, then the whole country's been lied to by itself, and if the impending millennium turns out Millennial it'll be hard to fucking care. But if true freedom's still meant to be more than this, more than the Pursuit of Yuppiness, then these are some really pathetic, infuriating times—especially among the Marginal, on whom freedom's unjust absence has imposed the conviction that freedom's just presents.