Another pretty simple answer, from outside the window: even the best of rap has no 'vision' of anything beyond present discontent less because it's a black music than because it's a distinctively young one. Ours is a generation (late- or post-Boom) divorced from Time: we're taught to look to the 'innocent past' for signposts to value; to see the present as little more than a compendium of evils and past fuckups we have to borrow a couple trillion from the Japanese and throw an innocent-past party to forget; to see the future as a vague fairyland where the consequences of our dire present will by political wand-waving 'all work out,' or else as the grim, cinereous end-of-the-month day when the Visa charges we've been using to pay off our AmEx finally come due. And the time banditry has got to be specifically worse for the urban black young, since the only real 'past' that might summon its political pavlovs is that of a civil rights movement no one under 30 can recall, of a King and an X both murdered at rhetorical zenith, before the movements their words fashioned had barely begun transit. Because the past can be considered altered, falsified (for whites by Reagan, for blacks by the whites who ran the past) induction doesn't apply, and so no imaginative future can exist: at best it'll be more of the same. Today even the _fresh_est black music is no longer an 'escape' from the very conditions and tight borders that make it possible as music, or even an expression--since rap is, in the best and worst ways, just a mirror.