I wrote last month about the need to see a much wider range of love stories between same-sex couples in our culture, moving away from relationships that are marked by tragedy because of the sexual orientation of the participants, and towards stories that can be purely happy, or tragic because of other factors, or the basis for heroics unrelated to the relationships. We’re in the early stages of some television shows that do that, like The L.A. Complex and Lost Girl. And now we have a music video that advances that narrative, Macklemore and Ryan Lewis’s gorgeous cradle-to-the-grave short film for “Same Love”:

Part of what’s fascinating and politically effective about the video is that the images are much more subtle than the lyrics themselves, which are a blunt call for equality. The couple in the film confront implied homophobia from their teenaged peers, from a couple on the street, but they also get to experience normal milestones, from teenaged fights with their parents, to public kisses, to introducing each other to their families, to an anxious proposal, to a joyous wedding. Homophobia, both internalized and external, is a factor in their relationship, but it’s far from the sum of it, and it doesn’t consume them and end in a cliche spasm of violence, as was the case for Murs’ “Animal Style” video. They just get to live, and love, and we can focus on the beauty and tremulousness and steadfastness of their relationship, above all else.

When Nicki Minaj joked about voting for Mitt Romney in a recent song, rhyming “I’m a Republican, voting for Mitt Romney/You lazy bitches is fucking up the econ’my,” it was a useful reminder that, while hip-hop has, at times, been a genre that relies heavily on claims of authenticity, rappers don’t actually intend to follow through on every declarative statement they make in song. But while “To The World,” Kanye West’s leaked track from his forthcoming Cruel Summer album, is probably not a useful tool for determining whether Mr. West will vote for President Obama, or evaluating Sen. Harry Reid’s claims that Mitt Romney paid no income taxes in some years, the line “I’m just trying to protect my stacks, Mitt Romney don’t pay no tax, Mitt Romney don’t pay no tax,” is actually worth paying attention to:

One of the central goals of the Obama reelection campaign has been to firmly fix the idea that Mitt Romney is an out-of-touch rich guy, someone who likes firing people, who ships his money overseas, who refuses to release his tax returns, probably because there’s something truly awful in them. If that narrative is sufficiently accepted that West can use Romney as shorthand for tax evasion, that’s an indicator of the larger success of that strategy. I’m not saying that a single hip-hop lyric is a weathervane of the election. But it’s not a bad sign that an idea is gaining some traction.

When teenage Chicago rapper JoJo was shot to death last week, his murder set off two separate online convulsions. The first was an alarming string of celebratory tweets from other Chicago teens who were glad of the killing. The second was a less-local burst of essays from hiphop writers on the relationship (or lack thereof) between the “drill” music that bubbles up from Chicago streets and the violence that fills them. Potholes In My Blog honcho Andrew Martin voiced the sickened, sorrowful feeling the response to JoJo’s murder inspired, and asked rap bloggers to reconsider how they talk about the drill scene. Lloyd Miller at Mostly Junk Food took the opposite approach, asking “Would any of the many other non-rapping young men and women in Chicago be in any more danger if they were to pick up a mic?”

This conversation misses a lot, but I share the sense of unease that sparked it. From Tipper Gore to Bill Bennett to suburban PTA meetings, nearly everyone who’s ever called for curbing the cultural output of the American ghetto has ended up looking out of touch or authoritarian. Yet while real-life violence never dinted my affection for emcees like Ice Cube, Big L, or Freddie Gibbs, reading about Chicago’s insanely violent summer has dredged up an internal conflict I’ve somehow dodged through a dozen years of hiphop fandom. It’s worth considering what our responsibility as listeners is; if you like drill, and you introduce a friend to a Chief Keef track, is it incumbent on you to mention the context in which the music’s produced? But surely it’s foolishness to get uncritically caught up thinking that the horrifying new normal in Chicago is in fact novel.

The murder rate in NWA-era Los Angeles was similarly jaw-dropping; 738 Angelinos were killed the year “Straight Outta Compton” came out, and over the next six years the population-adjusted murder rate would jump from about 21 killings per 100,000 people to over 30 in 1992-93. When Big L was killed in Harlem in 1999, the Giuliani administration’s authoritarianism had already lowered New York’s murder rate from its absurd early-90s highs, but he was one of 664 New Yorkers murdered that year. Freddie Gibbs is from Gary, IN (the one thing he has in common with my father), and Gary’s a perennial candidate for Murder Capital of America. Since the early ‘90s, “the Guts” has registered a much higher per-capita murder rate than New York, LA, Atlanta, Chicago, or Houston. (These statistics all come from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Statistics, a system that’s vulnerable to stat juking by local PDs, to be sure, but murders are tough to hide. I’m no criminologist, but while murder rates have dropped precipitously, hundreds are still killed each year in our most violent cities.)

Current-ness biases us. It’s easy to mistake things that are happening right now for much worse or much better than similar things that happened years ago. Like Poot said in season 4 of The Wire, “Man every year everybody’s like, ‘yeah these kids out here, they’re a new breed! I ain’t never seen nothing like this before! This the end of the world now!’”

(It’s worth noting, too, that Poot is one of the very few members of the original terrace crew from season 1 who makes it out of the life. He’s as much lucky as anything else, and ultimately his escape involves some pride-swallowing; in season five, he’s working at a Foot Locker. But while all this may have some relevance, The Wire isn’t a good enough stopping place here.)

Three obvious possibilities for why I’m reacting differently to drill than I do to the above-referenced trio of hardcore rhymers: I see thoughtfulness and artistic merit in L’s, Cube’s, and Gibbs’ output that is lacking from the drill rappers I’ve heard; I’m getting old; or the people dying in the home of the drill scene this summer are so likely to be children that there really is a meaningful difference.

Either way, it’s important that we be honest about why this conversation is happening now, and what it really is. We’re not talking about this because there have been over 150 murders in Chicago this summer. We’re not talking about this because nearly a third of those killed have been minors. We’re not talking about it because the conversation about violent culture and actual violence recurs, cicada-like, at fixed intervals.

People are positing or refuting links between Chicago’s drill scene and its bloody summer because the kid who got killed last week left behind an online footprint that provides the raw materials for a conversation about rap and violence. And it’s much, much easier to get lost in arguments about these kids’ lifestyles than it is to grapple with the systemic failure that’s producing such a staggering volume of young, dead brown bodies.

The critical conversation around drill music and real-life murders is a way to avoid talking about how Chicago came to be a place that produces both of those things. Drill isn’t causing killings, the dead-end trap of urban poverty is. Today’s landscape was produced by some combination of failures in education, public infrastructure, social policy, and economic opportunity. (For smart sociology on how the evaporation of blue-collar jobs from urban centers and disparities in social capital helped constrain the ambitions of East Harlem natives, read “In Search Of Respect: Selling Crack In El Barrio” by Phillippe Bourgois.) If we don’t find ways to remedy those failures, likely with policies that will look more like revolution than reform, we’ll continue to see generation after generation of American youth stay stuck and get dead. It won’t be because of the music they listen to. It’ll be because we haven’t done enough to expand the pathways by which social and economic capital flow between the burbs and the block.

When Dedication 4, the latest volume of carefully marketed vapidity from Li’l Wayne, hit the internet yesterday, I did what I’ve been doing with Wayne projects since about 2007: set phasers to “ignore.” The things I love about hiphop simply do not square with the things that Weezie fans love about his music, and there’s little to gain by turning that subjective reality into objective claims about a culture in which I am forever a guest. Unless somebody smart from the rap internet started to make noise about interesting rhymes or a sonic departure from the norm on Dedication 4, then, I was staying away.

But then Twitter started telling me that Nicki Minaj endorsed Mitt Romney. Here’s the line, from her of-course-NSFW verse on Wayne’s take on the “Mercy” beat:

“I’m a Republican, voting for Mitt Romney/You lazy bitches is fucking up the econ’my.”

The line was bound to inspire the worst kind of crossover thinking from political pundits with a stronger understanding of tongue-in-cheek twitter rhythms than of hiphop. But any effort to extrapolate a serious political endorsement from a rich emcee’s calendar-sensitive braggodocio would be foolish, and I assumed only the predictable cheerleaders of the right would bother.

Instead, after that tidy little wave of trolling passed, Google started registering credulous hits from actual news outlets. Buzzfeed, Politico, and DC’s unofficial insider-baseball digest The Hill all got in on the action. The Hill not only ran a “Nicki Minaj Raps Mitt Romney Endorsement” headline, but reported the second bar of the rhyme as “a shot at President Obama on the eve of the Democratic National Convention.” Whereas Buzzfeed submitted without comment and Politico filed the “news” in their celebrity gossip column, that quote is from the “Conventions 2012” vertical on TheHill.com. Even Glenn Beck’s site used qualifiers in writing this up, but The Hill’s piece uses declarative language and naked assertions. (We’ll leave aside The Hill’s stylebook being okay with “bitches” but insisting on a prim “f——-” two words later in their Nicki quote.)

It’s not just The Hill and the right who screw this stuff up, either. Gawker got in on the traffic game last night too, with a brief, tortured bit of semi-serious exegesis. Gawker also asserted Nicki’s verse was a freestyle, which smacks of “hey, I heard that term once!” unfamiliarity with the form. These might be freestyles, but nobody in the track asserts they’re anything but writtens, and it’s a good example of a meaningful term that often gets used as a buzzword by outsiders. In other words, Gawker did the same kind of parachute drop into hiphop culture that The Hill did, only attempting to spin Nicki’s line the other way.

All this reflects a failure to grok what rappers do, what rap is, how songs and verses work. In this specific case, I’d even argue that it reflects a casual disrespect for the level of thought that goes into crafting a verse. Plucking those couple words out of context is an embarrassing reach, and also detracts from the (gulp) artistry of the verse as a whole. As a hiphop fan, I may have little use for Nicki Minaj, Wayne, and the entire YMCMB style of music. But though it pains me to defend these folks as writers, it’s worse that the politics internet is so willing to use pop culture as grist for the mill.

I have no idea what Nicki Minaj’s politics are, and I respect objections to heavy-handed x-means-exactly-y hiphop exegesis. But for The Hill to report that Minaj not only endorsed Romney but labeled the President a ‘lazy bitch’ is absurd. First, the entire verse is get-on-my-level style wealth bragging, about the high-class lifestyle Nicki enjoys and the less luxurious life the imaginary person she’s mocking lives. That’s a strange home for a macroeconomic critique. Second and last, Nicki Minaj’s penchant for waving fake penises around on stage certainly doesn’t preclude her from making political statements, but it ought to prejudice one’s interpretation of a couple bars she probably recorded months ago towards “attention-grabbing joke” and away from “calculated election gambit.”

But the point isn’t to offer my own, superior interpretation of these lines, thus proving The Hill and the right-wing fever swamp incorrect. It’s that the whole business of scooping out two lines from a just-released mixtape to make a political point is gross and misguided. It’s possible to say interesting things about the intersection of hiphop and politics, but this isn’t how it’s done.

Of course, that assumes that our political media is capable of treating hiphop thoughtfully. We learned that’s mostly not the case from the Common flap last year. (Beyond the acres of right-wing internet real estate given over to hilariously misguided outrage about a mistranscribed misinterpretation of his Def Poetry Jam appearance, Kevin Williamson used his National Review Online space to insist that a culture he’s proud to be ignorant of can never rise to the level of art.) There are numerous exceptions, and there will be more of them as the pundit ranks are taken over by a generation capable of taking rap seriously. But for now at least, there are traffic-oriented news organizations whose grasp on what rappers do is nonexistent. These folks are nonetheless willing to make declarative assertions about what Nicki Minaj meant. I’ll wait for her press conference and performance of “Super Bass” at campaign events.

I want to like Lupe Fiasco’s “Bitch Bad,” on the grounds that I like Lupe Fiasco himself, and because I, like many female hip-hop listeners, would be happy to find articulate male allies in the genre:

There are a lot of things that are off about the song. Its chorus hook, “Bitch bad, woman good / Lady better, they misunderstood,” sounds like remedial English, which whether it’s directed at women who apply the word to themselves or the men who sling it around, sounds exhaustingly condescending. In The Atlantic, Mychal Denzel Smith has a terrific breakdown of the song’s problematic gender politics, from the simplicity of that core heirarchy, to its unwillingness to assign men responsibility for their judgement of women.

But what irritated me about “Bitch Bad” is its desire to get credit for bringing up a provocative issue without the accompanying responsibility for calling anyone out. “Disclaimer: this rhymer, Lupe, is not usin’ ‘bitch’ as a lesson,” he rhymes, “But as a psychological weapon / To set in your mind and really mess with your conceptions / Discretions, reflections, it’s clever misdirection.” But the only meaningful discussion between “lesson” and intellectual provocation is the responsibility the speaker has for making a point at the end. Given how heavily the rest of “Bitch Bad”‘s lyrics rely on media psychology—in the verse about how girls consume media, he might as well be cribbing from the Parents’ Television Council—he’s on particularly shaky ground in terms of declaiming having any particular message. Watching him dig deeper on that insistence that he can’t be taken too seriously, telling Rolling Stone “I’m not trying to say this is what’s going to happen, or potentially what’s going to happen. Because you don’t know, the characters are fictional, based on true events. I know personally what has affected me, but that’s me personally,” is irritating.

The thing is, as a woman, Lupe Fiasco’s personal experience with the impact of the word “bitch” is nice to have on record, but his willingness to take an actual stand would be a lot more useful. I’m not really in a mood to give him credit for calling out misogyny in hip-hop if he doesn’t actually want to be seen as calling out misogyny in hip-hop. Fiasco told Rolling Stone that the album from which this song comes was inspired by James Baldwin because “he was such a powerful figure. He was a homosexual, he was an atheist, he was black, he was a writer, he was a down brother, he lived in Paris and grew up in the slums of Harlem. And he was a preacher. So he had all these things that made him Public Enemy Number One, but he was also loved and adored by the public at the same time.” But part of what made Baldwin powerful is that he took action, in his life and his art. He moved to Paris in part to escape discrimination, and wrote bluntly and frankly about discrimination against gay people in Giovanni’s Room and about American racism in essays like The Fire Next Time. His work was powerful in part because it was explicitly, courageously political, something Lupe Fiasco is apparently afraid to be.

I’m tired of this. I thought I was tired enough after watching Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises, a perfect encapsulation of how Nolan manufactures credit for alluding to big issues while preserving a critical incoherence about politics that let him avoid offending any potential customers. And I’m even more tired after a stint at the Television Critics Association where people said repeatedly that the shows they’d created had no politics. By that, they mean that their shows are not partisan, which is something I can see legitimately avoiding (though having politicians on television have no party affiliation or fake party affiliation is disingenuous). But they end up implying that they’re afraid to claim their own ideas instead. It’s okay for pop culture to have ideas. In fact, it’s necessary. And pop culture can be deeper, and riskier, and more exciting, the action and the relationships it portrays can have higher stakes, when those ideas are about how the world should be run, about what conditions are necessary for equity, and stability, and justice.

Murs’ video for “Animal Style,” a story about the tragic consequences of internalized homophobia and closeting, was planned long before Frank Ocean released the liner notes from Channel Orange that tell the story of his first love. But the timing’s been such that it enters an existing conversation that’s already underway:

The video itself plays into some very old narratives about self-hating black gay men that, while they may be a powerful dramatization of the worst consequences of internalized homophobia, are hardly the sum of the experiences of non-straight African American people. But there’s still something bracing about Murs’ willingness to play a gay man even though he’s straight and married, without any of the coyness or shock-value courting of Lil B’s I’m Gay (I’m Happy) album.

But no matter the content, one of the things that’s fascinating about the reaction to the clip is the anxiety some people appear to feel about its existence. “Since when is HIP HOP and being GAY ever intertwined,” complains one commenter on World Star Hip-Hop. “Wtf , why are rappers trying to capitalize on this gay shit now,” whines another. The idea that hip-hop has somehow been captured by a gay takeover is ludicrous, of course. But it’s amazing how threatened people feel by even a couple of positively-received efforts by rappers and R&B singers to explore sexuality and homophobia. Frank Ocean, Lil B, and Murs are a beginning of a conversation, rather than the end of it. And some people seem very nervous about the prospect of that conversation taking place anywhere, even if there’s absolutely no requirement that they participate in it, if only because they know that it means their views may no longer be dominant.

It can be obscured under a grime of casual homophobia and sexism in their lyrics and music video imagery, but the most radical thing about the music collective Odd Future has always been their matter-of-fact inclusion of their lesbian producer, Syd tha Kid. She’s always been a full member of the group, rather than a sexually-available hanger on, and for all the language and imagery members of Odd Future throw around, in practice, the collective seems entirely comfortable with non-straight people. That perception is even truer today after Odd Future member Frank Ocean posted the story of his first love on his Tumblr, a lyrical, painful reminiscence of falling for another man who didn’t, or couldn’t bring himself to, return Frank’s affections. Tyler the Creator, Odd Future’s flashy frontman, was immediately supportive, tweeting “Proud of that nigga cause I know that shit is difficult or whatever.”

His Twitter bio, of course, still reads “I AM NOT A DYKE.” And it’s not as if his pride in Frank’s personal courage means Tyler recognizes (or wants to acknowledge) the contribution of casual vernacular homophobia to the fact that “that shit is difficult or whatever.” Dream Hampton wrote, in an open letter to Frank, “The 200 times Tyler says ‘faggot’ and the wonderful way he held you up and down on Twitter today, Syd the Kid’s sexy stud profile and her confusing, misogynistic videos speak to the many contradictions and posturing your generation inherited from the hip-hop generation before you.” That evolution, that untangling of contradictions, happens in fits and starts. Earl Sweatshirt, another Odd Future member, came back from an extended stay at a school in Samoa, during which he did volunteer work with rape and assault survivors, sobered about the casualness of rape imagery in his lyrics. Maybe the same thing will happen with Tyler. Maybe it won’t.

But whatever happens, Syd and Frank are here. They are visible. Tyler’s support for them is visible. Jay-Z’s tacit support is visible in letting Hampton publish her letter on his Life and Times site. And visibility is the long-term death of bias. I don’t really think that Odd Future will be the wheel that turns the entire ship of hip-hop (or R&B, the genre which Frank is more rooted in) here. It was never going to be that a major talent in a musical genre came out and the next day we woke up to the bloom of a thousand gay and gay-positive mix tapes. That’s too much freight to place on any one person, and far too much to expect of an entrenched industry with well-established norms, even if those norms do that genre harm. But at the end of Angels in America, Tony Kushner’s main character, Prior Walter, said something that I think gets this kind of event exactly right. “We won’t die secret deaths anymore,” he tells the audience directly. “The world only spins forward. We will be citizens…The Great Work begins.” There are all kinds of countries, and all kinds of citizenship to be claimed.

As a piece of political thought, I really, really like Jasiri X’s and Rhymefest’s latest track, “Who’s Illegal?”:

it’s a great explication of the work done by the word “illegal” when it’s used to describe immigrants, both in terms of how we view history, and how we judge present actions. If people are, themselves, inherently illegal, it becomes harder to judge violence done to establish and expand American borders in the past as a violation of both law and norms. And if people are illegal, the illegality of their personhood supersedes, in the imagination, illegal acts done to them by supposedly legal persons like Joe Arpaio. The idea that a person can be illegal is, of course, incoherent. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t serve ugly uses.

50 Cent, in an interview in which he endorsed marriage equality on the grounds that “If everyone else is for it, then hey, to each his own. I don’t have personal feelings towards it because I’m not involved in that lifestyle,” also decided it made sense to tell the world that:

So in process, we need organizations for straight men. We do. We need organizations for straight men in the case you’ve been on the elevator and somebody decides they want to grab your little buns. Times are changing. Those organizations are set up for at one point they were being attacked for those choices. Now its completely different. Obviously [homosexuality] is more socially accepted.

One of the hardest things about getting people to surrender their privilege is helping them to understand that giving some of it up isn’t going to materially change their living conditions. Asking that women be treated equally isn’t to ask that women have the right to sexually harass men or to invert the pay gap so women make more than men. Advocating for gay rights is in part about communicating that 50 Cent’s arrogant fear that gay men want to grab his ass is unfounded. Liberation, done right, can make things better for both people who have privilege and people who don’t. The people who are disadvantaged get access to the rights they see denied them. And then people who have privilege end up freed from their fears of what might happen if things change, benefitting from their contact with people they were previously separated from.

In this specific case, the wave of endorsements for marriage equality shouldn’t be mistaken for comfort with gay people. We normally talk about how contact with specific gay people makes straight people more receptive to gay rights: when you care for someone, it becomes emotionally difficult to support their continued legal subordination. But President Obama’s use of the bully pulpit reverses that process, and it means we’re seeing a lot of people coming out for substantive gay rights who don’t seem to have fully dealt with their homophobia. That doesn’t necessarily lessen the impact of their endorsements—indifference is better than aggression or loathing—but it is a reminder that progress doesn’t advance in tandem on all fronts.