If young people are going off the rails - and a flip through the newspaper archives suggests they have been since the 1950s —

then clearly something must be to blame. The usual suspects are, in no particular order, capitalism, liberalism, consumerism, and family breakdown.

But the debate inevitably turns to music.

Ask any youth in our cities, irrespective of ethnic background, about rap and you’ll get a roll of the eyes — they’re more than familiar with this argument — and you’ll be told you’re taking it too seriously, it’s just showbiz. No one’s embracing a gun and gang culture because of anything they’ve seen on television or heard on their MP3, there are other forces at work. Nor, sadly, do they think there’s much anyone can do about it, it’s just “how it is”.

In fact there’s very little violence or guns in mainstream rap. Spend an evening watching rap videos and a fairly standard image starts to emerge. There’ll be the stars by a swimming pool, in a fast car or a flashy club, wearing

designer clothes and jewellery. The message that you’ll pick up from this is simple — that if you’re not loaded, you’re not happening. And it’s not hard to see why record companies and other corporations don’t have a problem with that, because that’s exactly what they believe too.

The real problem with rap is that far from undermining society’s values it’s reinforcing them, and the most fundamental of all our society’s values at the moment is that you are what you

own. Commercial rap’s money and success ethic won’t do any harm to middle-class youth; they have access to the professions and property where they can participate in it.

Respectable society expects those involved in street culture to start taking responsibility for

what they do, and change their behaviour and attitudes. No argument there, but it’s equally true that the rest of us might want to think about taking responsibility for what we do, and changing the behaviour and attitudes that create the environment our youth live in. In 2007 though, that’s an unfashionable attitude. Most of us think we’re stuck with the society we’ve got because “that’s how it is”.