Sister Souljah and Ice T may be telling the truth when they say their lyrics are lies.

I meant what I said And I said what I meant: An elephant's faithful One hundred per cent ! --From Horton Hatches the Egg

by Dr. Seuss

ALTHOUGH he is not exactly renowned for his faithfulness, Bill Clinton may be said to resemble the elephant in more than just its appetite as he eats his way through the grueling (more like porridging, actually) presidential campaign. At least his attack on the rap chanteuse, Sister Souljah, was a welcome attempt to penetrate the rhetorical fog in which Jesse Jackson lurks by calling his protegee to account for her words.

This is apparently not something one is supposed to do to a rapper. With the weary contempt of the sophisticate for the literal-minded, both Sister Souljah and another rap artiste, Mr. Ice T, have denied that their advocacy of killing white people meant what it said. "The song is fiction, not fact," says Ice T about "Cop Killer," which goes "Die, die, die, pig, die!/F--- the police!" and depicts the poet preparing to kill a policeman. "At no point do I go out and say, `Let's do it.' I'm singing in the first person as a character who is fed up with police brutality. I ain't never killed no cop. I felt like it a lot of times. But I never did it."

Likewise, Sister Souljah denies that she meant what she said in an interview with the Washington Post about the Los Angeles riots: "If black people kill black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people?" Like Ice T she claims that this was dramatic license, designed only to represent the "mindset" of a typical rioter. "I was in no way advocating that people go out and kill anybody, whether white or black."

It is easy to dismiss such excuses as disingenuous. On her rap tape, called 360 Degrees of Power and issued earlier this year by Sony Music Entertainment, Sister Souljah claims that black people are "in a state of war" with whites, that George Bush is a terrorist, and that "America's no damn good." No doubt she would say that it is only in the same spirit of dramatic empathy that she seems to advocate the killing of a black CIA agent and a policeman and imagines an official announcement by a white American President in 2995 that black slavery is to be reintroduced, but her persistent claims that "White people and the American government/Want to destroy Black African people wherever they are in the world" are pretty explicit to the naive listener.

When a Liar Tells the Truth

YET TO SAY THAT may be in a way as much beside the point as to insist that statements like "We are at war" or "Slavery's back in effect" are meant to be all in good fun. It is always hard to tell when a liar is telling the truth, but I am inclined to believe Ice T and Sister Souljah when they say they don't really mean it.

That is not to say that I accept the loathsome assurances of the spokesmen for Time Warner who are trying to fend off a spreading police boycott of "Cop Killer," which that corporation produced. In an attempt to claim the noblest of motives for selling thousands of copies of this hateful recording, Gerald Levin, the president of the company, wrote in the Wall Street Journal of his "willingness not just to tolerate creative freedom but to encourage it, even when the viewpoints expressed run counter to the norms of our mainstream culture." Murder is to him evidently just an alternative "viewpoint" or "norm" to that of the "mainstream." Thus he rejects calls to withdraw the album: "Given the natural instinct of corporations to avoid controversy, that's undoubtedly the easiest course. But to follow it would be to dishonor the truth."

Gag! Who invited truth and honor in here? Next to such hypocrisy the rappers themselves are models of almost elephantine integrity. Yet there does seem to be independent evidence that Levin and others with a pecuniary interest in believing so may be right to say that even such explicit words as those of "Cop Killer" are not intended "to advocate an assault by black street kids on the police"--that, in short, rap does not mean what it says to those for whom it is intended.

In a vox-pop piece in the Washington Post, for example, more than one of the black interviewees piped up, apparently unprompted, that "Souljah used exaggeration to make a point" and that she was not to be taken literally. When she says, "I'll shoot that motherf-----," does she really mean that she only intends to beat him up? Perhaps it is true after all that, in the words of Mr. Antwan Parker, 18, of Southeast Washington, "You got to be black to understand it."

That is itself an exaggeration, but the truth of it is that what we are dealing with here is a peculiarly black version of the rhetoric of oppression. It is not that Sister Souljah or Ice T or even the Los Angeles ghetto dwellers for whom both of them have at various times purported to speak are actually oppressed; rather, they have inheritted from their ancestors, who were, a form of speech and imagery characterized by a kind of fantastical moral chiaroscuro. So far from being a discussion of what Mr. Levin comically calls "the reality of the streets," it depends precisely upon its unreality--an unreality that takes the form of Mittyesque fantasies. Think of the ones you sometimes see in movies where a poor worm of a man imagines himself throttling some authority figure who is harassing him. It wouldn't be entertaining if there were any chance of his really doing it.

And entertaining, primarily, it is meant to be. The artistic effect of such poetry is comic, in the broadest sense. And sometimes in a more narrow sense too. Comic as in funny. Take, for example, another selection from Ice T's Body Count, the album which contains "Cop Killer." It is called "Momma's Gotta Die Tonight."

She taught me things that simply were not true.

She taught me hate for race--

That's why I hate you ! There's only one way I can make it right:

Momma's gotta die tonight.

So he gets some lighter fluid from the corner store, douses her bed in it, and sets her on fire. When she gets up, he clubs her with the Louisville Slugger she got him for his 12th birthday, then cuts her up in little pieces with a handy carving knife ("that we only use on special occasions like bulls--Thanksgiving"), puts her into some "little green Hefty bags," and distributes her parts all over the country:

Yo, you wanna go to Connecticut bitch?

Ohio, Detroit, Texas, L.A.?

Who's laughin' now, momma?

Who's laughin' now, bitch?

We are, clearly. What is interesting here is not only that the authority figure who becomes the object of Ice T's violent fantasies can just as easily be his own mother as a policeman, but also that she deserves to die for having taught him racial hatred:

  So if you got a mother or a
 grandmother or father
  Who wants to carry on the same
 racist bulls--- that's
 F-----this world up from day one

you can go and do likewise. Poetically speaking, of course.

Ugly as this imagery is, it occurs in a highly moral context. It is like Richard Wright's Native Son chanted by an evangelical black preacher. Sister Souljah, too, is at times a moralist of a surprisingly old-fashioned kind:

If you're going with a brother

And all you have is his beeper number,

That's not your man.

If you never met his momma,

That's not your man.

If you never been to his house

That's not your man.

And like my great-grandmother used to say:

Who buys the goddam cow when you can get all the milk for free?

Imagine what the feminists would say about that traditional image! But Sister Souljah is as scathing about feminists as she is about the police:

White feminists say that they are the sisters of Black women,

Ask you to join their women's movement,

And then they want to give you five hundred reasons why

You should leave your Black man

And let them eat your...

Well, that's a little below the belt. But Sister Souljah is no liberal:

White people give you welfare with a set of rules and restrictions

Designed to keep you on welfare, ignorant and lazy,

And then talk about you on TV.

In such a context, the rap about the police is at least understandable, and the talk of killing whites has about it a rough and ready sort of morality. That was the point of Sister Souljah's bringing up the Code of Hammurabi and the lex talonis with the Washington Post interviewer, and of these lines in "The Hate That Hate Produced":

They say two wrongs don't make it right

But it damn sure makes it even.

Both the morality and the violence in these songs are nine-tenths disconnected from reality. That is why they try to make up in lurid rhetorical energy what they lack in plausibility. It is also why the rappers seem genuinely surprised when you take them at their word, and vehemently insist that they don't want to kill anyone.

Fantasyland