Earlier tonight I decided to check out a new restaurant that has just opened on the main boulevard here in Ann Arbor. As it is only a half a dozen or so blocks away, I decided to walk. A few blocks up the street, some young people were blasting the neighborhood with rap music at concert hall pitch -- accomplished by placing the speakers of their sound system on the windowsills of open windows. It was seriously loud -- so loud that had I been walking with someone else, we would have had to shout in order to hear each other even if we'd been an entire block away. Yes, it really was that loud. Not that this isn't the sort of thing to be expected in a student town; I occasionally have issues right in this block with a couple of loud houses, but even they have never been this bad. A young couple were sitting on their porch trying to enjoy what would normally have been a quiet sunset time, and I noticed that they had especially pained looks on their faces -- although they were not the sort of annoyed looks I would associate with having to hear music that was too loud. They looked pained almost in a guilty way. Strange. So instead of tuning things out in my usual manner, I decided to "tune in," and actually listen. To the, um, lyrics -- because it struck me that because of the genre that they might very well be "offensive."

Boy, was that an understatement.

Every few seconds the song (which wasn't all that musically bad, really, as rap goes) was punctuated by the usual "motherfucker" type obscenities, but what I found most significant was the constant recurrence of the N-word. Obviously, that (and not the sound alone) was what the neighbors on the porch found so upsetting.

What is it with that blasted N-word? It gets Tea Partiers in trouble even when it can't be heard, and yet it can apparently be blasted with impunity in popular music.

And I do mean popular. I'd heard this song (which I vaguely recognized) before, and it's a rap classic from 1996 -- Tupac Shakur's "All Eyez on Me." Tupac was of course black, which means that according to the prevailing cultural mores, he and all black people have a right to use the word with impunity.

But here's the thing: I couldn't help notice that the kids who were blasting the neighborhood were white. Do they have less of a "right" to play the song? What are the rules here? Are there any?

There is certainly no problem with the song on YouTube; it has gotten over 8 million hits. The song has its own Wiki post.

A Golden Oldie by any objective standard.

Out of curiosity, I did an N-word word count on the lyrics. The word appears in that song no less than 29 times.

Yet it is said to be the most offensive word in the English language, and it is deemed awful enough that the Tea Party Movement found itself in a sea of controversy over the merest allegation without proof that the word the was yelled.

Sorry, but I think this "system" is crazy. Just absofrigginglutely insane.

What if some asshole drove by a Tea Party and blasted them with "All Eyez on Me"? Would they get in trouble for that too?

Anyway, here's the song which upset the neighbors. I don't much like it myself, but there's no denying it's a classic, which probably makes it, you know, traditional for folks who are into nostalgia.

I think it overuses a word I don't use.

(As if anyone cares what my privileged white ass thinks.)