Creeping teh gheyness

Here's a thought: Rap music isn't as good today as it was, say, 15 years ago because black men have gotten a lot more teh ghey than they were back then. Note that I'll be instituting a special state of no homo Juelz Santana for the rest of this post.

I'm not sure exactly how you would measure this, but hip-hop is almost certainly the most hetero genre of music evar. In 30 years of rap music, there's never been a prominent openly gay MC, and there probably couldn't have been. There haven't even been that many closet cases. Indeed it can be argued that teh gheyness is the antithesis of of hip-hop: The teh gheyer hip-hop gets, the worse that it is.

That said, the number of the latter is obviously on the rise. (Self) Esteemed print journalist Sickamore already did a post here earlier this year about how many of your favorite rappers are going around dressed like faggits, but it bears repeating: Hip-Hop has never seemed quite as teh ghey as it does in 2006. Fer chrissakes, check out this picture of Kanye West and tell me that would be possible in 1988.

Which begs the question: Can a group of men get teh gheyer over time? I'm going to go ahead and suggest this is possible. (Note: I was pre-med.) It's no secret that the out of wedlock birth rate in the black community is out of control. Someone with the tools and the talent would be well-served to find the actual statistics, but I'm sure it's way worse today than it was, say, 30 years ago.

Can a man become teh ghey because he lacks a male influence at a young age? Before the teh ghey community jumps down my throat - both because they're upset and because that's what they do - it's worth noting that this idea has been put forth by one of their own. In an op-ed in the UK's Guardian by teh ghey Peter Tatchell, it was suggested that a young Malcolm X became teh ghey because he lacked a male influence in the home.

After the death of his father, when Malcolm was six, he lacked male role models and was dominated by strong women - in particular, his tyrannical mother. He feared women and his early sexual experiences with girls were mostly unsatisfactory. Far from macho, Malcolm hated fighting and got beaten by other men. His passionate assertion that the need to feel masculine is a man's "greatest urge" indicates someone doubtful of his own manliness.

If not having a strong male influence in the home could someone as gully as Malcolm X to rub talcum powder on an old white man's balls, what's there to suggest that something similar couldn't happen to a fruit like Kanye West or any number of other rappers whose daddies were in jail or off somewhere living with their real family? In an MTV special last year, Kanye West described a similar experience from his own childhood.

West says that when he was young, people would call him a "mama's boy."

"And what happened was, it made me kind of homophobic, 'cause it's like I would go back and question myself," West says on the show, "All Eyes on Kanye West," set to air Thursday night (10:30 p.m. ET).

Coincidence?

To recap: Hip-Hop sucks today because today's generation of rappers lacked a strong male influence in the home and as such lack the manliness to be great rappers. Am I right, or am I right?