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I have to admit that King Von and YNW Melly have a degree of authenticity when it comes to being actual vicious murderers that most people in music simply cannot lay claim to. I think this reflects an actual difference in the underlying reality of the communities they come from, where the black murder rate in bad neighborhoods really is shockingly high, but the rate of hillbillies killing each other simply isn't. What, exactly, is necessary for someone like Martin to be authentic? I don't think he needs to have actually killed someone, simply being armed and sincere in his conviction that he would defend his home if needed is sufficient.
In either case though, I don't have a problem with rappers that rap about things they haven't done or country singers appealing to their audience without personally being poor and backwoods. For all of the talk that Aldean isn't from a small town, I've been to Macon, and while it's not tiny, it is a pretty typical small Southern city - I don't really doubt that he has some sincere connection to redneck culture. I'm no more affronted by that than by the Dead South actually being Canadian.
Let's take a look at Detroit which annually has about 50 murders per 100,000 people.
Let's assume that 90% of the murders in Detroit are committed by men between 15 and 30. For Detroit, this group is around 70,000 people, or around 11% of the city's population.
So this group of 70,000 young men commits about 280 murders a year. Let's assume that the average murderer kills 2 people, leaving 140 murderers per year out of the group of 70,000.
Over 15 years, this would mean that the cohort of 70,000 produces 2,100 murderers.
By age 30, about 3% of Detroit's men will have committed homicide. The chance of being a homicide victim is probably even higher. These are not small and rare numbers we're talking about. If a rapper from one of these areas is bragging about killing people, it's not outlandish that they are telling the truth.
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In most of the United States, high concentrations of black people are found only in large Urban areas. In the South, the black population is more diffuse. Most medium-small towns in the South have a black neighborhood, and some are majority black outright.
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This website might be useful. Unfortunately, most of the detailed data is hidden behind a fee. Here is their page on St. Louis crime by neighbourhood.
This news story is suspiciously short on numbers, but it does have one:
which places that rural area just under the national average of 6.5/100k.
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Rural whites in those states are unusually murderous by the standards of whites, but the state-level rates are substantially driven by black homicides. I don't have aggregated data, but here's one example for Missouri. If you want to really start exploring, I think the CDC Wonder database is probably the best starting point, although that'll give victimization data rather than data on the killers.
Good call. does this link work for everyone else? It's a sorted list of homicide victimization rates by county, and it sure seems to be more scattered than I would have thought. There are a few rural counties up near the top, but I don't have the geographical knowledge to actually analyze the data in a timely manner.
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Do you think that murder rate is driven by the rural areas or say St Louis?
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I think the assertion is more like ‘if you’re a young black man growing up in bad parts of, say, St Louis, by the time you’re 20 you definitely know multiple murdered guys your age and possibly some murderers too’. So to some extent even a relatively law-abiding young man in such a community could write ‘authentically’ about this stuff. The rappers who get clowned on for not being authentic are more people who grew up middle class and well away from the ghetto, like Drake or Tyga.
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