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Whatever happened to socially conscious hip-hop? The lyrics blasting from the TV on our barber’s wall are so off.

First, they are racist. I don’t care if you say it is is authentic because the young man shooting out the N-word over and over is a young African-American man. I doubt the marketing executive and his PR crew are. Sorry, but I don’t want that word planted in my young son’s brain.

Then what? What is the message of these songs, forced onto me before 9.00am this morning? The promotion and glorification of thug culture, criminality and misogyny. There is nothing wholesome here: nothing I want my son to listen to while getting his hair cut.

I used to listen to hip-hop myself in the 1990s, but that was poetry with emotion and a soul. Compare to the positive messages from Arrested Development or Spearhead in the 1990s to this drivel. Artists of the past rhymed with a passion, intent on fomenting change.

But the beats my son and I were just subjected to in the barber shop: nothing but propaganda for a soul unwilling to be tamed.