The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Contributor: Guns and Poses: "DOWN at the crossroads of Hudson and West Houston Streets, where the radio station WQHT, Hot 97, broadcasts hip-hop programming, music and violence seem inextricable. Last week there was a sidewalk gun battle between the entourages of the rising rap star known as the Game and his former mentor, 50 Cent, while the latter was in the studios doing an interview to promote his new CD. Meanwhile, in a Manhattan federal court, testimony continues in the trial of rap artist Lil' Kim, who has been charged with perjury and conspiracy for her responses to questioning on the matter of a 2001 pistol fight outside the WQHT offices between her followers and those of a rival, Capone (born Kiam Holley).

In its bloodlust, hip-hop is more old school than many of its fans and critics may realize; in fact, the music is carrying on a tradition as old as the blues. Created by and for indigent African-American sharecroppers in the South a century ago, the blues gave voice to the discontent and anxiety of a subjugated, marginalized people. It was an outlet for rage - as well for joy, sometimes, to palliate that fury - coded in language about domestic matters, to throw off any eavesdropping whites.

Robert Johnson, the iconic early master of country blues, whose legend tells how he sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for his enigmatic guitar style, laid the bedrock for hip-hop lyrics when he sung freely of gunfire in songs such as '32-20 Blues' (Johnson's rewrite of a tune by a contemporary, Skip James), which he recorded in 1936:

She got a .38 special but I believe it's most too light

I got a 32-20, got to make the caps right...

I'm gonna shoot my pistol, gonna shoot my Gatling gun

You made me love you, now your man have come

Wrath and weaponry of various kinds infused virtually every style of blues in the music's formative years. Bessie Smith, the fearsome sexual provocateur, bellowed (in 'Black Mountain Blues'), 'I'm bound for Black Mountain, me and my razor and my gun/Gonna shoot him if he stands still and cut him if he run.' Lonnie Johnson, the virtuoso of delicate, chamber-style guitar blues, crooned (in 'Got the Blues for Murder Only'), 'I'm going to old Mexico, where there's long, long reaching guns/When they want real excitement, they kill each other one by one.' Leadbelly, the pardoned convict who composed lyrical and earthy folk-blues, entertained nightclub audiences with his tribute to a bartender who shot a policeman, 'Duncan and Brady': 'Brady, Brady carried a .45, said it would shoot half a mile/Duncan had a .44, that what laid Mr. Brady so low.'

Gunpowder helped ignite the blues, which spread and transformed over a century to give us innumerable musical styles from jazz to rock, and nearly every style has an element of the outlaw ethos at its core. Country music has always celebrated renegades, bandits and gunslingers - its founding father, Jimmie Rodgers, yodeled about being 'free from the chain gang now' and Johnny Cash came to epitomize outlaw cool - despite having served only a single day of his life in jail. Even swing had an aura of roguishness before Benny Goodman, with one early big band called the Racketeers of Rhythm.

How does hip-hop fit into this legacy? Awkwardly. While it too has at its heart the fury of profoundly frustrated, often desperate, souls, gunfire-for-show like the Lil' Kim incident and the recent altercation over 50 Cent demean that history through pettiness, self-consciousness and off-handedness.

In blues, the reasons (or rationales) for the violence were ostensibly amatory or otherwise personal, though societal by extension: a broken heart, wounded pride, maltreatment by the boss (standing in for white society). But what was the shooting on Hudson Street about?

Six years ago, Mr. Holley and his group, Capone-N-Noreaga, made a recording with the rapper Foxy Brown in which she referred to Lil' Kim as 'lame.' A year later, Mr. Holley bumped into Lil' Kim's former manager and one of her friends outside the radio station; two dozen rounds later, one of Mr. Holley's associates ended up wounded."