For a few years, if you weren't a thugged-out gangsta, you simply didn't exist in hip-hop.
I'm of an age to call someone roughly other like Giggs "pop", but he more or less inhabits some highly specified area that flickers in and around hip-hop and gangsta rap and the knotty domestic deviation, grime, that added certain ragged home truths and electronically quarried sonic grit to grabby, waggish hip-hop alertness.
He was concerned that he couldn't make it in the world of gangsta rap, which had become very competitive, and his grandmother told him: "Oh, baby, just knock them out!" So he did.
For whatever reason, a precious young man like Ashley Walters felt compelled to act up to a stereotype of a gangsta rapper.
It is also the stomping-ground of gangsta rappers, who rhapsodise about killing cops, and gang-bangers, who believe in the death penalty for sartorial errors.
The Wu-Tang Clan, fellow American rappers, listed the price of one of their CDs in euros rather than dollars on their official website.Today the euro has lost much of its glamour, gangsta or otherwise.
As nasty as Mr Elonis's Facebook posts may have been, the question is what happens in future cases when the government seeks to punish people for venting or trying their hand at some gangsta rap on their Facebook pages.
We must ask, however, why he was planning to give the award in the first place if he was feeling so het up about gangsta rap 24 months ago.
Human dignity would be elevated, too, if America were to stop dumping gangsta rap on other countries.
A gangsta in inner-city Detroit moves in a world stripped clean of anything that middle-class America (black or white) would recognise as "values".John Hall and Charles Lindholm, respectively professors of sociology at McGill University and of anthropology at Boston University, are unfazed by this.
Yet sociologists contend there are plenty of wannabe gangs around too, groups of teens who are more interested in social status and gangsta rap than in causing serious trouble.
