IT'S TRAD, DAD. It's never a good idea to get conservatives talking about music.

Gangster rap is crap. Yes, there are some interesting bits and pieces. Yes, there is buried amidst the steaming piles of rationalized b.s. a few trace elements of sociologically interesting ore. Sure, it takes some technical savvy to do it. Uh huh, right, right, right.

It's still crap. Here's how I put it last year in a column about Kanye West...

It's the holiday season so I'll spare you. Anyone who thinks "sociologically interesting ore" is any kind of reason to listen to music has a tin soul. Oh, he also gets around to the indecent dances young people are doing today.

The fracas is built around David Brooks bemoaning the passing of Led Zep and Ed Sullivan, and pimping a restoration via Little Steven platoons teaching Schools of Rock. A National Review correspondent cannot resist the call of the Konservetkult:

I think Brooks and Van Zandt are actually staking out a conservative position here: the importance of common culture, defining it and promoting it...

The problem is that America's cultural and political elites don't have the will, popular capital or sense of need to identify or promote any kind of Americal cultural canon in any area of liberal arts whatsoever.

But get those kids cranking "Born to Run" on the quad again, and Western Civ is saved.

This is the sort of thing that sends me back to the classics.