Whatever one thought of David Cameron's attack on trigger-happy rap lyrics over the summer (try shallow and opportunistic), some of his critics were equally simplistic in their defence of hip-hop, applying the say-what-you-see defence to lyrics that are no more sincere reportage than Scarface is a poignant meditation on the plight of Cuban immigrants.
The point is not that rappers don't revel in the drama of flying bullets; it's that they're not alone. Guns have always been a guilty pleasure for storytellers. In American music, you can trace the tradition back through Johnny Cash shooting a man in Reno just to watch him die and Robert Johnson cradling his 32-20 rifle to the legend of Stagger Lee, the mythology of the old west and the second amendment.
Even socially conscious songwriters romanticise the gun if they consider the cause righteous. Alabama 3 based Woke Up This Morning on the true story of a woman who shot dead her abusive husband. Not that you can hear it now without picturing Tony Soprano's long drive home. Hey Joe has the dark resonance of a folktale. It's been passed on like a folktale, too, with versions by Love, Deep Purple, Ice-T and Cher, among others, but Hendrix owns it with his ominous, uncoiling machismo.
The gun is also a - cough - loaded political metaphor. In Magazine's thrillingly tense punk landmark Shot By Both Sides, Howard Devoto portrays himself as a lone refusenik caught in the era's ideological crossfire. To the perpetually peeved Rage Against the Machine, the bullet represents government propaganda. The lyrics may be as subtle as a bullet in the head, but such explosive ire doesn't really call for subtlety.
In the anti-gun camp, Gang of Four take aim at the emblematic firearm of the Ulster conflict, the Armalite, and the Valentines tackle the epidemic of gun violence in 1960s Jamaica, albeit in such a chirpy manner that you'd think they were all for it. Lynyrd Skynyrd contradict their good ol' boy image with Saturday Night Special, a thunderous, NRA-bothering demand for gun control, and Steve Earle offers a rollicking morality tale in which, contrary to his mama's warnings, our pistol-packing hero shoots dead a card cheat. Doesn't he know that characters in country songs should always heed their mama?
Hip-hop has more to say about guns and their uses than any other genre, and I've never encountered a more eloquent and original example than I Gave You Power. Nas, a fascinatingly conflicted MC with a sensitive angel on one shoulder and a gangsta devil on the other, imagines himself as a gun that's finally grown sick of killing: "I might have took your first child/Scarred your life, crippled your style/I gave you power." The narrative grips like a fist. Let's go out not with a whimper but a Bang Bang: written for Cher, turned inside-out by Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood and made shockingly literal by Quentin Tarantino in Kill Bill. As for what the Audio Bullys did to it, they want shooting.
This week's playlist
1 Woke Up This Morning (Chosen One Mix), Alabama 3
2 Hey Joe, Jimi Hendrix
3 Shot By Both Sides, Magazine
4 Bullet in the Head, Rage Against the Machine
5 Armalite Rifle, Gang of Four
6 Blam Blam, Fever The Valentines
7 Saturday Night Special, Lynyrd Skynyrd
8 The Devil's Right Hand, Steve Earle
9 I Gave You Power, Nas
10 Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down), Nancy Sinatra
Next week: self-referential songs.