The Birmingham killings have been blamed on the rise of gansta rap, but music critic CHARLES HUTCHINSON says the gun culture problems go much deeper.

ROCK around the clock has always got it in the neck. From Elvis to Eminem, the Beastie Boys to Marilyn Manson, the Sex Pistols to So Solid Crew, behavioural excesses have been laid at the door of a still young, rebellious musical form that must push boundaries to regenerate. Rock has to roll.

Art, film and theatre evolve and break barriers too, but none today carries the instant oxygen of rock, pop, rap and hip-hop. So, in the wake of the murder of two New Year's Eve revellers, Birmingham bambis Charlene Ellis and Latisha Shakespeare, rap took the rap.

Culture Minister, Kim Howells, duly pointed the finger of blame for the rising gun crime in Britain at urban black music. "Idiots like So Solid Crew are glorifying gun culture and violence," he said. "It has created a culture where killing is almost a fashion accessory."

Here, then, was a case of shooting from the hip-hop. Except that any such sentiment is an over-simplification: an alarmist soundbite by a minister to satisfy people craving an instant explanation for a craven act of killing in a macho argument between Birmingham street gangs.

As the Culture Minister, he might have been expected to fight his corner for the arts, but no, he saw a speeding bandwagon and leapt aboard. Never mind that all manner of other influences came in to this gunplay: Jamaica, urban America, peer pressure, history.

For sure South Londoners So Solid Crew have played with fire and courted controversy, but last year one band member, singer 'Asher D' Walters, ended up in court on gun possession charges: a lesson in the folly of believing in a gun as the ultimate tool of empowerment.

What will rise will fall: both by rule of law and by force of nature.

There will always be a counter force, a counter influence, and so it was that the brightest young star in British rap, Ms Dynamite, sang at Sunday's memorial service to the Birmingham girls.

The battle between censorship and the right to freedom of expression goes on across all forms of life, be it Clause 29 or the tabloid calls for Muslim cleric Abu Hamza to "sling his hook" at the Finsbury Park Mosque in North London; or Radio 1's risible refusal to play Status Quo records on the grounds of the denim dinosaurs being too long in the tooth, or eight seconds being cut from the graphic French revenge movie Baise-Moi last year by the British Board of Film Classification in a token gesture of authority and taste.

Home Secretary David Blunkett has chipped in his moralising two penn'orth, suggesting he should convene a summit with the pop industry to define "what is and isn't acceptable".

Why not turn it into a variation on Pop Idols and Popstars or a Saturday teatime McCarthy Witch-hunt with Blunkett in his black cap as the new Simon Cowell?

What isn't acceptable is a minister calling the, er, shots to an industry from which it is equally happy to make capital, both monetary and political.

Who can forget Prime Minister Tony Blair inviting Oasis leader Noel Gallagher to Number 10 in the wake of New Labour's election triumph in 1997 (an act Gallagher has since mocked in Little By Little, the single from last year's Heathen Chemistry album)?

Censorship has its place, in the home, on an individual parent-and-child basis, or even through pragmatic systems such as film classification, which continues to move with the times.

Only last autumn, the new 12A category was introduced to give parents more leeway and say in their children's cinema viewing.

Pop censorship in the past has done little more than ensuring bigger sales for saucy Judge Dread, the anarchic Sex Pistols or naughty Frankie Goes To Hollywood.

From Elvis's hip to Eminem's lip, rebellion will have its day, and years later we wonder why the fuss ever blew up. Remember how the Rolling Stones had to soften the lyrics of Let's Spend The Night Together to "some time together" on Sunday Night At The London Palladium in 1967?

The tide of change can be stemmed for only so long. You may wish for a censorship system that would remove the irritations of life through public referenda, but financial factors will ensure the proliferation of traffic congestion charges, wimpy Irish boy bands, anything-but-local banks, impersonal phone systems and shoddy imported goods. Instead, struggling with rising crime, the Government has spotted the opportunity to knock gangsta rap, a peripheral strain of rebel music never likely to seep into the mass consciousness unless official reprobation makes it more attractive.

Guns have always played their part in youth culture, from cowboy movies to arcade games, and gangsta rap is no more, no less, likely to carry influence on an impressionable age group.

It may be old-fashioned thinking, but ultimately responsibility lies with an individual not a nanny state: a creed espoused by rap's poet laureate, Eminem, in Lose Yourself, his soundtrack single from his movie debut, 8 Mile.

When America went looking for a scapegoat for the Columbine High School shootings in 1999, it picked the strange-looking rock singer Marilyn Manson. Yet in Michael Moore's documentary Bowling For Columbine, Manson talked more sense than myopic National Rifle Association mouthpiece Charlton Heston.

Guns are inextricably linked to pop culture - Elvis in cowboy gear, Public Enemy taking to the Leeds University stage with replica guns, Kurt Cobain blowing his brains out, rapper Tupac Shakur being shot dead - but it takes far more than bragging videos and bravura lyrics to spark a boom in gun violence.

New Labour should be tough not bluff on the causes of crime.

Updated: 11:12 Wednesday, January 22, 2003