Few things are more ridiculous than me studying rap lyrics. But for some reason, everybody has to have an opinion about this music – specifically, gangsta rap, which is about drugs and violence, as opposed to the usual kind of rap, which is about how to pronounce the rapper's name and where to mail his check.

And it's not enough to develop an I-guess-it's-not-my-cup-of-tea attitude that people are allowed to form for jazz, classical music or raising children. We have to ask whether gangsta rap is good for society – a question that is, as always, irrelevant to whether we actually enjoy a particular kind of music.

This came up for me because of a local controversy, when Richard Strey, a freshman at Woodbury High School, tried to paint a mural on a school wall of Eazy-E, Tupac Shakur, The Notorious B.I.G. and Big Pun. Strey had permission from school officials, and was well along on the project before a social worker named Gloria Goode asked whether the school should honor four dead rappers who'd glorified killing people, selling crack and, uh, quitting school.

To complicate things, the school's music room already has a mural of some well known drug users – Jimi Hendrix and The Beatles. So condemning people on that basis seems inconsistent. On the other hand, aren't there cardinal differences here? The Beatles said “All you need is love,” while Eazy-E said “first I'm gonna choke ya then I smoke ya, then I'm gonna toss ya in the back of my truck with the other punk.” And although Hendrix may have sung metaphorically about drugs, B.I.G. was trying to sell you some.

Thus, we find ourselves mired in the old topic, Is Gangsta Rap More Evil Than All The Evil Music That Has Preceded It. We say things like, “I believe that this Big Pun gentleman is referring – quite accurately, I might add – to the shifting demographics among eligible voters in his borough,” or, “Merciful heavens, this Eazy-E fellow certainly seems to have gotten out on the wrong side of bed when he penned that rather randy couplet about the holiday season.”

This is a particularly ridiculous debate for middle-aged ignoramuses such as I because many of us have spent as much time listening to rap as Big Pun spent watching the Lifetime Channel. Goode herself said the only reason she knows “there's not one positive lyric out of Eazy-E” is that her son told her. Worse yet is the problem I have with any kind of poetry – such as in this excerpt from Big Pun's “Capital Punishment”:

“We came from kings in Queens, people with dreams/Gods and herbs, for what it's worth/We gonna fit the Earth with infinite worth/First it's turning tables, open your own labels…” Will somebody please tell me what this means so I can be offended by it?

Still, I have figured out three things about gangsta rap:

* Nice, middle class, suburbanites shouldn't get nervous when rappers talk about murder. Rappers actually don't kill nice, middle class, suburbanites. They kill other rappers.

* People talk about all gangsta rappers as if they were the same person. And of course, they aren't. Each is unique and precious in God's sight, like a snowflake. For example, although many rappers use the “F” word, they each mean something different by it. Big Pun meant things weren't going well. Eazy-E meant he wanted to shoot somebody (which is also what he meant when he said anything else, including “Hello” and “What kind of soup is that?”). And B.I.G. used the “F” word the way a dog would if that were the only word it knew for saying it liked you.

* Despite the differences and disagreements between Shakur, B.I.G., Big Pun and Eazy-E, I believe that all four men would have found me annoying.

That's all I know. But I've still got to give an opinion about rap, so I'll settle on this: We should replace all the murals of all these rock stars with a painting of a real musician: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. There's a good role model for the kids – a sex-crazed clothes-horse with a weakness for bathroom jokes.

… This needs more research.