On the other side of the debate there are not as many prominent voices. In fact, there is really only one: John McWhorter, a black professor of linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley, and an unabashed opponent of rap.

McWhorter finds the music pernicious and humiliating. He thinks of it as the musical manifestation of the worst traits of black America, particularly, and America generally. He says so often, in the opinion and editorial pages of the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal, among other major publications; in the pages of several best-selling books with leading titles like Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America and Doing Our Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Music and Why We Should, Like, Care; and on television and radio shows across the country. He has few allies on the public stage. But then he never expected to be loved for his views.

"My job is to comment from the sidelines and put a bee in at least some people's bonnets," he says. "I'd like to play some small part in changing the culture. It dismays me to see the energy that so many people waste in sticking their middle finger up - because it feels good - instead of actually trying to work with the world. I think we've taken a really nasty detour since the late 1960s."

McWhorter, 38, is tall and lanky, with large, emotive eyes, and close-cropped hair showing faint signs of gray. Unlike the perennially three-piece-suited West (whom McWhorter criticised in the pages of the Wall Street Journal for neglecting his academic duties in favour of cutting rap albums), he tends to dress down. He speaks in the quick, concise sentences of someone used to repeating his ideas.

I meet with McWhorter at a coffee shop in Manhattan. He is fresh off an opinion column in the Los Angeles Times and an article in Commentary magazine. In addition to being pressed for time, he seems a bit paranoid.

"The walls have ears here," he says, soon after we enter the coffee shop, ushering me away from the disinterested-looking patrons in search of more private surroundings. I ask him what he means. "People tend to listen in," he says, "and I'm not on television right now." We end up in a large bookstore a few blocks away, where we find two folding chairs in a secluded corner near the self-help books.

I ask McWhorter the question he's been asked countless times since throwing his hat into the ring several years ago: why does he hate rap? Surprisingly, he says he doesn't. "I like listening to rap, actually; the problem is that it's very, very catchy. The poetry is interesting, the rhythms are fantastic. But when I hear it, I hear it from a distance. For some people this music is a religion, and I don't mean religion in a hyperbolic way. It's at the point where a lot of people have never known the world without it. It's all the music they listen to. They wake up to it, they lose their virginity to it, they go to sleep to it, it's what they hear when they go to clubs. They have a vague sense of it as part of some political movement. It's a body language, it's a way of speaking. It's a creed. It's literally a religion."

It's a religion that McWhorter finds deeply repellent. In his interpretation, rap preaches "recreational outrage" to the black community, encouraging "oppositionalism" for the sake of it. McWhorter's main gripe is with gangsta rap, which originated in Los Angeles in the mid-1980s and represented, for a time at least, the music's most popular genre. These days the popularity of groups such as Outkast and the Black Eyed Peas is perhaps redressing the balance.

"The point is the thug attitude is what anchors rap and what sells most," he says. "No matter how much consciousness rap brings, no matter how many cuts there are that are constructive, what really drives it is that thug pose, that iconography. If you're going to become a big seller then you have to have that pose. Without that it would not be a billion dollar-industry."

He has little patience for intellectuals who seek to canonise rappers such as Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls. "Why must Tupac Shakur be celebrated as Jesus Christ? The sucking noise that you hear when you mention his name in a room full of engaged, smart African-Americans is the same thing you hear in church when Jesus is mentioned. That's a problem. Tupac Shakur was a moderately talented thug who died. That's it. The idea that he is some sort of Byron is just theatrical."

The most common aspersion cast at McWhorter, who grew up in a middle-class home in the city of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, is that he is "out of touch" with black people. Everyone from Chuck D to Russell Simmons (of influential hip-hop label Def Jam) to Vibe Magazine has publicly accused him of this and worse.

In certain ways, it must be said, he invites the charges, however unfair. He has only a layman's knowledge of rap, but has an unabashed fondness for Broadway (Cole Porter is discussed in greater depth than rap in Doing Our Own Thing). He communicates in a manner that he acknowledges "sounds white", even if he feels such a distinction is ridiculous. After claiming that he likes rap on an aesthetic level, he makes a point of telling me, You know, I'm not a square."

McWhorter has often been quoted as saying that rap has no social usefulness. The notion that it is a political movement he finds laughable. But what about artists like Public Enemy or Mos Def, songs like Grandmaster Flash's The Message? "What Public Enemy basically said was: 'The world needs to be turned upside-down.' If you learn from music that the country you live in is vastly corrupt and there's this huge debt to be paid until there's a revolution - well, there's a simple problem: there's not going to be a revolution. We all know it. That kind of politics is cruel, really. It has no chance of bearing fruit. It's idle."

A few people have settled in our corner of the store. "This is becoming too public," says McWhorter, and stands up. We wander around the bookstore, which has grown quite crowded. With no secluded corners left for us, we finally settle, cross-legged, on the floor in the children's section, where the only eavesdroppers are a pair of toddlers. To blend in, we open a copy of a picture book called Emily Goes Wild.

McWhorter's familiarity with rap is not an expert's. He buys the occasional rap album (his last was 50 Cent's, released well over a year ago), but he has never been to a rap gig, nor does he seem to know all that much about the musics from which rap sprang: blues, funk, rock'n'roll. As academics often do, though, he feels a passing knowledge is enough to theorise. But he is careful to point out that rap is a symptom of larger cultural decline, not a cause. He might rightly be called a Cassandra, even a kind of classicist. He seems to long for some golden age of culture, when public officials spoke eloquently and song lyrics were clever.

A faint air of hopelessness overcomes McWhorter as our conversation winds down. I ask whether he thought rap showed any signs of fading away. "You can't take people's god away from them," he says. "The best case scenario blacks can hope for would be that rap remain but its thuggish aspects go out of fashion." And the worst? "We've already got that. I literally can't think of what could be worse than the way that music, including all of its thuggish manifestations, is thought of warmly as expressing some sort of truth. It's awful. Just awful."

It doesn't matter, until we collective address the condition of our people, we will continue to chase our tails. Murder, poverty, drug use, etc., etc. were apart of our experience long before anyone even thought of rap.