Ms Dynamite is right - our society needs a miracle

The memorial concert in Birmingham on Sunday, staged to commemorate the deaths of Charlene Ellis and Letisha Shakespeare, did not manage to attract the audience of 10,000 its organisers were hoping for. Still, 8,000 did turn up at Villa Park stadium in the rain and cold, enough for the event to be counted as a success.

The big success, though, was in terms of media visibility, with front-page pictures of the headlining artist, 21-year-old R&B sensation Ms Dynamite. The papers also avidly quoted her uncontroversial remarks berating the gun culture that spawned the deaths of the teenagers on 2 January.

"I would love to see change in how we are seen and how we treat each other, but that is going to take a miracle," the singer suggested. "I would like to see these miracles happen – we need to seriously think about how we can help young people. Our young people are dying, failing and underachieving."

Ms Dynamite also made it plain that censoring rap lyrics was not the solution she had in mind, pointing out that rappers were hardly the only people who depicted and promoted aggression. "There are films and TV programmes that show violence," she rightly counselled. But as she knows herself, matters are a great deal more culturally confused than that.

Ms Dynamite, for example, writes lyrics that are anti-drugs, anti-violence and pro-education. So it is quite a paradox that the investigative journalists who interviewed some of the members of the gang responsible for killing Ms Ellis and Ms Shakespeare reported that the crack-dealing gunmen had Ms Dynamite blasting out on their car stereo.

Faced with a vignette such as this one, it is tempting to wish that the world really was as politicians such as David Blunkett and Kim Howells sometimes seem to think. How lovely it would be if the Burger Bar Boys could be rounded up and weaned off their wicked ways through the agency of lengthy exposure to "positive" lyrics.

Yet, in part, the media love affair with Ms Dynamite is a statement that the media too wants simple solutions. Obsessed with the idea of "role models", the press has decided that Ms Dynamite is just the ticket. She is young, beautiful, clever, talented and shrewd. Her views are grounded and sensible, and despite a fairly tough upbringing she managed to get herself a place at university – which she didn't take up. Crucially, she is female, and black women have never been frightening to the white mainstream in the way that black men have been.

Ms Dynamite is a young woman whom everybody wishes well, and at the same time wants to appropriate. Yet it is this very process of appropriation, whereby those with something to say are used as symbols rather than actually listened to, that helps to foster the shallow culture Ms Dynamite attacks.

One of Ms Dynamite's first hits, "It Takes More", satirised consumerist values, bling-bling jewellery and the veneration of champagne-swilling high-life among young black people, all of which are cited by many as part of the enervatingly thin air of cultural aspiration that attracts young black males to the dubious attractions of easy money through crime.

Yet it is far less widely commented upon that this is a busy two-way street. It would be just as moronic to point to Jade Jagger as responsible for gun crime as is is to suggest that such violence is caused by song lyrics. But it is worth noting that this ultimately privileged celebrity child, along with her vast network of wealthy friends and collaborators, is up to her own neck in strange cultural appropriations. Ms Jagger, 29, is was last year hired by Lady Rosa Monkton, her friend and Princess Diana's, to be creative director of Garrard's, on a salary reported to be £250,000. Her task is to make the royal jeweller, established in 1735, appeal to a younger generation of big spenders. This she has done by designing just the sort of heavy gold jewellery that has long been favoured by rappers.

Anyone wondering whether it might be gangsta rappers whose so hotly denied credibility Ms Jagger wishes to associate herself with, need look no further than her little diamond pistol, or her "graffiti" range, to assure themselves that the establishment is more than keen to display the very values that, among the poor and dispossessed, are causing such problems.

This is perhaps simply an illustration of how far the black street culture has penetrated, and how powerful and positive that transformation has been, both here and in the US. Nevertheless, it is the people closest to this vibrant cultural wellspring that are suffering its worst effects, while the rest of us enjoy only the benefits.

So it is also, surely, a neat metaphor for our economically polarised culture. An expensively educated and wealthy young woman is paid millions to repackage styles that have sprung from some of the least privileged, most marginalised subcultures Western affluence has produced and then sell them back to the few who have got themselves out of it – Dr Dre is Ms Jagger's dream client.

It is tempting to shrug this absurdity off as a prime slice of post-modern irony – after all it is hardly news that "ghetto fabulous" styles are much in demand among the very rich. But it is sobering instead to read it as a sign so obvious that it is almost literally blinding of how the age-old machine whereby the rich get richer and the poor get poorer is now grinding away as powerfully as ever, but so visibly that we barely notice it.

Gun crime, most commentators are agreed, is a symptom of material and spiritual poverty, with its roots in decades of failure to tackle urban deprivation in a meaningful way. But there is material and spiritual poverty also in a wealthy culture that wants to buy into, and make money from, the signs and symbols associated with this grim social failure. The people stuck in the middle of this "cultural exchange", especially young men, are the ones being blamed for it, and the ones expected to fix it.

Garrard's spent £250,000 on a party to launch Ms Jagger's new range, with music provided, with crashing inevitability, by So Solid Crew. This outfit is much maligned as being chief culprit in the "glamorising of gun culture" stakes – women making expensive gun-shaped jewellery, then getting musicians associated with guns to launch it, being way above that sort of criticism. But actually, you have to wince at the tricky position they're actually in.

It's quite something for a group of young people to find themselves straddling two worlds – Jade's, in which guns add a dangerous but abstract frisson to a life of wealthy hedonism, and the one that many of them come from, where guns add a dangerous and all too real dimension to a hedonism that is sought with far more urgent desperation. Blandishments from the former are bound to mean challenges from the latter, with a middle way between them difficult to negotiate, particularly since both these worlds are fuelled by fantasy and judged by surface appearance.

The trouble is that everyone is being asked to straddle the worlds of poverty and of affluence by marginalising the poor and worshipping the rich. Perhaps a society that has woken up to the deadly contradictions inherent in attempting to maintain such an unequal culture is the miracle Ms Dynamite was talking about.

d.orr@independent.co.uk