Bad rap

''ONE OF THE striking things about the scenes from France," tsk-tsked David Brooks in his New York Times column of Nov. 10, ''is how thoroughly the rioters have assimilated [American] hip-hop and rap culture." As evidence that poor young Muslim men in French slums are taking lifestyle cues from gangsta rappers, the author of ''Bobos in Paradise" and ''On Paradise Drive" effortlessly reeled off (in English) snippets of what he calls ''French rap lyrics today" by the likes of Bitter Ministry and Mr. R - known in Europe as Ministère A.M.E.R. and Monsieur R. Blaming the music's popularity on French racism and France's rigid labor markets, Brooks grimly concluded there may be ''no escape" for its fans.

Strong stuff! But ''Brooks's entire rant is shopworn," scoffed music critic Jody Rosen in an incisive commentary - about which the blogosphere has been chattering ever since - published in Slate.com's ''Music Box" section later that same day. Not only is Brooks harking back to the tired debates of the late 1980s and early '90s, when ''Bill Bennett was at war with Ice-T and Time Warner - and Bill Clinton was triangulating his way through his first presidential campaign by dissing Sister Souljah," complains Rosen, who writes a music column for The Nation. What's worse, Rosen suggests, it's unlikely that Brooks has ever listened to the music he so expertly condemns as pernicious; instead, he's most likely just read the lyrics in conservative periodicals.

The Ministère A.M.E.R. lyric Brooks quotes as an example of contemporary French rap, for instance, is 13 years old - and according to a Google search, Rosen notes, the only place that particular lyric has ever been published in English was the conservative City Journal, in 2002. As for the invective of Monsieur R's song ''Fransse," Rosen adds, a search for Brooks's translation of the lyric indicates he may have lifted it from the Sept. 28, 2005 issue of the Weekly Standard.

''None of this qualifies as journalistic malfeasance, exactly," Rosen said in an e-mail last week. ''But it's hackery of a pretty high order."

Joshua Glenn is associate editor of Ideas. E-mail jglenn@globe.com.