The Thorntons, meanwhile, sound like the men who sold it to her. The female vocals on Mr Me Too are blank-eyed and heavy-lidded the singer sounds like someone forced to sing while on a horrible cocktail of drugs. The overall effect is utterly forlorn: car-as-penis-extension, but flaccid and impotent. On Ride Around Shining, Clipse boast about their Porsche, while someone drags a coin over piano strings.

Wamp Wamp dispenses with drums in favour of the clatter of metal hitting metal. You can hear it in the sparse, bleak, challenging music the Neptunes conjure up: one-finger synthesizer riffs, disjointed vocals, harsh, trebly beats. Perhaps understandably, a sense of frustration and despair permeates every track on Hell Hath No Fury. Its follow-up has been delayed for four years by record-label politics and litigation. Bolstered by the brilliant single Grindin', but hamstrung by a cover painting of the Thorntons chauffering Jesus around the ghetto that seemed to have been snatched during a daring heist on Tony Hart's gallery, their second, Lord Willin', went gold in America: hardly earth- shattering news in the multi-platinum world of hip-hop. Their career has been an uphill struggle, despite the patronage of superstar production duo the Neptunes. That's precisely what cocaine rap's leading light, Young Jeezy, offers, but the genre's other main practitioners are a more intriguing proposition: Virginia-based brothers Gene and Terrence Thornton, who call themselves Malice and Pusha-T and make up Clipse. The last thing the world needs is a numb-nosed rapper bragging about his relationship with the old imbecile-dust. By lauding cocaine, you can upset not merely the prissy guardians of white bourgeois morality, but anyone who has ever wasted an evening trapped in the hellish company of someone with one suspiciously runny nostril, delivering an uninterruptable monologue about themselves. What's outrageous about 50 Cent and The Game is not the predictable gangster cliches of their records, but their bullet-strewn life stories. Shock and outrage have long been part of hip-hop's currency, but recently, it seems to have exhausted its power to provoke, relying not on the music, but the characters who make it for shock value. In fact, you can see its appeal as a topic to rappers. Given its grim effects, it would seem foolish and deeply reprehensible to base an entire musical sub-genre around cocaine. A spin of Chic's Greatest Hits dispels the myth that everyone on cocaine makes bad music, but it's still hard to think of anything responsible for more tedious, drawn-out, self-important records. It would trump the work of Simon Cowell: say what you like about the man who invented Il Divo, at least he didn't kill John Entwistle and break up the Stone Roses. I f you were making a chart of malign influences on popular music over the past 40 years - scat singing, nu-metal, the dark and fateful moment when Gary Lightbody turned to his friends and said, 'I'm going to form a band called Snow Patrol' - then cocaine would come high.

Hell hath no fury the clipse zip