Cue parents' councils' handwringing about a new, violent normal in pop music? Maybe not. A look back through the charts reveals that the shots discharged on Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded and MDMA are right on schedule. The rate of rifle sounds in mainstream releases has been sporadic but consistent over the past few years: The last big album to feature them was Eminem's Recovery in 2010, and a gun is fired at the end of Rihanna's single "Russian Roulette," from her 2009 album Rated R. At various in times in history, firearm clacks have been the sonic tool of hardened rappers, Caribbean dancehall DJs, scorned country singers, and even 19th century classical composers. It's been a used as token of aggression, a nod to historical battles, and a shortcut to starting parties—making it one of the most surprisingly pliant gimmicks that music has.

What's perhaps different now—a micro trend, but noticeable nonetheless—is how female pop stars like Minaj, Madonna, and Rihanna have picked up the pistols to communicate empowerment and dominance. Certainly that was the case with M.I.A., whose 2007 sleeper hit "Paper Planes" used gun blasts in its chorus as percussive shorthand for a symbolic armed robbery—the sound of the third world coming to eat the first world's lunch. Where other musicians might have distanced themselves from what could be seen as a gimmick, M.I.A. appears to have adopted it as something of a calling card, one that reinforces her self-styled agitator image. In February, she bust a cap during her rap cameo in the video for Madonna's "Give Me All Your Luvin'," and pointed her gun fingers in her own single, "Bad Girls."

Credit M.I.A., then, for updating a well-worn rap staple that has circulated through the genre for at least 20 years before "Paper Planes." Some of the most renowned gunshots in music belong to the 1980s and '90s eras of Los Angeles gangsta rap and its Scarface/Goodfellas-inspired New York counterpart, through songs like NWA's "Gangsta Gangsta," Eazy-E's "Eazy Duz It," Dr. Dre's "Bang Bang," Nas's gun-personifying "I Gave You Power," Jay-Z and The Notorious B.I.G.'s "Brooklyn's Finest," and Mobb Deep's "G.O.D. Pt. III," to name a few of thousands. These days, firearm-obsessed rappers like Gunplay and Waka Flocka Flame carry on the tradition—the latter's "Luv Them Gun Sounds" and "Bustin At Em" advance the cliché almost to the point of parody.

As hip-hop made the sound of firearms mainstream, did the public become desensitized to it? The censors at MTV still found the gunshots on "Paper Planes" too hot for TV in 2007, replacing them with less-recognizable, muffled thumps. Ditto for CBS, which put a silencer on her Late Show with David Letterman performance. As you can imagine, M.I.A. was not pleased, posting on MySpace that MTV "sabotaged" her video. As for Letterman: "I felt soooooo bad for what they did to my sound .... on the actual taping my sound was sooo different from what I'd agreed." Writing in the Village Voice, music critic Tom Breihan accused MTV of hypocrisy over the move. "The weird thing about all that is that MTV is totally cool with airing commercials of movies or video games that prominently feature guns," he wrote. "Any impressionable little kids watching MTV are learning that violence is cool anyway. So why bother removing gunshot noises from a song? Would the uncensored version of 'Paper Planes' really offend anyone?"

In their book In the Limelight and Under The Microscope: Forms and Functions of Female Celebrity, authors Diane Negra and Su Holmes regarded MTV and CBS's censorship of the gunshots on "Paper Planes" as a form of cultural discrimination: "What these moments suggest... is a discomfort in broadcasting such sounds and images in association with a figure such as M.I.A. An exotized, female Other preaching against assimilation into U.S. capitalistic culture was obviously deemed by producers as too disruptive a spectacle to be sending out to Late Show and TRL audiences."