If frlf in' nnolHii m ways that we do not easily or willingly nibHIII ICdlliy, define, the gangster speaks for us, ex- Iriplrin' hallictinc- |ressina **part """Amert:an m HlbHIII UdlllOllbO. che which rejects inequities and the > of modern life, which rejects Americanism nsen. postindustrial los angeles 5252T*T1*111111"1 their own nihilists, who are the ones dramatically saying "No!" and reminding others that there are worse things than Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Ml ForeWORD: south central los angeles, april 29,1992 I began working on this essay well over a year before the Los Ange- les rebellion of 1992, and at least two or three months before Rod- ney King was turned into a martyr by several police officers and w video camera owned by George Holliday. In fact, I had finished the essay and was about to send it out for comments when several thousand people seized the si reel s on May Day eve, in part to protest the acquittal of the four officers who hrutiilly beat King thirteen months earlier.1 Of course, the rebellion enriched ;md coin- plicated my efforts to make sense of gangsta rap in late-twentieth-century los Angeles, but I did not have to substantially change my original argunu'nis. This particular genre of hip hop was, in some ways, an omen of the insumvtinn. Tlu* two years of "research" I had spent rocking, bopping, and wincing to ^;»n^si;i n.u ratives of everyday life were (if I may sample Mike Davis) very mm h like "ex< ;i vating the future in Los Angeles." Ice-T, truly the OG (original gangster) of L.A. gangsta r;ip, summnl ii up best in a 1992 Rolling Stone interview: "When rap came out o! I A., vvluit you heard initially was my voice yelling about South Central. People thought, 'Th;it , Ml 111 HOT ratty, Mem 1 HIIM\ i r.i/y, aiul ignored it. Then NWA came and yelled, Ice Cube yelled about critic Tricia Rose has been drumming into students of African American popu- M IVo|>le said, 'Oh, that's just kids making a buck.'They didn't realize how many lar culture for some time. As she puts it, "Without historical contextualization, 2 niKtfas with altitude there are out on the street. Now you see them." aesthetics are naturalized, and certain cultural practices are made to appear es- Although the mainstream media believes it all began with the beating of sential to a given group of people. On the other hand, without aesthetic consid- K< nlney King neither the hip hop community nor residents of South Central Los erations, black cultural practices are reduced to extensions of sociohistorical cir '•) Angeles were surprised by that event. Countless black Angelenos had experi- cumstances."6 enced or witnessed this sort of terror before. When L.A. rapper Ice Cube was Heeding Rose's call for a complex, more historical interpretation of cultural asked about the King incident on MTV, he responded simply, "It's been hap- forms that takes account of context and aesthetics, politics and pleasure, I explore pening to us for years. It's just we didn't have a camcorder every time it hap- the cultural politics of gangsta rap—its lyrics, music, styles, roots, contradictions, pened." (Subsequently, Cube recorded "Who Got the Camera" on the 1992 al- and consistencies—and the place where it seems to have maintained its deepest bum The Predator, a hilarious track in which he asks the police brutalizing him to hit him once more in order to get the event on film.)3 Few black Angelenos roots: Los Angeles and its black environs. To do this right we need a historical could forget the killing of Eula Love in 1979, the sixteen deaths caused by LAPD perspective. We need to go back . .. way back, to the days of the OGs. choke holds, or numerous lesser-known incidents for which no officers were pun- ished. Virtually every South Central resident experienced routine stops, if not outright harassment, and thousands of African American and Latino youths have Ofis in posflndustriiri los angeles: mhtion of a style had their names and addresses logged in the LAPD antigang task force data L.A. might be the self-proclaimed home of gangsta rap, but black Angelenos didn't base—on a form, ironically, called a "rap sheet"—whether they were gang mem- put the gangsta into hip hop. Gangsta lyrics and style were part of the whole hip bers or not.4 hop scene from the very beginning. If you never hung out at the Hevalo Club on ^_ The L.A. rebellion merely underscores the fact that a good deal of gangsta 173rd or at Cedar Park in the Bronx during the mid-1970s, just check out Char- I rap is (aside from often very funky jeep music) a window into, and critique of, the lie Ahearn's classic 1982 film Wild Style documenting the early graffiti and rap criminalization of black youth. Of course, this is not unique to gangsta rap: all scene in New York. When Double Trouble steps on stage with the fly routine, kinds of b-boys and b-girls—rappers, graffiti artists, breakdancers—have been they're decked out in white "pimp-style" suits, matching hats, and guns galore. dealing with and challenging police repression, the media's criminalization of Others are strapped as well, waving real guns as part of the act. The scene seems inner-city youths, and the "just us" system from the get-go. Like the economy and so contemporary, and yet it was shot over a decade before Onyx recorded "Throw the city itself, the criminal-justice system changed just when hip hop was born. Ya Guns in the Air." But we need to go back even further. Back before Lightnin' Prisons are not designed to discipline but to corral bodies labeled menaces to so- Rod (Jalal Uridin of the Last Poets) recorded Hustler's Convention in 1973; be- ciety; policing is not designed to stop or reduce crime in inner-city communities 15 fore Lloyd Price recorded "Stagger Lee" in 1958; even before Screamin' Jay but to manage it. Moreover, economic restructuring resulting in massive unem- Hawkins recorded his explicitly sexual comedy rap "Alligator Wine." We need ployment has created criminals out of black youth, which is what gangsta rappers to go back to the blues, to the baaadman tales of the late nineteenth century, and I acknowledge. But rather than apologize or preach, they attempt to rationalize and to the age-old tradition of "signifying" if we want to discover the roots o( the explain. Most gangsta rappers write lyrics attacking law-enforcement agencies, gangsta aesthetic in hip hop.7 the denial of their unfettered access to public space, and the media's complicity Nevertheless, while gangsta rap's roots are very old, it does have an klent ill in making black youth out to be criminals. Yet these very stereotypes of the able style of its own, and in some respects it is a particular product of the mid ghetto as "war zone" and the black youth as "criminal," as well as their (often ado- 1980s. The inspiration for the specific style we now call gangsta rap seems to have lescent) struggles with notions o( masculinity and sexuality, also structure and come from the Bronx-based rapper KRS One and Boogie Down Product i< >ns, win > constrain their efforts to create a counternarrative of life in the inner city. released Criminal Minded, and Philadelphia's Schooly D, who made Nmofu* Same Lest we get too sociological here, we must bear in mind that hip hop, irre- Kill. Both albums appeared in 1987, just a few months before Ice-T came t ml with spective of its particular flavor, is music. Few doubt it has a message, whether they his debut album, Rhyme Pays.8 Ice-T was not only the first West ( \>asi ^an^st.i interpret it as straight-up nihilism or the words of primitive rebels! Not many pay style rapper on wax, but he was himself an experienced OG whose narrai ivts wvw attention to rap as art—whether the rappers are mixing break beats from occasionally semiautobiographical or drawn from scenes he hail wtincwil m ^ Funkadelic, gangsta limpin' in black hoodies, appropriating old-school "hustler's heard about on the street. A native of New Jersey who moveil to Los Angeles as toasts," or simply trying to be funny. Although this essay admittedly emphasizes a child, T joined a gang while at Crenshaw High School ami IH^.III .I very slum . lyrics, it also tries to deal with form, style, and aesthetics. This is a lesson cultural career as a criminal. He eventually graduated from Crenshaw, atieiuliul a junior Ill 121 Hcttf realty, Hcttf tafctics i ullcw, uiul, in the midst of deindustrialization and rising unemployment, turned only disseminated misinformation. Thus, it's important to clarify what gangsta rap to flic* armed services. After four years in the service, he pursued his high-school is not. First, gangsta rappers have never merely celebrated gang violence, nor have Jream lo become a rapper and got his first break in the movie Breakin* .9 Although they favored one gang over another. Gang bangin' itself has never even been a liT'T's early lyrics ranged from humorous boasts and tales of crime and violence central theme in the music. Many of the violent lyrics are not intended literally. \ lo outright misogyny, they were decidedly shaped by his experiences. In "Squeeze Rather, they are boasting raps in which the imagery of gang bangin' is used * V^the Trigger" on Rhyme Pays (1987), he leads off with a brief autobiographical metaphorically to challenge competitors on the mic—an element common to all \ composite sketch of his gangsta background, insisting all along that he is merely hard-core hip hop.