Rap, Black Rage, and Racial Difference

Steven Best and Douglas Kellner

Enculturation, Vol. 2, No. 2, Spring 1999

"Don't believe the hype!" Public Enemy

"My music is a product of who I am and where I came from. I'm made in America. I'm not
from Mars or nowhere else," Ice Cube

"What's a brother gotta do to get a message through to the Red, White, and Blue?" Ice-T

Rap music has emerged as one of the most distinctive and controversial music genres of the
past decade. A significant part of hip hop culture, [1] rap articulates the experiences and
conditions of African-Americans living in a spectrum of marginalized situations ranging from
racial stereotyping and stigmatizing to struggle for survival in violent ghetto conditions. In
this cultural context, rap provides a voice to the voiceless, a form of protest to the oppressed,
and a mode of alternative cultural style and identity to the marginalized. Rap is thus not only
music to dance and party to, but a potent form of cultural identity. It has become a powerful
vehicle for cultural political expression, serving as the "CNN of black people" (Chuck D), or
upping the high-tech ante, as their "satellite communication system" (Heavy D). It is an
informational medium to tune into, one that describes the rage of African-Americans facing
growing oppression, declining opportunities for advancement, changing moods on the streets,
and everyday life as a matter of sheer survival. In turn, it has become a cultural virus,
circulating its images, sounds, and attitude throughout the culture and body politic.

Rap artists like Grandmaster Flash, Run DMC, Public Enemy, Ice-T, N.W.A., Ice Cube, Salt
'n' Pepa, Queen Latifah, Wu Tang Clan, Snoop Doggy Dogg, Tupac Shakur, the Fugees, and
countless others produced a new musical genre that uniquely articulated the rage of the urban
underclass and its sense of intense oppression and defiant rebellion. Given the relatively low
expenses in producing and distributing popular music, black artists and producers themselves
have often controlled this mode of musical production and have been able to create a form of
communication relatively free of censorship and control by the dominant class and social
groups. Moreover, rap is part of a vibrant hip hop culture that itself has become a dominant
style and ethos throughout the world today.

The Moment of Hip Hop

Just as ragtime, jazz, R&B, and other black musical idioms and forms entered mainstream
culture earlier in the century, today it is hip hop culture and its distinctive sound of rap music
that is becoming an important form of music and cultural style throughout the globe. Hip hop
erupted from New York dance and party culture of the 1970s. Encompassing dance and
performance, visual art, multimedia, fashion and attitude, hip hop is the music and style for
the new millennium. A highly protean and assimilative cultural ethos, it is here to stay, as it
absorbs new influences, is appropriated throughout myriad cultural forms and forces across
the globe, and has become a major mode of the global popular.

Hip hop culture is intense body culture; it finds its expression in dance and gesture.
Expressive, dynamic, and energetic, hip hop gave rise to new forms of dance like break-
dancing, while gesture, movement, and bodily rhythm is a key aspect of its cultural style as
well as musical performance. Hip hop is a highly vocal culture and rap music provides its
voice and its sound. Drawing on the sonorities and inflections of the the rhythms of everyday
vernacular discourse, as well as the sounds of traditional music, creative use of previous
musical technology, and appropriation of new musical technologies, hip hop is noisy, oral,
and rhythmic, providing a soundtrack for life in a high-tech world of rapid transformation and
turbulent change. Hip hop is also highly visual, creating its distinctive art form of graffiti and
urban art, as well as fashion (B Boy, wild style, and ghetto street couture) that provides
extremely strong visual imagery, which also serves as models of fashion and badges of
cultural identity and belonging. Together, these forms provide a vivid hip hop spectacle,
providing style, identity, politics, and a way of life for individuals throughout the world.

Rap is thus the voice and sound of hip hop culture while dance and bodily movement enact
its rhythms and moves; graffiti inscribes spatial identity and presence and fashion provides
subcultural style; music videos present a compendia of hip hop's sounds and images; and
digitized multimedia furnish a sign of its migration into new cultural terrains and the next
millennium. Encompassing style, fashion, and attitude, hip hop culture thus becomes a way
of living, a genuine subculture and way of life, appropriate for the postmodern adventure.

Indeed, rap embodies a postmodern aesthetic, absorbing every conceivable musical style--
R&B, funk, soul, reggae, techno, pop, house--while migrating to every national culture, local
scene, and realm of culture. In turn, hip hop and rap have influenced all other musical styles
and culture, involving a breaking down of boundaries between music, image, spectacle, and
everyday life. Hence, rap is becoming the familiar soundtrack to postmodern technoculture,
part of advertising, film and TV, and the new digital and multimedia culture. As it knocks
down borders between musical styles, absorbing every conceivable type of music, rap crosses
the national borders of the world becoming a key component of global culture. Rap is
currently rocking the casbah and the ghetto, rolling across the mountains and the deserts,
hopping across oceans, and becoming hip to cyberspace and the new technologies, bringing
sound and attitude into digital space. Firmly ensconced in cyberspace and everyday life from
London to Los Angeles, rap is becoming the flagship of the global popular, bringing style,
attitude and voice to marginalized groups and hip entrepreneurs who package its sounds to a
growing audience throughout the world.

Hence, in the postmodern global cultural scene hip hop now rules. A dominant cultural form
in many parts of the world, hip hop is hybridizing and localizing, producing new cultural
matrices from Sao Paolo to San Francisco. Rap articulates the hip hop ethos and gives voice
to the subcultures that are producing and circulating it. As a new and democratizing cultural
force, rap levels the playing field, opening doors to new cultural players, circumventing the
old guard and corporate sharks ready to pounce on and exploit all new alternative cultures.
Circulating ideas, images, sound, and style, it is becoming central to the new multimedia
global culture and is an expression of a multicultural world with no borders and limits. Given
to excess, it explodes boundaries of good taste and cultural propriety, bringing a new loud,
plebeian and disruptive ethos into the interstices of the mainstream, announcing a
multicultural and potentially subversive presence, as well as vitality of marginalized culture
in the new world (dis)order.

An organic expression of urban hip hop culture, rap quickly became the distinctive sound of
African- American anger, rebellion, cultural style, and contemporary experience. Anticipated
by the ground-breaking work of the West Coast-based Watts Prophets and New York area Gil
Scott Heron and the Last Poets in the early 1970s, the current configuration of rap emerged
out of Sugar Hill Gang's 1979 "Rapper's Delight" and Grandmaster Flash's 1982 hit "The
Message." Hip hop culture began developing its style, sounds, and ethos in New York party
scenes in the Bronx, Brooklyn and other ghetto areas in the late 1970s. By the 1980s, a whole
cycle of New York-based hip hop and rap artists emerged to public attention, including
Grandmaster Flash, Afrika Bambaataa, Run DMC, Eric B and Rakim, Big Daddy Kane,
KRS-ONE, Tone Loc, Salt 'n' Pepa, Queen Latifah, and Public Enemy. Russell Simmons
founded his Def Jam music label, winning wide-spread distribution for many artists now
considered "old school," representing the first wave of rap.

East coast rap ranged from the black nationalist fervor of Afrika Bambaataa and the Zulu
Nation, to the radical politics of Public Enemy, to the feminism of Queen Latifah, to the
emphasis on ghetto experience of Grandmaster Flash, Run DMC, and KRS-One. Yet it
should not be forgotten that from the beginning there was a strong component of dance and
party music connected with rap, that it was integrally bound up with a broader hip hop
culture, and thus was a highly energetic and expressive cultural form.

The rap explosion and controversy would dramatically accelerate with the rise to national and
then global influence of West Coast gangster rap. Anticipated by Ice-T, the "original
gangster" (see Kellner 1995), it was N.W.A.'s 1987 album Straight out of Compton that
prefigured a grittier, grosser, and more controversial form of gangster rap, extolling the
dilemmas and pleasures of what became known as "thug life." N.W.A. ("Niggaz With
Attitude") comprised a group of young African-Americans from the 'hood, including Ice
Cube penning lyrics and singing, Dr. Dre composing and orchestrating, Easy E rapping, and
DJ Yella and Renn performing, N.W.A. crystallized attention on a new gangster genre and
musical idiom. In turn, Easy E put out his own record and split with the group, Ice Cube and
Dr. Dre also separated from N.W.A. and produced their own records, and Suge Knight
formed Death Row Records, which released Dr. Dre's influential The Chronic in 1992 and
then signed on Snoop Doggy Dogg and Tupac Shakur, who would become highly
controversial rap megastars.

Meanwhile, the East coast put out its version of G-rap, with Wu Tang Clan creating a
sensation through its hard, gritty urban sounds. Sean "Puff Daddy" Combs and his label Bad
Boy Entertainment, featuring The Notorious B.I.G. brought a NY urban ghetto realism into
rap, while the Fugees imported funk and R&B into the rap sound. A wide range of younger
rap artists spun off of these groups and erupted from seemingly every corner of ghetto (and
sometimes black middle class) life.

In the mid-1990s, spectacular feuds between East and West coast rap groups broke out with
highly publicized shoot outs and the murder of Tupac and The Notorious B.I.G. Following
the bizarre ruptures of divisions between art and life in G-rap, with the artists living and
dying the violent scenarios they were performing, [2] a movement to stop the violence, to
heal the rifts between East and West, emerged as did what became know as "New School," or
"Now School," building on and going beyond the sounds of the "Old School" (now
interpreted largely as the first wave of East Coast rap but in some genealogies including early
gangster like N.W.A.). New York groups like De La Soul and The Fugees produced less
harsh rhythms, more affirmative and romantic lyrics, and new fusions with Soul, R&B, and
pop. Wyclef Jean and Lauryn Hill spun off the Fugees to create their own megahits and the
multiple Grammies, including best album of the year, won by The Miseducation of Lauryn
Hill in 1999 showed that rap had matured, entered the mainstream, and gained recognition as
an significant musical idiom. [3]

Thus, today, rap covers a large spectrum, ranging from the urban fury of gangster rap to the
rural fusion of blues and rap in Arrested Development, to the educated raps about black
history of Chuck D, to the poetic and political discourses of the Disposable Heroes of
Hiphoprisy, to the G-funk melodies of Snoop Doggy Dogg and celebrations of thug life by
the late Tupac Shakur. It is therefore a mistake to identify the genre of rap per se with its
most extreme expressions such as gangsta rap, as there are countless varieties of urban rap,
suburban rap, rural rap, rap and soul fusions, reggae rap, Latino rap, white rap, and even
Christian rap groups, so the genre is highly flexible and can be used for a variety of purposes.

Yet it is gangster rap, G-funk, or what we'll call "G-rap" that is still the cornerstone of rap's
billion dollar plus market, an authentic voice of organic hip hop culture, and probably the
genre that elevated rap to the global popular. G-rap provided a distinctive language, style, and
attitude that made rap a significant oppositional form and subject of intense controversy.
While break-dancing, graffiti, and other forms of hip hop have declined in significance, rap
and the hip hop style enshrined in rap performance and music video have become a highly
significant part of contemporary culture. Hence, our study below will focus on G-rap, saving
engagement with other important rap and hip hop forms for later work.

G-Rap from Gangster to Funk

Much rap music provides a spectacle of self-assertion with images of black rap singers
threatening white power structures, denouncing racial oppression and police violence, and
celebrating a diverse realm of black cultural forms extending from Afrocentric nationalism to
the gangster lifestyle. With its staccato beat, multilayered sound, aggressive lyrics, in-your-
face messages, and defiant style, rap provides a spectacle of revolt and insurrection in its live
performances, music videos, and recorded forms. Blasting out of boom boxes in the ghettos,
roaring from car stereos, and blaring from home sound systems, rap provides a cascade of
sounds threatening middle class order and decorum and the powers that be.

Some rap singers cultivate the outlaw and rebel image through their clothes, their life-styles,
and in many cases their crimes, serving as a warning of the rage and violence seething in
underclass ghetto communities. But other rap artists engage in political rap, or "conscious
rap," seeing themselves as "knowledge warriors" and spokespeople for an oppressed
underclass. "Organic intellectuals" (Gramsci) of the underclass, political rap warns that
subordinate groups have periodically mobilized their anger into political struggle and
insurrection. Other rap artists articulate a variety of black cultural styles, ranging from
Afrocentric black nationalism to cool and funky urban hedonism. Rap thus points to the
diversity of the African-American community and is itself a musical genre that makes its
audiences vividly aware of the differences between various social groups in U.S. society and
the oppression of the underclass.

Although there were rap artists in the 1970s, it was in the 1980s that rap became massively
popular, coming of age during the Reagan-Bush era. As a result of conservative attacks, the
1980s was a period of immense hardship for blacks as the Reagan right shifted wealth from
the poor to the rich, cut back on welfare programs, and neglected the concerns of blacks and
the poor. [4] During this period, the standard of living and job possibilities for African-
Americans declined and living conditions in the inner-city ghettos deteriorated with growing
crime, drug use, crack cocaine, teen pregnancies, AIDS and sexually transmitted diseases,
gangs, and urban violence.

Stylistically, rap music arguably stands between the modern and the postmodern, deploying
postmodern techniques of sampling, quotation and collage of various sounds for modern
purposes of self-expression and articulating social critique and rebellion. [5] Rap has a close
relation with musical technologies and can be seen as a form of technoculture, for while it
depends heavily on the voice and diction for its effects, its production involves highly skilled
use of new musical technologies. While early hip-hop music mocked the technical
sophistication of disco through the medium of a technically versatile DJ's manipulation of
turntables, and while some early rap was technically primitive, later rap evolved into a highly
complex tapestry of sound, using sampling, multi-track overlay, computers, and a variety of
sophisticated mixing techniques. There is, in fact, often not much "real" or "original" music,
but simply basic drum beats and guitar riffs, overlaid with recorded sounds.

Starting around 1987-88, Public Enemy and other rap groups began experimenting with
multilayered sound collage, appropriating sounds from contemporary media culture,
everyday life, and the archive of the voices of black radicalism. Thus, the DJ or mixer, such
as Public Enemy's Terminator X, plays an important part in the production of the sound of
rap and is often respected accordingly. At this moment, rap articulated with a postmodern
aesthetic of sampling, quotation, and appropriation, thus becoming part of the postmodern
turn in culture (on postmodern aesthetics, see Best and Kellner 1997, Chapter 3).

In particular, rap groups "sample" previous music (also known as "sonic shop-lifting"),
sometimes respectfully in the manner of quotation, sometimes ironically in the mode of
juxtaposition, and sometimes satirically or critically by counterpoising a romantic love song
with misogynous lyrics or violent street sounds. Rap groups regularly sample black classics
like James Brown, but also engage in crossover poaching with DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh
Prince ironically sampling the "I Dream of Jeannie" theme for their rap "Girls Ain't Nuttin'
But Trouble." The group De La Soul created something of a scandal by sampling an
Aerosmith song in the early 1990s, but by now this is accepted as normal, as, for example,
when Coolio sampled ("interpolated") Kool and the Gang's song "Too Hot" to make its
catchy riff and lyrics more relevant for the 90s: " 'A mind is a terrible thing to waste'/That
was the slogan/But now it's '95 and its 'Don't forget the Trojan.'"

In a postmodern media culture, there is evident pleasure in quotation, sampling, and mixing
material from different sources and eras. Houston Baker accordingly describes rap as
"postmodern" by virtue of its "nonauthoritative collaging or archiving of sound and styles
that bespeaks a deconstructive hybridity. Linearity and progress yield to a dizzying
synchronicity" (1993: 89). Like other postmodern artistic products, rap is eclectic and
pastiche-oriented, and subverts modernist notions of authorship. But from the perspective of
Jameson's concept of postmodern culture, marked by depthlessness, the absence of affect, the
disintegration of the authorial voice, and so on, rap appears to be modernist in form. Creating
highly expressive modernist collage, the best rappers have distinct voices, styles, and
messages, often related to modern politics. Thus, rap draws on both modernist and
postmodernist strategies and is between the modern and the postmodern (for further
explication of this claim, see Kellner 1995: 147f).

A Sense of Time and Place

When listening to rap, one immediately notices that it is a form of articulating identity and
self-assertion. The rap artists frequently call attention to their origins, usually grounded in a
particular region like South Central Los Angeles, the Bronx, or Compton; thus there is a
highly articulated awareness and sense of place in rap music. In particular, rap is frequently a
music of the 'hood, that arises from distinct neighborhoods where identification with place
supplements the strong identification with race and is certainly stronger than identification
with the nation.

Rap also functions as a means of affirming and constructing individual identities for the
group or rap artist. This identity may border on narcissism and a materialism that brags of its
record sales and material possessions, as well as a macho bravado that boasts of being kick-
ass tough, but it is also a key mode of assertion in an environment hostile to any form of
African-American self-expression. It also situates the rap artists in their specific milieu,
gaining identity and authenticity from being located in a specific space and time.

Rappers also frequently state the time in which they are rapping ("Ice-T, 1991, mother fucker,
you should have killed me last year"). They are frequently asking the question, "What time is
it?" and answering: Time to Wake Up! Flavor Flav of Public Enemy wears a clock around his
neck and rappers situate their work in a specific time and place, often signalled in music
videos by newspapers, graffiti, or graphics, as well as the lyrics. Rap tells us that it is the time
of conflicts between the dominant and subordinate race, gender and class forces, that it is
time for change, that it may be the fire this time, that apocalypse is on the horizon, that its
time for change.

Thus, rap undercuts the placelessness, timelessness, and contextlessness of much popular
music, especially the schizophrenic play of signifiers of music video, with a drive to
contextualize, narrativize, and signify. The rap singer wants you to know who she or he is,
where they are from, what time it is now, and what is happening. The images of the music
videos show specific urban sites, often the ghettos of the underclass. Ice T's videos of the
songs in "Original Gangster" show him in the 'hood, experiencing the stories he narrates in
his songs, as do many videos of N.W.A., Ice Cube and other ghetto-based rap artists. The
images and lyrics show and tell us that it is a time of intense poverty and differences between
the haves and the have nots, that it is a time of urban crime and violence, a time of gangs and
drugs, a time of STDs, HIV, and AIDS, a time of buck-wilding and extreme sexuality, a time
when the urban underclass is striking out and striking back, and thus is a tense and
frightening time for the culture at large.

The lyrics and images of rap stars like Ice-T and Ice Cube anticipated the L.A. uprisings,
which henceforth became a significant part of the iconography of rap. Thus, rap engages a
specific political era and spaces, showing what is going on in the urban underclass and its
rage and fantasies at the end of the millennium. Public Enemy's music video of "By the Time
I Get to Arizona" shows black revolutionaries going to Arizona to protest the state banning of
the Martin Luther King day holiday and depicts them assaulting white politicians and
attempting to bring revolution to the state. Their video of "Shut it Down" also projects images
of black revolution, evoking the legacy of Karl Marx, Malcolm X, the Black Panthers, and
Angela Davis, with the PE rappers calling for the shutting down of the system of exploitation
and oppression.

The rap spectacle therefore resists the ruptures of signification within much music video in
favor of narrativization and contextualization, telling their stories and getting out their
messages. Indeed, voice, lyrics, and rhyming are very important in rap which can be read as
an acronym for Rhythm And Poetry. The songs are often long, highly complex, and
expressive, continuing an African-American tradition of extended stories with individual
variations each telling, as well as drawing on the forms of the solo riffs of rag-time, jazz, and
the blues. Rap continues earlier African-American traditions of "signifying" and "playing the
dozens" (Gates 1988), involving ritualized verbal contests to demonstrate verbal dexterity,
mental acumen, and creativity. The "dissing" of other rap groups, women, and white
politicians reproduces the African tradition of the toast or boast, rendering some rap highly
confrontational.

Yet other rap artists are like a minister in the black church, with a message for the audience,
which the rapper conveys in distinctive ways, and like in the black church, rappers often have
choruses in the background. Rhyming in complex patterns, rap songs create tension between
the spontaneity of the performance and the fixity of the lyrics. Thus, in opposition to
fragmentary, disconnected, flat, and one-dimensional postmodern texts, which only refer to
themselves or lack depth of meaning, most rap music strongly signifies and the collaging
often adds up to a political statement, rather than fragments of nonsense. This approach
identifies with politics like '60s black radicalism or Afrocentrism, and uses transgressive
sounds such as the noise of police cars, helicopters, bullets, glass breaking, and urban
uprisings in order to underscore the tension, desperation, and violence in the inner cities.

Rap thus involves an articulation of black aesthetics, experience, style, and cultural forms in a
hybridized synthesis of black culture and new technologies. By the late '80s, Rap replaced
R&B as the most popular music for young blacks, but the largest audience for rap music is
white suburban youth, thus continuing the phenomenon of the "white negro" diagnosed by
Norman Mailer in 1957. [6] According to Mailer, American existentialism, unlike its
European counterpart, is based primarily on mood and feeling, rather than theory ࠬa Sartre
and others; it finds its first major expression in the "hipster," the cool white cat who drops out
of white culture--condemned as staid, boring, affectless, corporate, and conformist--in order
to enter the exotic world of black culture with its mesmerizing rhythms and powerful
expressions of sexuality and soul. Fleeing from the culture of "spiritual death," where the
dominant norms are consumerism and careerism, the "white negro" finds passion and
creativity in a far more vital black culture. From jazz to rock and roll to rap, many whites
males have identified primarily with black music, language, dress, and style.

Young suburban whites identify with rap because they too feel deeply alienated and
rebellious, and like to identify with the "gangsta" image, such as "the wigger" subculture
which appropriates the forms of black culture for oppositional white identities. As Ray
Mazarek, the keyboard player for the Doors put it in a VH1 interview, without black culture,
Americans "would still be dancing tippee-toe to the minuet." In fact, rap is a global popular
with rap groups appearing on every continent in various languages and cultures. It is a
product of the African diaspora, drawing on a wealth of African traditions and its rhythms,
rhymes, and rebellions strike a responsive chord throughout the postmodern global village,
suggesting the existence of a yet-to-be-organized Youth International of the disaffected.
Especially "gangsta rap" flaunts disrespect for the authority, laws, and norms of white
culture.

As is clear in songs like Ice-T's "Mic Contract," the microphone is seen as a symbol of
power, a phallic extension or gun, that enables rappers to engage in sublimated warfare. Rap
reveals that the word "nigger" has been appropriated by African-Americans in various ways,
either as a positive term of endearment and solidarity, as a term of hostility toward a peer, or
as a political identity for a member of an oppressed class, such as when Ice-T insists in
"Straight up Nigga" that "I am a nigger, not a colored man, negro, or black," terms widely
accepted by white culture that euphemize the actual conditions faced by blacks, and which
the word "nigger" refuses to tidy up.

Much rap music attempts to communicate the plight of young blacks in the inner cities and,
especially, to call attention to the problem of police violence which they confront on an
everyday basis. While the police are supposed to "serve and protect," young blacks find
instead that the cops are there to harass and exploit, and that these "guardians of the peace" in
fact pose one of the gravest dangers to the community--as well dramatized in films like
Menace II Society, or the Mark Fuhrman tapes during the O.J. Simpson trial which one
African- American commentator described as an appropriate soundtrack for the Rodney King
beating. In "Body Count," Ice-T satirically reflects on the white utopia of Ozzie and Harriet
and the Cleavers, as a time and place where cops would help a kitten down from a tree.
Nowadays, in the inner cities, Ice-T notes that "Shit ain't like that!" Every day, from L.A. to
New Orleans, Philadelphia to New York, the complaints of the rappers are confirmed as
white police have been caught beating and killing blacks, ordering their execution,
imprisoning them on bogus charges and planted evidence, and shaking down their
communities for whatever blood money they can extort, often from the poorest of poor. To
these conditions, N.W.A. dedicated their anthem, "Fuck tha Police!"

Tupac Shakur's Me Against the World (1995) paints an especially vivid portrait of life in the
inner city. Titles like "If I die 2nite" and "Death Around the Corner" describe the danger and
paranoia of living in no- peace zones where bullets fly more than birds, while "Me Against
the World," "So Many Tears," and "Fuck the World" express both sadness and rage
concerning this plight. Reminiscing about his past, he tells us:

I was raised in the city,

shitty ever since I was
an itty bitty kiddy,
drinkin' liquor out of my mama's titty.
And smokin' weed was an everyday thing
in my household,
and drinkin' liquor `till you're out cold.

Shakur regrets his mother and the preachers couldn't save him from a life of drugs,
drunkenness, and violence. Although he often appeals to God and affirms struggle and hope,
he condemns the world that has taken so many of his friends ("I've lost so many peers/I shed
so many tears") and which threatens to take his own young life at any moment: "Fuck the
world 'cause I'm cursed/I'm havin' visions of leaving here in a hearse. . . . Will I survive to the
morning to see the sun?" The paranoia of life is intense: "If you're black, you'd better stay
strapped," or: "You want to last? Be the first to blast." The expectation of death is especially
heightened in Shakur's "Death Around the Corner," which opens with his young son asking
him why he is standing by the window with his gun and the father answering that: "My
destiny is to die." The rapper explains that "I guess I've seen too many murders" and is
prepared for more violence at any moment. Still, he is not afraid to die, figuring that any
place will be better than the ghetto: "Don't shed a tear for me nigga/I ain't happy here."

The Politics of Rap

As concerned citizens and activists, some black rappers consider themselves to be
"knowledge gangsters," such as Black Liberation Radio activists like Mbanna Kantako and
Zears Miles, who raid U.S. scientific and military documents in particular to find evidence
for economic, cultural, and biological warfare against blacks (Fiske 1994). Translating
information from white systems into black terms, knowledge warriors reconstruct mainstream
or suppressed knowledge into "blackstream knowledge," thus using information and
knowledge as tools of struggle and counter-hegemony. Some of this is the black version of a
politicized Pynchonian paranoia that mines white information systems for clues as to how
white America is preparing genocidal attack on the black population. Paranoia is in fact
rampant in the black community; for instance, 1990 polls showed that one-third of African-
Americans found it plausible that AIDS had been deliberately created by the government and
white scientists as a form of chemical warfare against their people, seeing it more as a "black
disease" than a "gay disease," [7] just as many believe the liquor and tobacco companies have
targeted black people in specific to hawk their poisons.

Some rappers attempt to play a positive role in their community. The initials of the group
KRS-ONE are short for "Knowledge Reigns Supreme Over Nearly Everyone" and the rapper
urges his people to put aside the gold chain and braggadocio and to straight out tell people
what is happening in the black community. KRS-ONE also began a Stop the Violence
campaign--with song, record, and concerts--and published an article which argues that it is
new technologies of violence that make it more lethal, that violence is thus a social problem
that must be addressed, and that we must gain knowledge of what is accelerating violence,
and then how to control the technologies and social conditions that are accelerating violent
incidents. [8]

For many rappers, it is time to wake up, a time to do something, a time to get educated as to
what is happening, a time to think and act for oneself. "Don't believe the hype!" and "Fight
the Power!" shouts Public Enemy. While some rap is sexist, some is mediocre, and some is
just plain silly, the best rap music is intensely political and incarnates what Herbert Marcuse
(1964) described as "the great refusal," refusing to submit to domination and oppression. Rap
songs frequently invoke groups that are doing something, as well as the black radical heroes
and traditions of the recent past, such as Malcolm X, the Black Panthers, H. Rap Brown, and
MLK. Thus, certain forms of rap, like Public Enemy, are good examples of a political form of
postmodernism that turns the forms of media culture against the established society.

On the other hand, there are more apolitical, narcissistic, sexist rappers like 2 Live Crew and
Snoop Doggy Dogg who are consistently derogatory toward women, portraying them as good
only for sex, and who are looking primarily for good times. Snoop's lyrics and cover art
cartoons are a panegyric to a hedonistic lifestyle of gin and juice, chronic (highly potent
weed), cars, sex, and money. The world of danger, paranoia, suffering, and oppression that
Tupac has underscored is largely absent in the exploits of Snoop and the Dogg Pound. Snoop
revels in his distance from it all. As the chorus in "For All My Niggaz & Bitches" celebrates:
"Put your hands in the air/We don't care/About nothin' at all/Real niggers don't give a fuck
nigger." Such attitudes have erased the distinction between pessimism and apathy. Like many
other rap artists, Snoop is obsessed with being a "G," a gangster, a lawbreaker who smokes
dope and kills with impunity. Indicative of the situation in the inner cities, his rage is directed
against fellow blacks, not whites, and he brags "I never hesitate to put a nigger on his back"--
as he does on Doggystyle in an argument over a woman, and as he was prosecuted for in real
life, before being acquitted.
Snoop's rhythms are infectious, and his rhymes clever indeed, but his lyrics put women
through a verbal shredder similar to the infamous Hustler cover featuring a naked woman
being ground into meat. Doggystyle's cartoon-art portrays a woman merely as a hole to be
filled by the man and the songs have hundreds of disparaging remarks toward "'ho's" and
"bitches." In "Ain't No Fun, for example, Snoop and the pound swagger:

I have never met a girl

that I loved in the whole wide world.
Well if [I] gave a fuck about a bitch
I'd always be broke,
I'd never have no motherfuckin' Indo to smoke . . .
I have no love for her,
that's something that I had in the past,
you're just the latest 'ho.

Now that pussy's mine,

so I'll fuck it a couple mo times,
and then I'm through with it,
there's nothing else to do with it,
pass it to the homies . . .
It ain't no fun
if the homies can't have none . . .

Use of the terms "bitches" and "'ho's" replicate sexism and oppression within the black
community, showing clearly that an underclass is not necessarily an enlightened class, and
prompting angry outcries by female rap singers. Queen Latifah, for instance, in her
1993/1994 hit music video and song "U.N.I.T.Y." calls for black solidarity and says
indignantly: "Who you calling a bitch?!" A chorus tells the black woman audience, "You ain't
a bitch and a 'ho" and "You gotta let 'em know." Women rappers also appear on Ice Cube's
albums telling the male rapper that their sexism is unacceptable. Coolio, for one, seems to
have heard the message, dedicating "For My Sister" to the "young black queens from the
neighborhood scene who haven't lost their dream" and is repentant for using the word "bitch,"
saying:

Now I done used the word `bitch' a few times in a rhyme

But that was '95, so let me drop a line . . .
Coolio knows that you ain't no 'ho
And its time to put you up on a pedestal . . .
For every nigger that ditched you
For every nigger that hit you
Accept my apologies for my brothers,
My sister . . .

Occasionally, sexist rappers attempt a lame defense of their language. In various interviews,
Snoop claimed that he calls women bitches and 'ho's only to denigrate their tendencies to
exploit men for their money, paying him and his friends attention only when they became
successful. [9] Similarly, Tupac Shakur reveals in "Wonder Why They Call U" that men
rightly call women bitches and sluts when they play men for money and ignore their
responsibilities to their children while partying all night. In "Bitches 2," Ice-T sings that
"Ladies we just ain't talkin' about you/`cause some of you niggers are bitches too," implying
that anyone can be a bitch, male or female. Nevertheless, many rappers indiscriminately use
these words, such that they are virtual synonyms for "women." Even Coolio's 1996 release--
despite the apology that we cited above--enjoins men to "get your woman on the floor."
Clearly, there is a far deeper misogyny in black male culture than rap artists care to admit--as
well as in the white male community that buys and listens to rap. [10]

A Contested Terrain

Thus, rap music, like U.S. society in general, is a contested terrain in which a variety of
different, often conflicting and self-contradictory, positions are articulated. In addition to
misogyny, Ice Cube and other rappers are not immune from the kind of racism they condemn
when directed at them, making derogatory references to Korean- Americans and other racial
minorities in their songs, while restricting the proud badge of "nigger" to African-
Americans. In "Black Korea," for example, Ice Cube warns: "So pay respect to the black
fist/or we'll burn your store right down to a crisp," thereby inflaming serious racial tensions
among minorities themselves that continue to erupt in bombings and killings, such as
occurred between various minorities in Los Angeles and Harlem in 1995, leading to
shootings and firebombings.

Snoop's lyrics indicate that drugs, alcohol, sex, and money are means of escape from
systemic oppression, tranquilizers that dull the pain, but they also blunt the critical vision and
will. Many rappers, political or not, uncritically reproduce violence in their music. Dr. Dre
and Snoop Doggy Dogg play tough, with Snoop himself "Snoopy Dogg Killa" and pining,
"How can I be the 'G' that I want to be?" Ice-T and Ice Cube adopt the "ice" metaphor,
signifying their absolute coolness and hardness. Ice Cube describes himself as "America's
Most Wanted" and choruses taunt "Fuck you Ice Cube" as he raps his radical rant. Ice-T is
probably the most macho of all. He constantly evokes his own name, sometimes embellished
with the refrain, "Ice, motherfucking T." He presents himself as the "baddest motherfucker
around" ("I'm as hard as they come"), taunting the cops or anyone else to try to fuck with him
and his guns. In "Mic Contract," he brags: "Violent? yeah, you could call me that. Insane?
you're on the right track." While he draws an extended parallel between the microphone and
gun as symbols of power, Ice-T wants us to know he really lives the life of crime; indeed, this
"cop killer" wants to distinguish himself from pseudo-tough rappers to claim the mantle of
"O.G., Original Gangster."

Thus, in much rap music, "black pride" mutates into overweening hubris and machismo taken
to absurd extremes. It quickly becomes clear that many rappers only condemn violence when
it is directed against them; otherwise, they celebrate it, internalize it, and embrace it as an
ethos and means of self expression. In fact, during the mid to late-1990s, violent episodes
between East Coast and West Coast rappers erupted in response to members of each group
dissing other groups, translating the violence of the music into violent acts. In November
1994, West Coast rapper Tupac Shakur was shot and wounded in New York, claiming he was
set up by, among others, Randy "Stretch" Walker, a producer employed with East Coast rival
rap firm Bad Boy Entertainment. Exactly one year later, Walker was murdered gang-
execution style in his Queens, New York, neighborhood. Next, a member of the Bad Boy
group shot and killed an employee of West Coast Death Row records and while shooting a
video in New York, shots were fired at the West Coast Dogg Pound group in a drive-by
shooting (In These Times, July 22, 1996: 24). Then, Tupac was shot to death in Los Vegas in
September 1996 in a gangstyle drive-by shooting, followed by the execution of the Notorious
B.I.G., a star of the N.Y.-based Bad Boy Entertainment. [11]
During the mid to late-1990s, the East/West "war" thus exploded into violence, carried out in
rap music, Internet exchanges with members of each side dissing the other, shootings, and
gangstyle executions. In the early rap classic "The Message," Grandmaster Flash suggests
that "You grow up in the ghetto/living second rate/and your eyes will sing a song of deep
hate," but this hardly excuses reproducing violence and failing to seek positive alternatives.
One could add to this that the "gangsta" identity is often nothing but a promotional image
constructed because it sells. Dr. Dre, for example, tells how he started off as an R&B artist
and admitted he's only in it for the money, and M.C. Hammer helped resurrect his career with
a gangster pose. In fact, market demands for ever more shocking and provocative products
reward the most extreme excess, leading some rappers to complain that they have to play the
gangster game and make their work ever more shocking in order to sell and have it
distributed.

By the late 1990s, however, there was such revulsion against the excesses of gangster rap that
even members of the "hardcore" were seeking new directions. By 1993, the conventions of
G-rap music and style were so exaggerated and over the top that Rusty Cundieff could
produce a hilarious satire of its pretensions and eccentricities in the film Fear of a Black Hat.
The real-life violence erupting constantly in rap culture, its sexism, and its problematic
celebration of gangster life and style drove many away from the genre. Yet for a diagnostic
critique, rap violence replicates the exorbitant competitiveness of contemporary capitalism,
while its ferocity is part and parcel of a society that places sex and violence at the center of its
media culture, and is not hesitant to use extreme force to defend the interests of its ruling
elites, whether in the form of police brutality against the underclass or military intervention
against declared enemies of the state.

Moreover, the excesses of rap are explained by Henry Louis Gates Jr. who acknowledges
violence in rap is extreme, but argues: "When you're faced with a stereotype, you can
disavow it or you can embrace it and exaggerate it to the nth degree. The rappers take the
white Western culture's worst fear of black men and make a game out of it" (cited in Howe
and Strauss 1993: 14). There is indeed an element of extreme parody, of constantly going
over the edge, of hyperbolic exaggeration in rap, creating the need to constantly up the ante,
making the next performance more extreme than the last.

Rappers often defend themselves by arguing that they are only describing black experience
and sounding warnings about "black rage." Thomas Kockman suggests that the purpose of
black verbal aggression "is to gain, without actually having to become violent, the respect
and fear from others that is often won through physical combat" and that rap, therefore, might
actually help to reduce physical violence (cited in Fiske 1994: 187). None of these apologies
are very convincing. Indeed, the misogynistic, hedonistic, and violent outlook of gangsta
rappers has involved many of them in real-life trouble: Flavor Flav, Dr. Dre, and others have
been arrested on drug and alcohol charges; Snoop was charged with conspiracy in the murder
of another black man that he claimed was in self-defense, although he was cleared in 1996;
Tupac has been arrested on rape and sodomy charges, and was himself the victim of violence
when shot and seriously wounded outside his recording studio, and then later shot to death;
Easy E, who celebrated thug life, began a victim of its excesses himself dying of AIDS
(though he made safe sex and anti-drug commercials during his last days); a member of Da
Lench Mob was sentenced to 29 years to life for the murder of a male friend of his girlfriend,
while another member of the same group was charged with murder in an altercation at a L.A.
bowling alley; the founder of Death Row Records, Suge Knight, is back in jail after a parole
violation and is reportedly the subject of a grand jury investigation for his possible role in the
execution of Biggie Small; rapper and mogul Sean "Puffy Daddy" Combs is accused of
assaulting an executive of Interscope Records, while other stories of violence within the rap
music industry continue to circulate. [12]

Rap is thus a highly ambivalent cultural phenomenon with contradictory effects. At its best,
rap is a powerful indictment of racism, oppression, and violence that calls our attention to the
crisis of the inner cities and vividly describes the plight of African-Americans. Rap provides
a positive valorization of blackness, celebrating black culture, pride, intelligence, strength,
style, and creativity. It supplies a voice for a social group excluded from mainstream
communication and enables members of other social groups to better understand the
experiences, anger, and positions within the black community. It constitutes a set of
oppositional cultural practices that can mobilize awareness and understanding of oppression
and revolt, providing musical resources that can be used by groups struggling for justice and
liberation. It is a potential wake-up call urging African-American and other audiences to
break out of the cycle of drugs and violence, accept self-responsibility, and begin to restore
their lives and communities in whatever ways possible as they struggle for broader societal
changes.

At its worst, G-rap is itself racist, sexist, and glorifies violence, being little but a money-
making vehicle that is part of the problem rather than the solution. Many of its images and
models are highly problematic, such as the gangsta rap celebration of the outlaw, pimp,
hedonistic pleasure seeker, and drug dealer. Yet rap is a contested terrain with its most
virulent sexism contested by other rap artists who also attempt to provide an array of
alternatives to the dubious figures of gangster rap. Some rap is random in its circulation of
violence and anger, channelling it indiscriminately against the entire world, while other rap
artists correctly target anger against the actual forces of oppression that have historically
subjugated the black community. In short, G-rap is but a part of a much broader and more
multifaceted hip hop culture that has become a dominant cultural form and style in the
present era.

Rap music is thus highly complex and many-sided with contradictory effects. It is clearly a
formidable mode of cross-cultural communication, enabling white audiences to listen to black
voices and assimilate black views that they might otherwise miss. Rap music makes the
listener painfully aware of differences between black and white, rich and poor, male and
female. Rap music brings to white audiences the uncomfortable awareness of black suffering,
anger, and violence. More upscale and privileged audiences are enabled to experience the
painful effects of deprivation and pain suffered in the urban ghettos. They can also confront
grotesque caricatures of its own mainstream celebrations of wealth and materialism via the
often gross in-your-face recounting of their new found wealth by black rap artists. Moreover,
the aggressive expressions of male misogyny and violence toward women in some rap are a
grim reminder of male violence and the hostile and dangerous attitudes that many men hold
toward women, as its homophobic and racist attitudes indicate that oppressed underclasses
also harbor prejudice and anger against other oppressed groups. Very often the oppressed
direct their rage against their own people and other subaltern groups, thus furthering their
own oppression and subordination.

Rap has thus proven itself to be a very potent and powerful musical idiom. The best rap
draws on the Dionysian tradition in rock visible in Elvis Presley, James Brown, Janis Joplin,
and others, driving its audiences into ecstasy and frenzy. [13] With its extreme sexuality and
violence, rap bursts through all boundaries of propriety, good taste, and decorum, creating
genuine shock effects of the sort described by Walter Benjamin (1969), who argued that in a
media-saturated world art must shock its audiences to get their attention. Rap often goes to
extremes, over the edge, into that tabooed region of excess that threatens the protectors of law
and order, morality and taste. The rap spectacle is thus potentially highly subversive and in its
more extreme forms enacts a Dionysian subversion of boundaries, entering a realm of
anarchy, lawlessness, and chaos.

Rap is thus at once a formidable form of musical expression, a subcultural means of

opposition, a cultural idiom of counterhegemonic anger and rebellion, and an indicator that
existing societies are structured according to a system of differences between dominant and
subordinate classes, groups, races, and genders. Exploding false homogenization and
humanisms, rap music is thus an anthem of postmodern marginality and conflict, a vivid
articulation of the extent to which difference and opposition are structuring principles of
contemporary society, and a reminder of the growing differences between the haves and the
have nots. It is the thorn on the rose of media culture which pricks its audiences into
awareness of the shadowside and underclass of American society. It is a frequently
embarrassing reminder that all is not well in the home of the brave and the land of the free.
Rap vividly reminds us that the red, white, and blue of the flag are not yet signifiers of a
multicultural society where the colors of the rainbow complement each other and harmonize
rather then clash.

Yet rap can further a destructive type of identity politics, promoting a binary opposition
between white and black, cops and gangsters, men and women, straight and gay, that
stigmatizes one of the terms of the binary. However, with its heavy emphasis on color, rap
music calls attention to the importance of racial difference and focuses attention on whiteness
as well as blackness. Rap thus troubles and problematizes the system of racial difference
whereby blackness is marginalized, silenced, and excluded from the cultural dialogue and
whiteness is assumed as the norm and the normal. Rap can force white audiences to reflect on
their own racial construction, on the ways that whites oppress blacks, on the ways that their
own subject positions are constructed in opposition to an Other who is often presented in a
negative light. Rap is thus a significant part of the postmodern adventure that forces an
increasingly multicultural and multiracial society to become aware of its differences and to
learn to live with otherness and dissimilarity.

Endnotes

1. As we note below, hip hop is a broader cultural matrix that includes dance, performance,
visual art, style, fashion, and a mode of life; rap is the form of musical idiom that articulates
the ethos of hip hop culture. On the relationship between hip hop and rap and for various
accounts of their historical genesis and significance, see Toop 1984; George 1988 and 1998;
Gilroy 1991 and 1994; Dyson 1993 and 1996; Rose 1994; Lipsitz 1994; and Kellner 1995.
This study was carried out as part our forthcoming The Postmodern Adventure, which
follows Best and Kellner 1991 and 1997. (back)

2. Tupac recorded songs anticipating his death, including "Death Around the Corner" and "If
I Die 2nite", which we discuss below; Biggie Smalls also cut two records entitled "Ready to
Die" and "Life after Death" before his execution, which were released after his death. (back)

3. Two recent testimonies to the potency and popularity of rap are found in Newsweek article
(February 8, 1999: 52-66) which documents rap's global popularity, claiming that it is to the
present era what Benny Goodman was to the swing era and the Beatles to the 1960s; the
article notes that rap music sold 81 million CDs in 1998, compared with the ever popular
country music which sold 72 million. And in March 1999, MTV featured a five-day hip hop
retrospective that looked back on the genre, played rockumentaries on the main figures,
engaged in panel discussions and demonstrations of DJ and MC style, and played top rated
songs of the "old school" and "now school," and the top twenty-five rated rap music videos of
all time. (back)

4. As Ferguson and Rogers write: "the combination of social-spending cuts, other budget
initiatives, and the massively regressive tax bill produced a huge upward distribution of
American income. Over the 1983-1985 period the policies reduced the incomes of household
making less then $20,000 a year by $20 billion, while increasing the incomes of households
making more then $80,000 by $35 billion. For those at the very bottom of the income
pyramid, making under $10,000 per year, the policies produced an average loss of $1,100
over 1983-85. For those at the top, making more than $200,000 a year, the average gain was
$60,000. By the end of Reagan's first term, U.S. income distribution was more unequal than
at any time since 1947, the year the Census Bureau first began collecting data on the subject.
In 1983, the top 40% of the population received a larger share of income than at any time
since 1947" (1986: 130). (back)

5. On rap as a modernist genre, see Gilroy 1994 and Kellner 1995a. While one could read the
highly elaborate productions of Ice-T and Ice Cube and the entire work of Public Enemy as
deploying modernist cultural strategies of creating a unique voice and style, of producing a
distinctive vision of the world, and envisaging radical cultural and social change in the mode
of the modernist avant-garde, there are also distinctive postmodern motifs in rap, as we will
stress in the following analysis. (back)

6. In the mid-1980s, MTV came under heavy fire for not playing enough black music. They
rectified this situation by featuring soul music and rap in regular time-slots. Beavis and Butt-
Head too have expressed their appreciation for rap, albeit often with tongue-in-cheek, as they
playfully satirize its language and dance style (with Butt-Head mimicking doggy-style sex
spiced with spanking). They also can easily spot a white negro like Vanilla Ice, whom they
devastatingly dismiss with only a contemptuous glance at one another. Yet the more
politically explosive music videos like Public Enemy's "Shut it down!" are not shown on
MTV or other mainstream musical venues. Yet MTV's showcasing of rap, culminating in a
five-day March 1999 focus on rap and Hip Hop culture, has done much to circulate rap/hip
hop as a global popular. (back)

7. Black paranoia is evident even in mainstream Black celebrities like Bill Cosby who in a
1991 interview on CNN's Showbiz Today stated: "AIDS was started by human beings to get
after people they didn't like." For Public Enemy's version of this belief, check out the song
"Race Against Time" on their 1994 album Muse Sick-N- Hour Mess Age. (back)

8. KRS ONE's article "Stop the Violence Movement" is published in Rap Sheet (August
1994): 14. (back)

9. He provided this defense in a 1996 MTV interview "Snoop Raw" and in a Playboy
interview, October, 1995: 60. (back)
10. A book on a Canadian serial murderer who tortured and killed young women indicated
that he constantly listened to rap music as he performed his vile acts (Burnside and Cairns
1995: 265ff), and an account of a gang rape by a women who suffered it indicates that the
prolonged assault was accompanied by rap music (Morgan 1995: 181f.). Thus, there is
evidence that rap misogyny does provoke and provide a pretext and soundtrack for sexual
violence. (back)

11. Rivalry and dissing between East and West Coast rap goes back to the early 1990s; see
Paul Gilroy's (1996: 308f.) citing and discussion of New York rap artist Tim Dogg's attack on
West Coast gangster rap in his 1991 EP Fuck Compton. After the shooting of Tupac and
Biggie, however, there has been a concerted effort to cool the rivalry between East Coast and
West Coast. (back)

12. Members of the rap culture tell of recurrent violence within Death Row records in a 1998
MTV rockumentary, while a Los Angeles Times story reports violence against writers for rap
music magazines (January 1, 1999: F16, F18). (back)

13. The term "Dionysian" derives from the Greek god Dionysus, the god of the festival and
ecstasy; see the description in Nietzsche 1967. From this perspective, the more extreme
versions of rap are a baccalanian festival of excess, an expenditure of anarchic and creative
energies that draw on the deepest roots of Eros and Thanatos, sex and violence. (back)

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