Black British Cultural Studies and the Rap on Gangsta

Abstract

The term gangsta rap started to gain currency in 1989. Its first American broadsheet appearance was in Los Angeles Times (Hilburn 1989), when controversial single Gangsta, Gangsta by N.W.A. (Niggaz with Attitude) was in Billboard's Hot Rap Singles chart. (1) The coinage denoted fresh and provocative rap sound--a cocktail of bass-driven and usually minor-key tracks, heightened first-person street gang rhymes, irreverent and humorous stories, and antiestablishment social commentary on deindustrialized black life--created by cluster of rap artists chiefly in Los Angeles region. The genre tag stuck, and by early 1990s, this most controversial strain of hip-hop was fast becoming market leader. At same moment that gangsta rap began to make an impression with audiences and critics, debates were heating up in field of black cultural studies. Across Atlantic in England, Stuart Hall proclaimed the end of innocent notion of essential black subject in 1989 conference paper and article entitled Ethnicities--a controversial statement that was to take on manifesto resonances. Along with other notable scholars, Hall (1996c, 443-444) identified a significant shift in black cultural shift away from essentialist strategies of replacing their bad forms with our good ones and toward new phase, which was concerned with the struggle around strategic positionalities. He characterized shift as move away from focusing on of representation (a dualistic approach to cultural politics: Is it good or bad? authentic or not?) and toward concern with politics of representation. This view entailed looking behind relations of individual media representations and self-representations of blackness in order to explore wider determinants and deeper structures that shape black popular-culture terrain and that frame and inform practice of both culture workers and critics. Hall's pronouncement of phase was in fact as much prescriptive as descriptive. In 1992, he provided an extended version of this challenging critique, revised this time for U.S. intellectual arena. He delivered paper What Is This `Black' in Black Popular Culture? at New York conference, and this paper was positioned as kind of keynote article (before those of Henry Louis Gates and Cornel West) in influential conference collection Black Popular Culture (Dent 1992). Hall's address conveys note of critical exuberance and intellectual mission: [B]lack popular culture ... can never be simplified or explained in terms of simple binary oppositions that are habitually to map it out: high and low; resistance versus incorporation; authentic versus inauthentic; experiential versus formal; opposition versus homogenization (Hall 1992, 26). Although simplified for rhetorical effect, Hall's description of still habitually used binaries were perhaps nowhere more apparent than in much of gangsta rap's reception. The polemical critical climate, provocative and, to many, offensive nature of gangsta rap, and high stakes resulting from music's close connection to an impoverished lived experience all contributed to emergence of variety of totalizing judgmental responses. The subgenre was frequently cast as incorporated and inauthentic (gangsta rappers as cultural dupes, as slaves to system, as neo-blackface minstrels). Alternatively, critics read it as resistant and authentic (gangsta as black, proletarian voicing, as antipolice, antihegemonic protest). Very often, and in line with longstanding trends in criticism of black cultural forms, critics understood gangsta rap as experiential rather than formal, construing gangsta as social realism (reflecting grim realities of so-called black experience) and at same time as formally basic, as musically debased, and as aesthetically unworthy of close attention. …