Comedies of Transgression in Gangsta Rap and Ancient Classical Poetry

Abstract

The history of literature and art offers no shortage of works created to offend or shock an audience, but few have been as incendiary as gangsta rap. Apologists cannot deny problematic content of this form of rap?the misogynistic posturing, themes of intense violence, freewheeling and gratuitous obscenity?and some detractors hold that even attempt to analyze genre bestows undeserved legitimacy on its practitioners. The transgressive and counter hegemonic stance of gangsta rap has become so threatening, in fact, that its origins as a complex poetic form with deep roots in a variety of literary and ritual traditions have, for most part, been neglected or obscured. Indeed, it is difficult to think of any poetic form in contemporary West in which politics, race, and ideology have dictated so completely terms of acceptable criticism. This is all more remarkable for gangsta rap, insofar as so much foundational scholar ship, some even decades old, already exists within fields such as folklore, psychology, and anthropology which can articulate nexus of literary and cultural forces that gave rise to it. As such approaches make clear, far from being an unprecedented art form that can only reflect social pathologies idiosyncratic to American ghetto life, gangsta rap operates within a well-documented poetic tradition within African American culture that ritualizes invective, satire, obscenity, and other verbal phenomena with transgressive aims. Many critics have indeed noted that gangsta rap has, for example, links with African-American rituals of abuse, such as the dozens or toasting, and a very few have even suggested that this background might be relevant to a contemporary understanding of gangsta rap. But there has been no detailed study of genre as an example of a poetic mode operating according to principles that are conceptually prior to an author's lived reality. Ironically, genre itself has probably been biggest obstacle to any serious investigation of its poetic provenance. Like many forms of subjective poetry, after all, gangsta rap insists on pretense that I of its lyrics is actual poet; and when this pretense is combined with transgressive content, it becomes even more