Chang Reading...gangsta rap as the new "anthem"

The anthem of the oppressed African American is something that has changed and morphed and cannot be pinned to a single song or style.  The styles have varied, but the message has significance has remained the same: as described in the last week of class, music for the oppressed has served as a type of medicine for the socially, politically, and economically disenfranchised.  These people, as illustrated in the From Mambo to Hip Hop documentary as well as the Culture Assassins reading, were almost forced to develop styles of hip hop that have come to speak very powerfully.  In gangsta rap, violent raps like those of “Boys-N-The-Hood” became an “anthem for the fatherless, brotherless, state-assaulted, heavily armed West Coast urban youth.”  In its chronicle of the development of gangsta rap, the Chang reading also outlined to some extent the deindustrialization of Los Angeles.  

In the Chang reading, something that I tend to gloss over in listening to rap (which I only sometimes do) is the explicitness of the lyrics.  The dirty rhymes and X-rated lyrics that Ice Cube and Dr. Dre used were (and are) extremely popular.  This sort of outright description of violence is reminiscent of, as MANY of the trends in gangsta rap development are, the corridos of Tex-Mex music we previously discussed.  There are several similarities and differences I noticed.  As the reading mentions, the gangsta rap made the transition from swap meets to big labels, whereas corridos even to this day are primarily distributed through swap meets here in L.A.  Besides the difference of the mode of dispersal and clear stylistic differences, the most prominent similarity is the intent to disseminate the TRUTH.  As in corridos or even songs of Jenni Rivera, gangsta raps tell about the brutal reality of the “hood” and the “hardness” of the people who survive there.  It’s all about the “strength of street knowledge.”  Toddy Tee’s “Batterram” was a prime example of the brutality of police and the hardships experienced by those living in the hood.  These songs were about telling their stories, and the more explicit the more popular.  It’s about the aesthetics of excess, and and insider-outsider distinction was created and gave power to the musical genre.  “Straight Outta Compton” gave Compton-dwellers pride in being from the city and it was a sort of musical manifestation of artistic othering.  It wasn’t, as some hip-hop pioneers hoped, inclusive; but rather, it was made to distinguish those hardened gangsters as defiant and resilient in the face of a reality marred with racism.  Sometimes, there seems to be a blurry balance between the actual racial injustices that occurred/horrors rappers witnessed or took part in and what they ACTUALLy experienced.  Dre and Ice Cube weren’t described as participating in many terrible gang-related crimes or activities, but they sure sing about being “hard” and badass.  

My opinion of what I read was it seems (and all of what I’m saying might be overly generalized, but I apologize for that) that in the South Bronx social oppression forced hip hop to be birthed in abandoned spaces, and the gangsta rap in L.A. seems to have been wrought out of very dramatic sociopolitical events (Watts Riots and gang/turf wars).  The Watts Prophets and the poets seem to have been created in an abandoned political space.  I don’t know if that makes sense, and it would take a lot more reading and research to really flesh out this idea, but I feel like in terms of space, which we’ve talked about in class, gangsta rap was born not only out of the garages of people like Mixmaster spade, but also out of gang lines cut into the landscape of Los Angeles by both whites and blacks.  The fractioning of groups of blacks into gangs in conjunction with the clear lines drawn by whites to segregate blacks created both a physical line not to cross, but a space within those lines to define or even buffer those lines further through music and rap.  Almost contradictorily, these spaces that reinforced boundaries co-existed with the boundaries that helped catapult rap into the status that white kids around the country listened to in order to vicariously be part of something so stylistically unique.

One small thing I noticed: many articles emphasize the police raids and brutality, which I don’t doubt occurred...but in pretty much every case, there are lots of drugs behind the door that they raid...it’s not as if they raided necessarily without due cause.  I don’t know all the facts, but it’s just a thought and my first impression. 

Sorry all my ideas are pretty scattered!