fi!fl, K bracks arrested for aggravated assault in that year amounted to 3 times
the number of whites arrested for the same crimes.

In slavery tunes, the old people used to say that you can hide the fire, but what
M-e you going to do with the smoke? We can try to prevent young people from hear-

f^Jr^^i^l ""^P' ^""^ ^^^^ ^^} ^^ °^^^ t^^^ ^" return? Where can tKey take their
aneer and horror over what deindustrialization and the abandonment of the civil

Sldihn1fv"«,^nn^''^ ^°"^ ^ ^^^''" neighborhoods? One reason why rap artists have
t^^fv. fX AA^ ^° ""^^y y"'?"^ P®°P^e ^s because they appear to he telling the
«^H .nmr^^ addressing the realities of inner city life in a way that the news media
f^;Ia T^^*^ 1^^^^"^ ^-^^"^ "°^ ^° ^°- What alternatives do we offer to the heroic
W,rf«n/^^"^ rap unages which simply adapt to local circumstances the vio-
hJ^^ A "liTIT"'^ ^^^^ ^^ ^^ P"^^^ '"^ "mainstream" action adventure films star-
SpI«1^« 11. Schwarznegger, Bruce WUlis, Jean Claude Van Damme, and Steven
mmk rivf T=^ff f^?:,^T ""T^ misogynist or more violent than heavy metal or
fn ?hi2^?f f '^ "Til ^^^?^ '"^.^^! ^^° ^^^ ^ be denied the sadistic pleasures sold
m these staples of the culture industry? Are black women treated wiSi respect and



154 3 9999 05982 341 7

dignity outside of gangster rap? For that matter, what constitutes gangster rap? Is
Ice-T a rapper or a heavy metal artist? Are the metaphors used by PubUc Enemy,
Ice-T, and ke Cube in songs that critique the gang hfe to be suppressed along with
the songs that glamorize this life? In the past, politicians and journalists have dem-
onstrated little more than their own ignorance of popular culture when they have
attempted to single out songs for criticism, because they have opportunistically at-
tackea the most positive and socially conscious rappers instead of the most vicious
and sadistic ones.

Gangster rap is one facet of a broader hip hop culture that answers a culture of
surveiflance with a counterculture of conspicuous display. Young people in the hip
hop culture constitute their own bodies, gnetto walls, and city streets as sites for
performance and play. Defamed and despised by the dominant culture, they discover
ways to contest their erasure, to write themselves back into history by using tech-
nology, performance, and oral testimony to throw out a style that calls attention to
themselves and their world. Hemmed in by the spatial constraints of the post-indus-
trial city, they reconfigure space with placas ana graffiti tags, and they restructure
time by sampling music from the past as part of the present. Rap music, grafBti
writing, and car customizing turn consumers into producers while mocking the
prominence of commodities in American culture. Young people in hip hop drop their
family names and invent new identities for themselves that mock the world that
disdains them, as evidence in the names of rappers like Public Enemy, Special Ed,
Arrested Development, and Above the Law.

In their desire to be seen, to wield the symbolic currency of American popular cul-
ture, some rappers do deal heavily in misogyny, abusive language, and eroticized
brutality. How could it be otherwise in a population that increasingly experiences
incarceration in all-male penal institutions rife with violence and antagonisms of
every kind? But in a subciilture that makes an art form out of answering oack, they
are most effectively rebuked from within — by female rappers like Queen Latifan
who celebrate the accomplishments of black women or by politicized male rappers
like Public Enemy and KRS-1 of BDP who use their art to build affirmative identi-
fication with collective struggle. To encourage record companies or radio stations to
abandon gangster rap will only drive it underground and make it more lucrative.
It will hide the fire, but do nothing about the smoke.

If the same effort required to publicize the alleged evils of gangster rap went to-
ward public meetings that encouraged youiig people to speak about their experi-
ences and to formulate their own solutions, we would be supporting a level of edu-
cation and mobilization that might address the pervasive proDlems that loom behind
this whole discussion. We could use the knowledge and insights and energy of young
people instead of suppressing them. I don't want to convey the impression that I
think that the fans of gangster rap are idealists and optimists, that all they need
is a helping hand to become constructive citizens. Quite the contrary. My experi-
ences teaching in a prison and my interviews with young people over the past 5
years have exposed me to an unrelenting cynicism among young people; many of
them expect the worst of everjdhing and everybody. But this is a view they have
learned in our society, it reflects the reality they have known in the 1980's and
1990's. I think this is why conversations between the civil rights generation and to-
days young people are so diflQcult, why so often we seem to be talking past each
other. People who witnessed the transformations of the 1960's witnessed terrible
atrocities, out they had the advantage of seeing ordinary people take history into
their own hands and bring about some changes.

I think the gap between generations today is enormous. But it is, in my judgment,
a problem of poverty rather than a problem of black culture. It has close parallels
to what happened between generations among working class and poor people during
the Great Depression of the 1930's. Writing about the plays of Clifford Odets, Robert
Warshow described the gap the depression opened up between a father and his chil-
dren as follows: "For his part, he was always disappointed in his children, and his
sense of disappointment was often the only thing ne could clearlv communicate to
them. He succeeded at least in becoming a reproach to them, and the bitterness of
the personal conflict which ensued was aggravated by the fact that they could ever
quite see fi-om what he derived his superiority or what it was he held against them.
The children took hold of what seemed to them the essential point — that they were
living in a jungle. It would not be accurate to say that they failed to understand
the rest; so far as they were concerned, the rest was not there to see, it had retired
into the mind. They tri-^d to act reasonably. Every day they could see the basic
truth; without a dollar you don't look the world in tiie eye .... Their economic
strength comes from their ability to act as the situation demands even though the
situation is abhorrent to them. But the gap between the moral man and the require-
ments of reality has seemed to them so wide that they have been able to function



155

successfully only by imposing cynicism on themselves as a kind of discipline. They
have gone further than most in the acceptance of reality, and this is perhaps the
strongest kind of subversion — to take capitalism without sugar."

This is the cynicism of poverty; it is also the cynicism of gangster rap. It is ready
to give measure for measure to its enemies. But condemning gangster rap without
offering opportunities for young people to address and redress their grievances only
plays into its hands. It will add to its prestige by showing the outside world to be
as ruthless, unforgiving, and unyielding as the gangster rappers suspect. It gives
them something to be against, but nothing to be for. A better way is to not take
the bait, to not scapegoat a few artists and their audiences for the social disintegra-
tion we are now experiencing, but rather to build a coaUtion with young people,
using what they alreadv know about the world to battle together for a redistribution
of wealth and power that will provide a compelling alternative to gangsterism in
music and in social life.

o



82-668 (1601



ISBN 0-16-044889-1



9 780160"448898



90000