April 12, 2009
gangsta gangsta (chapter one exceprt)
sugarhigh! will be posting excerpts from this book over the next several months
Straight Outta Compton’s decisively-title “Gangsta Gangsta” is a resumé of the tropes which would come to define the gangsta genre: “Takin niggaz out with a flurry of buckshots”; “Homies all standin’ around, just hangin’ — some dope-dealin’, some gang-bangin’”; and perhaps the most durable phrase, the t-shirt ready axiom “Life ain’t nothin’ but bitches and money.” This last supplied an inside-out objectification. Gangsta offered up the figure of the violent Black youth as a character to be consumed (from a safe distance); in turn, that character was increasing required to objectify the world around him. This defensive objectification would become gangsta’s other structuring principle: cartoon materialism, aligning with black-on-black violence to dominate rap’s lyrical content.
If this seems a volte-face from Black Nationalist rap’s demand for economic self-sufficiency, this is not entirely the case. Hip-hop remains “a cultural form that attempts to negotiate the experience of marginalization, brutally truncated opportunity, and oppression within the cultural imperatives of Africa-American and Carribbean history, identity, and community.” The particular focus on having things, on possession and dispossession, remains constant. What flips is the stance toward these fixed desires: from the tribulations of living in a land where the property and power are always elsewhere, to the long folktale of getting these things. The song remains the same, but for the shift from a confrontation with economic brutality to a phantasmatic identification with same: Get Rich or Die Tryin’, per gangsta’s unerring instinct for the truth of capitalism.
The emergent nonetheless must shadowbox the fading dominant. The chorus of “Gangsta” locates the song in relation to rap’s political mode, concluding with a conscious rebuttal of high-flown rhetoric: a sampled woman’s voice concludes, "Hopin’ you sophisticated motherfuckers hear what I have to say.”
The phrase is telling. Gangsta’s anti-sophistication is an unassailable principle. Rhymed couplets are the order of the day — not so much simple as actively signifying simplicity, and thus a kind of authenticity. This reality effect is matched by musical loops substantially less complex than those of the Bomb Squad, less technique-heavy than Rakim’s DJ/producer Eric B. This is not to say that Compton’s production (by Dr. Dre and DJ Yella) is unambitious — rather, it returns to the verities of hook, bassline and beat, in transit from New York’s uptown hustle to a slower funk more attuned to Southern California’s boulevard car culture. No hip-hop at the close of the eighties can escape the police siren: “Gangsta” begins with it. Against the Bomb Squad’s multifaceted use of such sounds, here the siren is reduced to a single, literal meaning: crime.
But to let “Gangsta” tell the whole story of Compton is to elide its moments of external confrontation, not yet entirely sublated into the new worldview. Thus “Fuck tha Police”: a six minute document of fury. The outlaw thrills of “Gangsta” and Compton’s title song are largely missing; instead, the track proceeds from an agitated, agitating loop punctuated by a periodic shriek which quite evidently summons the Bomb Squad style. It begins where “Boyz” ends, in the courthouse — but here the drama unfolds in the funhouse mirror, as the white cops stand accused. Ice Cube is the first to testify:
Fuck tha police comin’ straight from the undergroundThe dynamic of racial confrontation is straightforward enough, with moments of greater nuance (“don’t let it be a black and a white one, cuz they slam ya down to the street-top: Black police showin’ out for the white cop”). Inevitably, the lyric retreats from its brush with social realism into the myth of the Black superman (especially once Ice Cube yields the mic). Moreover, in the end the cops stand not as agents of an oppressive regime in a systemic confrontation — as one would expect in Black Power and Black Nationalist hip-hop — but merely as another set of thugs in the thug game, a kind of unjust interference to be dispatched with: “Without a gun and a badge, what do ya got? A sucka in a uniform waitin’ to get shot.” The hood is the night in which all cows are gangstas.
Young nigga got it bad cuz I’m brown
And not the other color so police think
They have the authority to kill a minority...Fuckin’ with me cuz I'm a teenager
With a little bit of gold and a pager
Searchin’ my car, lookin’ for the product
Thinkin’ every nigga is sellin narcotics
Posted by jane at April 12, 2009 07:33 AM | TrackBack