Save the Gangsta
Demise of an American folkway predicted. Gangsta rap going the way of so many of its artistes. Sales headed where the lyrics always were, down the toilet.
Kevin Powell, a historian of the genre, said: “Hip-hop culture has been assassinated by the hip-hop industry’s desire to make money by any means necessary.”
Means which, if we are to believe the lawsuits and headlines, ironically included assassination.
Means which apparently aren’t working, however:
The rap artist Nas bemoans the decline on his new album Hip Hop Is Dead, complaining that everyone sounds the same and that they have forgotten their roots.
You know. The murder. The drug dealing. The siring of as many children as possible by as many women as possible and abandonment of same.
No one embodies the decline of rap like Marion “Suge” Knight, the man who created Death Row Records and became known as the John Gotti of hip-hop. When Knight, reputedly a member of the LA gang the Bloods, helped mastermind the careers of Dr Dre, Snoop Dogg and Tupac Shakur, his company boasted annual sales of $200 million (£100 million) and the monicker “Motown of the Nineties”.
Now he is an ex-convict, a bankrupt who is $137 million in debt and facing a civil trial in which the family of murdered rap star the Notorious B.I.G. claim that he was gunned down in 1997 by hitmen hired by Death Row as part of an East Coast-West Coast rap feud. Now the bad boy of rap is planning to withdraw the entire Death Row back catalogue and bleep out each and every instance of the word “nigger” in its songs. “To me, it’s never too late to change,” he told The Washington Post last week.
Earlier this year, the radio “shock jock” Don Imus sparked a media storm by referring to black members of the Rutgers ladies basketball team as “nappy headed hos”, a derogatory term for unkempt prostitutes. The fury that ensued cost Imus his job but immediately prompted claims that an ageing white man is judged by different standards from the “gangsta” rappers who use such terms with abandon.
The Democrat presidential candidate Barack Obama joined the conservative Fox News channel in calling for a crackdown on rap lyrics.
Hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons, who made millions co-founding and then selling the Def Jam label, called a meeting of music industry executives shortly afterwards and called for the words “nigger”, “bitch” and “ho” to be bleeped out of radio -versions of songs.
The New York civil rights leader, the Rev Al Sharpton, protested outside the offices of leading record labels and met executives from Universal, Warner and Sony Music, who control 90 per cent of the rap market between them. He declared: “We plan to continue to march until those three words are gone.”
What up, Gangstas? You gonna let poindexters like Sharpton and Obama smack you around like hos?
Ed Driscoll with more on the music industry’s woes.
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 10:44 am on Sunday, July 1, 2007
5 Responses to “Save the Gangsta”
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July 1st, 2007 at 11:25 am
Rap, never a blip on my radar anyway, can vanish unremarked and unlamented for all I care. It’s the worst genre ever to call itself “music”, exceeding even the execrable “grunge”.
July 1st, 2007 at 1:18 pm
[...] that maybe the Rap artists once held as special, really don’t deserve the distinction. As Jules Crittenden says: You know. The murder. The drug dealing. The siring of as many children as possible by as many [...]
July 1st, 2007 at 10:29 pm
“Rap artist” “Rap Music” oxymorons.
July 2nd, 2007 at 12:00 am
I still like the line from S.M. Stirling’s “Island in the Sea of Time” where the black Coast Guard Captain confesses that if it would make sure there was no rap instead of being thrown back in time to the Bronze Age, she’d have been willing to be thrown back to the Jurassic into the middle of a pack of velociraptors in white sheets and hoods….
July 2nd, 2007 at 4:20 pm
How will we survive?