strategic Self-Commodification As Resistance:
The Complexity of Media-Transmitted
African-American Cultural Attitudes
Erotics of Gangsta: The Background of the Issue
In February 1994, the National Board of Directors of the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People ‘‘unanimously voted to
condemn ‘gangsta rappin’” (“NAACP”).' Gangsta Rap is a sub-genre of rap music,
which emerged in the South Bronx around 1974. Inspired by West Coast inner-city
youth culture, in particular “the gang culture and street wars of South Central Los
Angeles, Compton, and Long Beach,” Gangsta Rap has been acknowledged as
one of the central phenomena that marked the extensive commercial progress
characterizing the second wave of rap music (Perkins 18). On the other hand, artists
of this genre have been incessantly criticized by the mainstream media, politicians,
and white middle-class liberal organizations— like Tipper Gore’s Parents’ Music
Resource Center—because they “glamorize” violence, including sexual abuse of
women and the use of guns and drugs.Recently, however, various academic studies and discussions have been
accumulating: they investigate the racial politics and social critique hidden under
Gangsta Rap’s fighting signifiers. Tricia Rose in Black Noise argues that “rap’s
social criticism opposes and attempts to counteract the ways in which public
educational institutions reinforce and legitimate misleading historical narratives
and erase from the public record the resistance to domination that women, people
of color, and the working classes have persistently maintained” (105). Implied
here is that rappers’ expressions stem directly from their resentment of actual innercity experiences of discrimination, impoverishment, and victimization by authority
as represented by police brutality. Yet more significantly, Rose’s interpretation
sheds light on rappers’ anxiety that those experiences will be erased by the dominant
epistemology, which constructs the mainstream American social texture, unless
they articulate them in the form of rap music.^ Fomier Public Enemy member Chuck
D’s well-known reference to rap as “Black CNN” clearly represents the role of rap
music as an information source for those who are in the periphery of modern
American society.'*
However, if mainstream society has no exegetic intentions toward rappers’
politics of self-expression for critiquing the “common sense” of American social
structure, then those “violent” words will be understood literally and thus comply
textually with the existing stereotypes of African Americans. The NAACP’s concern