QUESTION

Week 9 Music  

Topic: Rock & Roll, Gangsta Rap
Video Assignment: Rock and Roll Documentary Part 1-6 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Lo46EPlGmc
Writing Assignment: Name as many people mentioned in these videos as you can. Who are they? Where are they from? How do you like their music?
Gangsta Story: Read and comment on this piece (see link above)
Video Assignment: (Warning: Explicit content.)
Writing Assignment: Name as many people mentioned in this video as you can. Who are they? Where are they from? How do you like their music?
N.W.A. – Straight Outta Compton https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMZi25Pq3T8&ab_channel=NWAVEVO
Hamilton Musical Hip hop Musical. What do you think about it? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0D3zz6byFT4&ab_channel=AsakiTakaya

a) Composer information (Short biography, work status, nationality)
b) Include the bold lettered Genre name and its definition.
c) Description (What do you hear in the piece? i.e. instrumentation, voices, etc.)
d)Analysis (What is the piece about? The story if any.)
e) Opinion (How did you like it or not and why?)

The Dynamics of Storied Space:

When You’re a Gangsta

by Ken Baskin

Abstract: The term “gangsta rap” today evokes a dominant narrative that celebrates violence and misogyny. Yet in reconstructing the “gangsta saga” in terms of the dynamics of storied space, one uncovers a richer, in some ways more disturbing story. This essay performs that reconstruction, examining how gangsta rap emerged in the decade 1987-1997, as an attempt at social protest, an antenarrative expressing the living story of African-American ghettos decimated in a perfect storm of social forces. Because of the way those articulating this antenarrative felt compelled to tell it, their story was interpreted very differently by a series of social groups – among them white youth, law enforcement officials, politicians, civil rights activists, and the media. In the end, the dynamics of storied space would transform the middle-class young men who popularized gangsta rap into the reality of their gangsta personae, leading eventually to the murder of Tupak Shakur and Christopher Wallace. In this way, the dominant narrative was able to dismiss a significant counter-narrative. Yet, as a storied-space analysis shows, this dismissal was achieved, not as a conspiracy, but through social self-organization.

[G]angsta rap’s greatest “sin” may be that it tells the truth about practices and beliefs that rappers hold in common with the mainstream and with black elites. This music has embarrassed mainstream society and black bourgeois culture. . . . Indeed, gangsta rap’s in-your-face style may do more to force our nation to confront crucial social problems than countless sermons and political speeches. Michael Eric Dyson, Between God and Gangsta Rap

One night in 1988, Andre Young (a.k.a. Dr. Dre) and Eric Wright (a.k.a. Easy-E), two members of the rap group NWA (Niggaz with Attitude), were out celebrating their group’s successful first album. Driving around Los Angeles in Young’s Mercedez, they were doing the kind of exceptionally stupid thing you’d expect of 20-year old boys – shooting paint guns at people at bus stops in Torrence. Only instead of the slap on the wrist that rich white college boys would have received, the police who caught them convinced them not repeat the prank by putting guns to their heads (Kenyatta, 2000). Enraged, Young got the other members of NWA together and recorded a song that would transform American youth culture.

That song, “F**k tha Police,” protested in street terms, not just this incident, but the racial prejudice that they’d seen police act out for years. In this way, the song explains that police “think/They have the authority to kill a minority”; that the same police are “Searchin’ my car, lookin’ for the product [drugs]/Thinkin’ every nigga is sellin’ narcotics”; and that police would “rather see me in the pen/Than me and Lorenzo [another group member] rollin’ in the Benzo [Mercedes Benz].” The song took the shape of a mock trial of a “redneck, whitebread, chickenshit” policeman like the ones who’d abused Young and Wright. The song reflects the braggadocio, admittedly violent, that is typical of ghetto American American culture (note).  The song was an immediate success as a single, and the album of which it became part, Straight outa Compton, would become the first rap music album to sell a million copies. As white suburban kids lined up to buy the album, “gangsta rap,” initially an attempt to portray the life of certain elements of ghetto African-American life, was transformed from an edgy, periphery genre of hip-hop (Dyson, 1996) to its mainstream, where it remains 20 years later.

            The mainstream interpretation of gangsta rap, which I accepted until a couple of years ago, is unremittingly critical. Gangsta rap, this narrative explains, is “too violent” or “celebrates violence,” is misogynistic and homophobic, and is either “illiterate” or “too difficult to understand.” All these criticisms, with the exception of the charge of illiteracy, are impossible to deny. Yet, there is often a note of hysteria in the criticism. For example, civil rights activist C. Delores Tucker told a Senate hearing in 1994, “Being coaxed by gangster rap, [young people] will trigger a crime wave of epic proportions that we have never seen the likes of” (Chang, 2005: 453). Interestingly, as social critic Michael Eric Dyson notes, rap denigrators such as Tucker are “scapegoating without sophisticated moral analysis and action” (1996:186).

            Like Dyson, I find this mainstream interpretation unsatisfying, if only because it ignores the fascinating ironies that hover around the phenomenon of gangsta rap, especially in its most vital stage, from 1987-1997. Several ironies, in particular, call out for Dyson’s “sophisticated moral analysis”:

• Many of the Baby-boomer critics of gangsta rap were in the streets of Chicago during the 1968 Democratic convention and would have been delighted to write a song titled “F**k tha Police.”
• The major icons of gangsta rap, Andre Young (Dr. Dre), Tupak Shakur (2Pak), and Christopher Wallace (The Notorious B.I.G.), were creative young middle-class men who did well in school.
• The same critics who lambaste gangsta rap for being too violent agree that their high-school-age children should be forced – I mean, required – to read plays such as Hamlet and Macbeth, which are equally violent.
• While gangsta rappers portray women as “hoes” and “bitches,” the one worship word in their vocabulary is “momma.”
• While Conservatives such as William Bennett have been especially offended by gangsta rap, they also insist that we should let “the market decide” on a wide variety of issues. The triumph of gangsta rap was clearly a market decision; like our love for SUVs and Hummers, in spite of global warming and dependence on foreign oil, gangsta rap’s success reflects the dark side of American Capitalism.

In this essay, I intend to explore these ironies, examining the phenomenon of gangsta rap as an example of the complex dynamics of storied space, a theory of which appears earlier in this book. To do so, I want to treat three major issues in depth:

1. How gangsta rap arose as an antenarrative striving to articulate a living story within the dominant narrative of America’s post-WWII drive for racial equality;
2. How the mainstream response demonized the gangsta persona, driving artists who held it to enact the social stereotype they were drawing attention to, thus becoming the very thing their critics most feared;
3. How thus analyzing this self-organizing dynamic enables us to understand the phenomenon of gangsta rap at a level of detail the dominant gangsta narrative cannot and the wider social implications of this dynamic.

Before treating these issues, however, I wanted to summarize the theory of “storied space” presented in an earlier chapter. Storied space is the human equivalent of Complexity Science’s complex adaptive systems (CASs). Like CASs, storied space is a nested network of entities – a person, small groups, organizations, professions, nations, etc. – in which events on any level can generate cascades of change through other levels. The dynamics of storied space emerge from the interplay of two types of story – the historically grounded dominant narrative, such as the individual’s personality, organizational culture or professional discourse, which functions like the attractors of complexity, and the antenarrative by which people try to communicate the “living story” of present events. To a large extent, the health of any storied space depends on its ability to adapt its dominant narrative in response to living stories that do not fit neatly into the group’s dominant narrative.

Gangsta rap’s narrative context

Gangsta rap emerged in the context of a series of interlinking dominant narratives in American society. Two are especially important – the post-WWII narrative of the commitment to racial equality and the American Capitalist narrative. In many ways, gangsta rap is an antenarrative attempt to resolve the contradiction in the American culture’s racial attitude, dating back to the nation’s founding. Thus, while the Declaration of Independence insists “all men are created equal,” the Constitution defined black slaves, for the purpose of assessing Congressional representation, as only three-fifths of a human being. Slavery and then, after the Civil War, segregation and open discrimination against African Americans, including lynchings, expressed the dark side of this contradiction. In the 20^th century, conditions became more complex. In particular, the migration of black jazz artists into America’s musical mainstream in the 1930s, blacks and whites serving separately in WWII and then desegregated in the Korean War, and the integration of professional sports by the late 40s, forced the emergence of a new living story that made avoiding this historical contradiction impossible.

            As a result, in mainstream society, a new narrative emerged, which insisted that American society had a responsibility to enact racial equality. According to that narrative, Americans have a responsibility to live up to their ideal of equality by removing laws that discriminate against blacks, by integrating society, and by providing government assistance so that blacks can achieve equal social and economic opportunity. One sees this narrative expressed in Brown vs. the Board of Education (1954), in which the Supreme Court ruled that public schools must integrate, in the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and ‘60s, in Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society program, in the rise of Equal Opportunity laws, and, eventually, in the dramatic increase in black/white intermarriage over the last 20 years. By the 1970s, these actions had created several dynamics shaped by this dominant narrative. For one thing, it had, in much of mainstream America, created the belief that African-Americans were no longer subject to discrimination, assuaging a great deal of guilt; for another, it had begun helped create a growing black middle class; for still another, it had created a class of civil rights activists, such as Tucker and the Reverend Jesse Jackson, and public servants providing a wide range of services, all of whom were dependent on the dominant narrative for their power and economic well being. For most of those in this class, as long as government was available to intervene to maintain equality of the races, the dominant narrative was largely fulfilled.

            Much of this dominant narrative was valid, as discriminatory laws fell away and African Americans became better educated and more economically successful. However, its inability to change life in African American ghettos was demonstrated in the urban riots that followed the murder of Martin Luther King in 1968. Other events, especially a series beginning in the late 1970s and early ‘80s, drove the emergence of a living story that would be expressed as antenarrative in gangsta rap. Those events are much in evidence in the life of NWA’s Andre Young, who was born in 1965 in Compton, a suburb of Los Angeles, at the time, an integrated lower-middle class neighborhood. By the early 1980s, corporate America’s blue collar downsizing had erased most of the middle-class jobs of the black fathers in Compton, which, combined with the incentives for welfare mothers, accelerated the growth of single-parent black families, about which the Moynihan Report (1965) had already warned. In addition, white families left Compton; gangs took over the neighborhood; and the rise of crack completed the devastation of neighborhoods like Compton (Dyson, 1996). What had been a safe, happy place to grow up had been transformed into a gang-infested, drug-ridden nightmare. These conditions formed the living story for which gangsta rap was the antenarrative.

            Not surprisingly, intelligent, creative young men such as Young or Christopher Wallace, who grew up in New York’s Bedford Stuyvesant, were enraged. Brought up to believe the dominant narrative of enacting racial equality, they must have felt, not merely terrified at the developments in their neighborhoods, but also betrayed by the (mostly white) power structure that had allowed the degeneration of their neighborhoods. The rage they experienced, I think, is the best way to understand the violence of gangsta rap, as well as its almost obsessive use of the most derogatory of all racial slurs – “nigger.” So, when asked what NWA was trying to accomplish, Young replied, “Everybody trying to do this black power and shit, so I was like, let’s give ‘em an alternative, ‘niggerniggerniggernigger fuck this fuck that bitchbitchbitch suck my dick,’ all types of shit, you know what I’m saying?” (as quoted in Coker, 1999). For me, Young’s comment translates, roughly speaking, to the following:

You people in the mainstream aren’t paying attention. You say you care about black people in America, but look what’s happening. You couldn’t have created a more poisonous environment for us if you’d tried. Most of us can’t even climb out of it, because the schools you’ve left us are so awful. And if I have to use the words that make you most uncomfortable, I will, because for me it really feels that, while you have the word “brother” on your lips, you have the word “nigger” in your heart. How else could you let this happen?

            The image of African American men this antenarrative focused on was as difficult to ignore as Young could have wished. As illustrated, for instance, by the photograph of rapper 50 Cent on the front of his album The Massacre (2006), it combines two of the most frightening stereotypes in mainstream American culture. First, it evokes Foucault’s “dangerous individual” (2001) a person so dangerous to society that he must be imprisoned not for what he has done, but what he is capable of doing. (It’s difficult here not to recall that FBI Director Herbert Hoover once described Martin Luther King, Jr. as “the most dangerous man in America.”) Second, it suggests the black sex myth, which portrays African-American men and women “as threatening creatures who have the potential for sexual power over whites. . .” (West, 1993: 119). I further suspect that the repeated use of the word “nigga,” reproducing ghetto pronunciation, emphasizes this image, as if gangsta rappers such as Young are saying, “Yes, we’re just as big and bad as you think we are. But we’re not what you think we are.”

            The ironies here are again overwhelming. In order to make their antenarrative heard in mainstream society, Young had to communicate in the emotional equivalent of a shout. For decades, African Americans had spoken quietly (Martin Luther King) and violently (Huey Newton and other Black Panthers), but the promise of the narrative of racial equality continued to be denied to many African Americans. To get their message through, NWA presented “an indictment of mainstream and bourgeois black institutions by young people who did not find conventional methods . . . useful” (Dyson, 1996: 185), and they did it specifically using the one word that most discomforted the mainstream, both whites who felt guilty about the nation’s history of racism and blacks invested in the post-WWII narrative of overcoming racism. Not surprisingly, the excessiveness of this message made it unlikely that the people it was aimed at would understand it.

It may at first be surprising that gangsta rap also emerged from the American Capitalist narrative. However, like most American youths, the pioneers of gangsta rap had spent long hours watching TV, absorbing the programs and commercials that, in line with the Capitalist narrative defined success as having enough money to afford the “good things in life.” Yet, in the black ghettos, young men could see only three ways of achieving this American Dream – sports, entertainment, and crime. As Wallace put it in “Things Done Changed” (1997), “either you’re slingin’ rock crack or you got a mean jump shot.” Gangsta rap portrays the life of those who, without the talent to succeed in sports or entertainment, turn to crime, people such as Frank Lucas, the drug lord fictionalized in American Gangster (2007).

            As a result, the theme of “getting paid” is ubiquitous in gangsta rap. Perhaps the best-known articulation of that theme is Puffy Combs’ line, “It’s all about the Benjamins [$100 bills].” Similarly, in NWA’s second gangsta album, Young (1991) raps that he’s made more money from the previous album than a doctor makes in a year. This theme – and its tragic implications – is most fully examined in the work of Wallace, especially his first album, Ready to Die (1994). In that album, Wallace tells the story of his persona, Biggie Smallz or the Notorious B.I.G., beginning with his birth. Biggie wants to achieve the American Dream, but can only conceive of doing it through a life of crime. The album details his successes in his life of crime and the way that success destroys everything other than money that matters to him. In “Me and My Bitch,” for example, Biggie raps about falling in love with the woman who’d become his wife and then seeing her dead body, murdered by people looking for him. In the last song, “Suicidal Thoughts,” he commits suicide. Wallace’s antenarrative is unmistakable. For young men like Biggie Smallz, the only way to achieve the American Capitalist Dream of wealth, fame, and power is through crime, and the life that enables them to achieve it destroys their lives. What makes the work especially poignant is its parallel with the life of Wallace, who was killed as a result of his involvement with gangsta rap.

            The living story this antenarrative articulates, the social poison of a ghetto world in which the American Dream is self-destructive, continues to infect our society a decade after Wallace was gunned down. Yet the mainstream response, not surprisingly, was denial.

The dominant narrative strikes back

“F**k Tha Police” certainly succeeded in gaining the attention of the American mainstream, if not quite in the way Young and his friends had hoped. Not surprisingly, people in many groups could only understand gangsta rap through the filter of their group dominant narratives. The FBI and police departments across the country were terrified that the violence threatened in gangsta rap was meant to incite actual attacks. The FBI, for instance, sent a threatening letter to NWA’s record company, Priority Records. Then, the police response to NWA’s 1989 tour reinforced the group’s attitudes. “F**k tha Police” complains that police think that “every nigga is sellin’ narcotics.” So, as if on cue, police in Cincinnatti searched them for drugs, assuming they were associated with Los Angeles drug dealing gangs. Police in Detroit also closed down their concert when the group sang this song (Ro, 2007). 

I find it critical to remember that, at this point, NWA members like Young were still in the tradition of protest music, trying to draw attention to real social problems by adopting a persona. What would turn such middle-class rappers into gun-carrying gangstas and their protest music into the youth culture social observers such as Tucker found so troubling was a perfect storm of responses to the gangsta antenarrative from people throughout American society. Not only did the police treat NWA members as if they were the gangsters their music portrayed, but the actual gang members, the Crips and Bloods in Los Angeles, were attracted to the entourages of rappers. Violence became an almost daily part of their lives. Concerned about the police and the gang members they were associating with, middle-class young men such as Young began “strappin’ gatz” (gangsta slang for carrying guns). Young makes this explicit in a later album, Dre 2001, where he raps that their white fans don’t understand they need guns for protection. Like British Romantic poets Byron and Shelley, they were being transformed into characters in their own stories, acting more and more like the thugs about whom they were writing. However, the transformation was only apparent. So when Young spent a few months in prison for some of his thuggish behavior in 1994, he realized he was a musician, not a gangsta. As he put it, “I had nothing to do in there but think about how much I was screwing up” (Ro, 2007, 124).

            At the same time, the market for youth music was deciding in favor of gangsta rap. Why were suburban white youth lining up to buy the gangsta rap? For one thing, as hip-hop critic Nelson George notes, “cartoonish misogyny . . . has never failed to titillate teenage boys, whether espoused by rockers or rappers” (1998, 87). It was the type of rebellion that Baby boomers weaned on the Rolling Stones should be able to recognize. In addition, as George also points out, for a generation whose parents had smoked marijuana and practiced free love, the misogyny and violence of gangsta rap offered the perfect rebellion. This popularity of gangsta rap among white suburban teenagers transformed it into the mainstream of hip-hop music by the early 1990s. And as with the reinforcement of rappers’ gangsta behavior, the mainstream attack on gangsta youth culture ended up reinforcing the very things at which the attack was aimed. What could have more positively reinforced the gangsta culture rebellion of these youths than the criticism issuing from super-authority figures Bob Dole or William Bennett?

            By the time NWA put out its second album, Elif4zaggin, in 1991, a new gangsta star was rising, Tupak Shakur. In addition to the angry protest rap of NWA, he offered a more lyrical style that focused on the ravaged ghetto community and on a vision of a better world. In “Brenda’s Got a Baby,” for instance, Shakur (1991) describes how the indifference of the people around her destroys the life a 13-year-old who gets pregnant and eventually becomes a prostitute. Like Young, he was drawn into the gangsta myth. In November 1994, Shakur was shot five times and left for dead while visiting New York. He survived, but went to jail the following spring, found guilty of sexual abuse. Shakur also found that he wasn’t gangsta enough for the prison experience. So when Death Row Records entrepreneur Marion “Suge” Knight offered to put up the $1.4 million for bail, while the conviction was appealed, Shakur signed with Death Row (Ro, 2007). Under Knight’s influence, Shakur became convinced that a cabal of West Coast rappers, led by Wallace and his friends, had set him up for the attack he suffered in 1994. Shakur had been friends with Wallace for years; so Wallace at first refused to believe that Shakur meant the things he was saying. In “Notorious Thugs,” (1997) Wallace referred to his “so-called beef with you know who.” Yet, under the urging of Knight, Shakur continued to accuse Wallace and other “East Coast” rappers of conspiring against him.

            The conflict between West Coast rappers, in the Los Angeles area, and East Coast rappers, in the New York City area, went violent in 1996 at the Soul Train Awards in Los Angeles. After Wallace and Puffy Combs performed a medley of hits at the awards, Shakur stormed down the aisle with a large entourage and, backstage, confronted Wallace face to face for the first time since he went to prison. “That’s when I knew it was real to him. That he believed all this shit,” Wallace later commented. Members of the two groups insulted each other; one, then another gun was fired. In the aftermath of this confrontation, Shakur released an extremely insulting song, “Hit ‘Em up,” Then, on September 6, 1996, Shakur was shot after the Mike Tyson fight in Las Vegas. He would die seven days later. Almost exactly six months later, on March 8, 1997, leaving a party following the Soul Train Awards, Wallace was gunned down, dying before he could be taken to the hospital only a half mile from the shooting (Hampton, 1999, 346-47).

            As social protest, the gangsta antenarrative died with Shakur and Wallace. Gangsta rap continues as a pop culture pose, but serious attempts to articulate the living story from which it emerged, have moved to other forms of hip-hop. Thus, in the music of Eminem (Marshall Mathers) the gangsta stance is parodied with violence comically exaggerated (see, for example, his rap on “What’s the Difference” on Dr. Dre 2001). As a legitimate expression of its living story, gangsta rap had run its course. Yet the social conditions it commented on remain unaddressed.

The dynamics of storied space

So what would Dyson’s “sophisticated moral analysis” of the gangsta rap phenomena suggest? First of all, it demands a great deal more than the several conspiracy stories that can be taken from it. The Activist Conspiracy, for example, holds that the popularity of gangsta rap is a cynical effort on the part of the white recording industry to profit from encouraging violence within the black community. “You are destroying not just a generation,” she told the CEO of Time Warner, “but a race of people. That’s what your music is doing” (Ro, 2007: 128). When one looks at gangsta rap as a phenomenon that reflects the dynamics of storied space, it becomes clear that what went on is far more morally sophisticated.

            The dynamics of the gangsta saga as storied space, in fact, provide an excellent example of what complexity calls “self-organization” in human social systems (Cilliers, 1998). In other words, many agents with many different interests interact, expressing their own needs and desires, as defined in the storied spaces of their groups, and the result is generally an emergent effect that no one necessarily intended. (An excellent analysis of human self-organization appears in Foucault’s description of the emergence of the Modernist healthcare discourse in Birth of the Clinic (1994), where the French National Assembly wanted to create a medical system without hospitals or doctors as experts, and the exact opposite emerged.) All the players – perhaps I should use the gangsta variation, “playaz” — in the gangsta saga acted in what they thought was their best interest, and the final result appears to serve the best interests of the dominant system. As Wallerstein (2006) notes, Capitalist institutions often treat protesters by trying to crush them and, if that fails, buy them off. That is what happened with gangsta rap: When the “system” couldn’t crush it, it created a class of gangsta millionaires, who ended up serving the interests of the mainstream dominant narrative.

Yet these results were not intended. There was no conspiracy of the powerful. The key dynamic is not that power is always oppressive, as some critics have accused Foucault of believing (see, for example, Said, 1986); rather, as long as the majority has faith in the dominant narrative – that is, as long as this narrative works for them in their lives – people find ways to redirect protest antenarrative, often without intending to, in a way that continues to support the dominant narratives upon which they depend.

            So, as we’ve seen, gangsta rap began, as a protest antenarrative trying to communicate the living story that the post-WWII narrative of racial equality was failing for large portions of the African American community. Young wanted NWA to make an important statement; yet he realized that neither the Civil Rights movement nor the Black Panthers, representing a peaceful and violent approach, respectively, had been able to draw needed attention to the problems of communities such as Compton. The members of NWA shouted the message by presenting the gangsta ethic they saw destroying their communities, and did so in language that people in the mainstream couldn’t ignore. It is, I am convinced, a mistake to think that rappers such as Young, Shakur and Wallace were “glorifying” this way of life; rather, they were portraying it. They did so, at first, for two reasons. First, in their efforts to realize the American Dream, they wanted to make a lot of money, which they did. However, because those efforts so completely reflect the American Capitalist narrative, their desire to “get paid” should not tarnish the second reason, more central to this essay; that is, these icons of gangsta rap were registering a protest to the society that had allowed their communities to disintegrate. The tragedy of the gangsta saga is that each would be pulled into the life style that all three portrayed.

            Because, among other things, the image of the gangsta did combine the stereotypes of the dangerous individual and the black sex myth, the gangsta narrative excited a series of responses that had little to do with the initial intend of Young, Shakur and Wallace. Each group of participants in the saga experienced the music according to their own narratives and acted accordingly. White suburban teens turned gangsta rap into the basis for a new youth culture, not because they wanted to carry guns or protest conditions in African-American ghettos, but because this was the perfect rebellion against their Baby-boomer parents. Perhaps if gangsta had remained a black phenomenon, it would have attracted less attention. However, once it had “infected” white young people, it became too dangerous to ignore.

            The first reactions came from law enforcement, terrified at the apparent message of “F**k tha Police.” Because the law-enforcement narrative focuses on the dangers to its members, that was all police could recognize in this song. Their behavior, whether the FBI letter to NWA’s record company or the local police harassment of the group’s tour, enacted this narrative, ironically reinforcing the group’s message that police treated young blacks with extreme prejudice. It was as if NWA’s members and fans were being challenged to act in the way portrayed in their songs. Similarly, gang members, such as Los Angeles’ Crips and Bloods, seem to have assumed that gangsta rap was celebrating their dominant narrative and began attaching themselves to rap artists. As a result of both these responses, the violence inherent in gangsta rap became increasingly real.

            At the same time, the recording industry began encouraging gangsta artists. After all, the adolescent, album-buying market had decided, and lots of Benjamins were becoming available. The first important gangsta label would be Death Row Records, founded by Young and Suge Knight. According to a body of stories, Knight was one of the few authentic gangsters, in the gangsta saga (Marriott, 1999). Once Knight signed him, Shakur became an all-out gangsta, preaching the gospel of Thug Life, which he tattooed on his chest. Knight seemed to be motivated mostly by the Benjamins, as in the way he apparently aggravated the East Coast/West Coast conflict, pushing Shakur to believe that Wallace and Combs had been behind the attack on his life in 1994. Of course, Knight was hardly the only recording industry figure to take advantage of gangsta rap. Combs’ Bad Boy Records raked in millions from the works of Wallace. Moreover, recording majors, such as Time Warner, recognized that, as the musical expression of the new youth culture, gangsta rap was a gold mine for an industry that had been looking for the Next New Thing.

            Civil rights activists, such as Tucker, also experienced gangsta culture through its narrative, which emphasized the need to protect African Americans from the exploitation of powerful white interests. Deeply dependent on their version of the dominant narrative of post-WWII racial equality, they looked past the failure of that narrative in places such as Compton and Bedford Stuyvesant, the living story for which gangsta rap actually seems to be an antenarrative. After all, recognizing that failure would have demanded a more effective way of approaching the nation’s racial issues, diminishing their power and position in the community. These activists therefore needed a reading of gangsta rap that would fit in with their own narratives. Tucker would interpret the popularity of this music as a product of the racism of white record producers. “Gangsta rap,” she explained, “is a perverted form which has been encouraged by those who have always used the entertainment industry to exploit and project the negative stereotypical images to demean and depict African Americans as subhuman, which is the antithesis of what we as African American people are” (as quoted in George, 1998: 189). Such an antenarrative overlooks the contributions of black entrepreneurs, such as Knight, with Death Row Records, and Combs, with Bad Boy Records; the fact that rap artists intentionally employed these stereotypes for serious reasons; and the element of market “decision,” the way teen popularity rather than industry pressure made gangsta the phenomenon it became. Yet, while Tucker’s point of view is so clearly a distortion, it had an enormous affect in the political establishment and the press.

            Politicians were delighted at the opportunity to attack gangsta rap without having to make any of the hard choices that improving the conditions of black neighborhoods such as Compton would have entailed. Tucker, for instance, had allied herself with William Bennett, the Republican spokesman, whose moralistic attacks on gangsta rap, among other “failings” of popular culture, spoke for the religious right. Of course, Bennett would not note that it was on his watch as “Drug Czar” that crack took hold of inner-city ghettos (George, 1998). Then, in 1992, President George Bush “I” attacked gangsta rapper Ice-T’s song, “Cop Killer,” even though it actually tells of a psychopath pushed over the edge by police harassment. Not to be outdone, 60 members of Congress signed a proclamation denouncing the song, and Vice President Dan Quayle insisted it was “obscene.” It being a presidential election year, Democratic candidate Bill Clinton joined the fray, attacking rapper Sister Souljah in comments to Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition Leadership Summit for a provocative joke she made (Johnson, 1999: 288-89). When one looks at these events from the perspective provided by a storied space analysis, such political attacks seem particularly self-serving and cynical.

At the same time, these sorts of repeated attacks served to obscure the element of protest in gangsta rap, to alienate artists such as Young from this positive social function, and to push rap artists toward embracing the life style they were portraying – to strap gatz, slap hos, and shoot at each other. In short, they became the very figures that we in the mainstream love to hate . . . and fear. And the media, presented with a powerful, easy explanation of a troubling phenomenon, trumpeted these attacks until they became the dominant narrative explaining gangsta rap.

            Those readers familiar with complexity thinking will recognize this process of social self-organization as an example of a positive feedback loop (Battram, 1998), by which a cause creates the very effects that reinforce it and deepens those effects. Thus the efforts of young rappers to protest the conditions destroying their communities by portraying some of their worst consequences, especially drugs, violence and crime, excited a response that made it more likely for those artists to become more and more deeply involved with those very consequences. In turn, people in the mainstream could see them as their worst nightmares, nicely avoiding the need to do anything about the conditions that had created those nightmares.

            In this way, the act of social protest embodied in gangsta rap was driven to serve the interests of those invested in the dominant narrative. White youth used it to rebel against their parents; law enforcement officials attacked it to show their toughness; politicians exploited it to win votes; civil rights activists have abused it as an attack on black Americans, victimized once more by the powerful; record execs turned it into a “cash cow”; the most recent crop of gangsta rappers have employed its forms to make lots of money; and the media has misinterpreted it to sell papers and TV advertising. Only a few social critics, such as Dyson and George, have pointed to the living story that Young, Shakur and Wallace tried to tell. Yet until people across the society are willing to admit that the narrative of post-WWII racial equality has failed many African Americans, to reframe their antenarratives, and to re-examine this living story, no one is likely to address the conditions that gangsta rap tried to expose.

Implications

Perhaps the most surprising implication of this storied space analysis of the gangsta saga is that, in spite of all the conflict and misunderstanding, all the players in it have so much in common. They all accept the American national culture, the American Capitalism narrative, and the post-WWII narrative of racial equality. Yet their professional discourses and social positions are so different that they seem unable to listen to each other, except through the distortions of those filters. Law enforcement officials, for instance, were understandably unable to hear anything in songs such as “F**k tha Police” or “Cop Killer,” except the violence apparently aimed at them. Many civil rights activists hear these songs as attempts by the white power structure to oppress blacks by appealing to the worst racial stereotypes. Politicians act as if they heard them only as fodder for their electoral cannonades. None of this should be surprising. But it does mean that, even though most of these participants share significant goals and values, and important antenarrative communicating living story never enters the national dialogue, and our national social system is therefore less healthy.

            Developing an ability to understand the antenarratives of other from inside their storied spaces is extremely difficult and time-consuming. When I started listening to hip hop and gangsta rap, I found some of it easy to appreciate, Mathers’ early albums, for example. On the other hand, it took more than a year of listening to Wallace’s work before I understood its brilliance. I continued listening, even though I couldn’t understand, because so many of the people in the hip hop community whom I respected insisted that he was its leading artist. What is required is the kind of humility that Joseph Needham emphasizes in discussing cross-cultural understanding (note). It is also the same humility that is so difficult for senior executives in understanding that people in other parts of their organizations have very different storied spaces that are as valid as their own (Baskin, 2005). But for those with the humility to understand the storied spaces of others, the world is a richer place where the motives of those others are accessible.

Perhaps I am exaggerating the power of understanding the dynamics of storied space. Perhaps something innately complex about America’s racial problems – where a white employee of the Washington, DC government was nearly fired for using the word “niggardly,” which means “stingy” – makes the gangsta rap saga an inappropriate example of the dynamics of storied space. I don’t think so. Rather, I believe it to be a powerful illustration of the way intelligent people attempting to communicate a living story are likely to be misunderstood when that story contradicts the dominant narrative upon which others depend for their sense of well being. Especially at a time when the world is becoming more interdependent and our key challenges – whether global warming or terrorism, energy or food shortages – can only be solved through international cooperation (Baskin, 2008). People in different cultures, after all, have much less in common than the participants in the gangsta saga.

My point is that if people are to understand the challenges they face, they must be prepared to listen to the living stories bubbling up in their storied spaces, especially when those stories contradict their most cherished dominant narratives. In fact, it seems to me that if we want our families and organizations, our professions and nations to remain healthy at a time of cripplingly rapid change, we must make listening to such troubling stories a habit. That will not be easy. But the alternative is, as the saga of gangsta rap suggests, living in an ongoing crisis that no one is ever ready to face.

References

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