The Decline of Gangsta Rap

Now what do Black people have to protest?

Black people love music. They have excelled at numerous forms of music,from jazz to disco, pop and finally to rap music. It is one of themajor contributions that they have made to the world, and through thismedium they have assimilated themselves to millions of white people whonormally would have nothing to do with them.

Rap music in particular, owes its main-stream success to the integration of the gangsta-rapgenre with the listening habits of suburban white people, particularlywhite males whose only exposure to Black people came from listening togangsta – rap in the early late 1980s and early 1990s.

Another gangsta rapper, similarly named after solidified water, Ice Cube, was part of Niggaz With Attitude (NWA), a hardcore gangsta rap outfit from Compton, that took the world by storm in the late 80s, forever changing the listening habits of white people with it:

“N.W.A released Straight Outta Compton in 1988. With its famous opening salvo of three songs, the group reflected the rising anger of the urban youth. “Straight Outta Compton” introduced the group; “Fuck tha Police” protested police brutality and racial profiling, and “Gangsta Gangsta” painted the worldview of the inner-city youth. While the group was later credited with pioneering the burgeoning sub genre of gangsta rap, N.W.A in fact referred to their music as “reality rap”.”

Butas gangsta rap slowly invaded the white suburbs, it had to move awayfrom the hardcore, cop-killing image it had created. Thus, the Trojanhorse for gangsta rap and Black people invading white people’s cassettetapes and CD players: Vanilla Ice.

Yes, he got white kids listening to rap, but it was a Faustian Pact forgangsta rappers: he was a white rapper that parents found tolerable,yet a white rapper that Black audiences found unimaginably intolerable.He was a mortal blow to gangsta rap that the genre may never recoverfrom.

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2009-08-14