Black fathers were going M.I.A., guns were flooding the streets, and crackheads were multiplying. It was 1986-the year Schoolly D birthed the genre with his single “PSK (What Does It Mean?)”-and the old order of Afro-America was coming apart. There in front of the store where I frequently leafed through copies of X-Men, I met gangsta rap in its most tangible form. Some 17 years ago, I was ambling past a local 7-Eleven on my way home from school. the Notorious B.I.G., “Things Done Changed” Step away with your fistfight ways/Muthafucka this ain’t back in the days. And yet still it lumbers across the landscape of pop, shouting “I’m Real.” Gangsta rap today is about as reflective of reality as, well, a reality show. But still it lingers, fueled by America’s myth of the menacing black man. For that reason alone, gangsta rap should be dead by now. The streets that gangsta rappers claim as their source are no longer as angry as they are sad. Mundane afflictions like unpaid child support and industrial flight have once again come to the fore. The way of the gun still takes its toll, but Saigon has been pacified.
GENIUS GANGSTA RAP MADE ME DO IT CRACK
Crack is played, and so, apparently, is fratricide-murder rates in the black community have been dropping since the mid ’90s. Their narrative no longer rings with the romance of a Nino Brown. The crash is complete, and in any black community you can find the rubble-uneducated, unemployable young black men. If Motown and Stax were the joyful noise of us unshackling ourselves into the dream (“Are you ready for a brand-new beat?”), gangsta rap was the sound of us crashing back into the desert of the real (“Life ain’t nothin’ but bitches and money”). The Harlem Renaissance drew its power from the optimism of the New Negro, the Black Arts movement pulled from Black Power, gangsta rap tapped the crack age. Drug dealing was becoming a legitimate, if deadly, life option, and with it came an arms race that turned Anyghetto, U.S.A., into Saigon. In the late ’80s, young black men-gangsta rap’s creators, and its primary constituency-became their own worst enemies. Now it mythicizes a past that would fade away much faster without it. Gangsta could once fairly claim to reflect a brutal present.
But millennial black America is hardly the Wild West scene it was during gangsta rap’s prime. Of course, drugs are still a plague on America’s house, and America’s gun violence is a black mark on the developed world. The sobering fact is that the streets as 50 presents them, brimming with shoot-outs and crack fiends, do not exist. Like all nostalgia, neo-gangsta is stuck in history rather than rooted in current reality. Imagine-articulate young black men pining for the heyday of black-on-black crime. At its core the hubbub around Get Rich and the return of gangsta rap is crack-era nostalgia taken to the extreme. Add in 50’s work history in the narcotics trade and his random swipes at supposed wanksta Ja Rule and you have the makings of the most legitimate gangsta rapper since Jay-Z.īut not much more. All that concerns him is your (preferably violent) downfall.
50 could care less about what whip you’re pushing or the cut of your Armani. To its credit, the album turns down the bling factor considerably. Get Rich has been hyped as the most realistic representation of the ghetto since the heyday of Biggie. Now the banners are unfurling: “2003: the year hip-hop returned to the streets.” You can thank 50 for that. Who knew nine bullet holes could be such a boon? On the cover of Rolling Stone, he posed with his back to the camera, exposing one of his wounds. Even critics have bought into the mystique-review after review of 50’s Get Rich or Die Tryin’ cites his battle scars as evidence of his true-to-life depiction of the streets. The attempts on his life come up repeatedly in interviews, and 50 is happy to provide embellishment. His handlers have played the angle magnificently. The promotion of 50 Cent from bootleg king to god of the streets was PR genius. Yeah, they want reality, but you will hear none/They’d rather exaggerate a little fiction.
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