Hang the MC

Illustration by Sam Weber.

II. Gangsta rap, from past to present

Way back in 1988 — when hip hop still got dismissed as an American fad waiting to pass, before it became a billion-dollar industry with more foreign outposts than Western Union — a wrecking crew named NWA released Straight Outta Compton, music from and about the killing fields of South Central Los Angeles. Gangsta rap was a gathering force, localized to L.A. and other U.S. cities that had been carpet bombed with crack cocaine. (Before the arrival of NWA, Philadelphia’s Schoolly D stood a rung above the rest of gangsta’s early artists.)

“By most accounts, the cycle of violence started in Los Angeles around ’82 or ’83, but got much worse in the latter half of the ’80s. A big part of that was the switchover from revolvers to semiautomatics, which meant that a lot more bullets were being fired. That really brought up the death count,” says Rodrigo Bascuñan, co-author of the forthcoming book, Enter the Babylon System: Unpacking Gun Culture from Samuel Colt to 50 Cent, and the publisher of Pound, Canada’s largest hip-hop magazine. “It was that [switchover], in conjunction with an increase in the drug trade, in the amount of money that could be had — and therefore in the potential rewards for violence — as well as the demographic factor of there being a lot of young men with nothing to do. Everything came together at the wrong time.”

Los Angeles County became a war zone, particularly in underprivileged neighbourhoods with high unemployment rates. Of its more than 7,000 gang-related homicides between 1979 and 1994, 93 per cent of the dead were black or Hispanic — the flesh and blood of hip hop’s first nations. Two in three were gang members; the rest were what militaries call collateral damage. L.A.’s myriad gangs had formed rebel armies, fighting against each other and an outrageously corrupt police force.

This was the birthplace of NWA, or N----- With Attitude. South Central’s four corners of chaos begat their chaos on wax: Straight Outta Compton’s second song, F--- tha Police, delivered the group’s enraged response to LAPD brutality against black suspects. It was immediately controversial.

I’m a sniper with a hell of a scope
Takin’ out a cop or two, they can’t cope with me…
Without a gun and a badge, what do you got?
A sucka in a uniform waitin’ to get shot

In 1989, six months after the release of Straight Outta Compton, an assistant director of the FBI dispatched a letter to NWA’s label, Ruthless Records, expressing his Bureau’s disgust with their lyrics. The group were banned from several cities on their planned U.S. tour, and briefly detained in Detroit after chanting a few bars of F--- tha Police on stage. A protracted media freakout portrayed them as marauding sociopaths. Three years later, Straight Outta Compton could have been CNN’s soundtrack, grim atmosphere music for the channel’s helicoptered coverage of the Rodney King riots.

“NWA, being one of the first groups to report on the crack epidemic and all the violence that had happened and was happening... they shocked people,” Bascuñan says. “But if it wasn’t NWA, it was going to be somebody else. Rap being what it is, a narrative artform, someone was going to say it eventually.”

Ice-T (right) performs with Snoop Dogg in Las Vegas, Nevada in 2003. (Getty Images/Carlo Allegri)

And how. In the spring of ’92, mere weeks before the King riots, another hip-hop anti-hero matched NWA’s ante. Ice-T, an Army veteran, retired pimp and rap’s self-professed original gangster (his 6 ’N the Mornin’ predates Straight Outta Compton by a year), had taken the unusual step of fronting a heavy metal band, Body Count. Together they released Cop Killer, a thrashing attack on inner-city policing. Bursts of gunfire underscored the song’s venomous lyrics:

Cop killer, better you than me
Cop killer, f--- police brutality
Cop killer, I know your momma’s grievin’ (f--- her!)
Cop killer, but tonight we get even

The American mainstream was horrified. U.S. vice-president Dan Quayle called Cop Killer “obscene.” Sixty members of Congress signed a letter to Warner Bros., Body Count’s record label, slamming the song as “vile” and “despicable.” After an estimated 1,500 U.S. stores pulled the band’s self-titled album from their shelves, Ice-T announced that the song would be removed from all future copies. He refused an apology, though, citing his First Amendment right to free speech. “I’m singing in the first person as a character who is fed up with police brutality. I ain’t never killed no cop. I felt like it a lot of times. But I never did it,” he told reporters. “If you believe that I’m a cop killer, you believe David Bowie is an astronaut.”

Skip ahead to the present, and Ice-T still hasn’t murdered a police officer — or anyone else for that matter. He quit making records in 1999, but has compiled more than 50 acting credits. For the last five years, he has played Det. Odafin Tutuola on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. That’s right, a cop. And he’s pretty good too.

Ice Cube, NWA’s most talented MC, wrote most of the lyrics to F--- tha Police. The L.A. native was raised in relative comfort by two parents (both worked at UCLA), and took a hiatus from the group to earn a degree in architectural drafting before Straight Outta Compton came out. He quit over a financial dispute in 1989, then began an extremely lucrative (and equally controversial) solo career. In 1991, he made his acting debut as a star of John Singleton’s lauded Boyz N the Hood; the next year, his album The Predator became the first record to debut at No. 1 on the U.S. pop and R&B charts. Cube taught himself how to smile sometime in the mid-’90s — his NWA-era scowl could have been trademarked — and returned to Hollywood to star in movies like Three Kings, Barbershop and, just last year, the family comedy Are We There Yet? He is a married father of four.

Actor/rapper Ice Cube. (Getty Images/Carlo Allegri)

My point? Ice Cube and Ice-T are millionaires — intelligent, articulate storytellers who spun tales of ghetto nightmares, real or imagined, into lives of limousined luxury. Straight Outta Compton went double platinum; Ice-T sold truckloads of records during his career. The sagas of F--- tha Police and Cop Killer taught their musical descendents that songs about drug deals, gunshots and gang affiliations could pave a quick path to prosperity. A procession of gangsta superstars rose in their wake: Snoop Doggy Dogg, the long-bodied Crip with the inimitable drawl; Tupac Shakur, the poet son of a Black Panther who was murdered in a 1996 drive-by; the Notorious B.I.G., Tupac’s archrival in the mid-’90s’ infamous East Coast-West Coast rap wars, himself gunned down in similar circumstances six months after Shakur’s death.

Gangsta rap died with the unsolved murders of Biggie and Tupac. Sean “Diddy” Combs (known as “Puff Daddy” at the time) recast B.I.G.’s former home, New York City’s Bad Boy Records, as a temple of materialism. The battle-hardened blasts of B.I.G.’s Somebody’s Got To Die and Ten Crack Commandments gave way to Puffy’s gurgles on It’s All About the Benjamins and Been Around the World. Almost overnight, spending money at the jewelry store became U.S. rap’s central narrative. Combs — and Southern mogul Master P, who was equally obsessed with making cash money hand over fist — had a string of late-’90s hits, each album more vapid than the last. Their bling dynasty held to the turn of the century, until being overwhelmed by a new wave of hardcore that was led by Eminem.

Nowadays, gangsta’s back. Its banner is carried by the likes of Young Jeezy, aka the Snowman, whose 2005 album Let’s Get It: Thug Motivation 101 is basically a blueprint for selling cocaine; Cam’ron, who was recently shot through both arms during an attempted carjacking of his Lamborghini, and has refused to cooperate with a police search for his attackers; and, as capo of the whole scene, Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson III.

“The thing about 50 is, smart man, been through a lot, coming out of the ghetto, trying to live the American dream, trying to get everything that he never had — he created a character and a space was opened by the media for him to exist as that character,” says Sol Guy, a former Bad Boy employee who is a major player behind the scenes of Canadian hip hop. (The Vancouver native has managed the careers of homegrown stars the Rascalz, Kardinal Offishall, K-Os and K’naan.) “At some point [50] had to look at that and ask himself, ‘Oh, so what do you want from me? Do you want me with my shirt off, super buff, black, black man with a gun in my waist? If you want that, if you want me to instill that fear and be that stereotypical angry black man, cool. I’ma give it to you 100-fold. I’m gonna influence all your kids, I’m gonna make hundreds of millions of dollars and I’m gonna be like f--- you, and take care of my crew.’”

Many gangsta MCs, 50 included, have real-life experience with the grisly narratives described by their music. Others are outsiders who become enamoured with gangsta culture. Tupac, for one, had no criminal record before becoming a famous rapper. Life on the wild side changed him. In 1993, he got into a gunfight with two off-duty, intoxicated police officers. (Shakur shot one cop in the leg and the other in the buttocks; criminal charges were filed against him, but later dismissed.) In 1995, he was convicted of sodomizing a female fan. A glaring question arises: If rappers can trip across the line to criminality, what stops the fans who emulate them from doing the same?

“Who are you, who is the character you created, who does society want you to be, and how much do you start becoming that thing?” Guy asks. “If you start carrying guns, that manifests certain things. If I walk around with a gun in my pocket, some s--- is going to come around me eventually. If I don’t, I still might get shot, but damn, that’s just some bad luck. You know what I mean? But if you pack guns, and you walk around and espouse violence and posture, then I believe these things will come to you. It’s magnetic.”

Matthew McKinnon writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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