Whatever You Say I Am_ The Life and Times of Eminem - Anthony Bozza [67]
“There is certainly innocent hip-hop and then there’s gangsta—and there’s a whole range of expression included there,” says author Shelby Steele. “Gangsta rap has something to do with the fracturing of the black family that began to be very serious in the seventies and eighties and has continued. It has something to do with the attitudes, it has something to do with life in the underclass. There seems to be a painful alienation there, between men and women, individuals and society. It’s an anti-innocent culture. It does not allow for innocent expressions of love back and forth, you know, the way Motown did with all the ‘ooh baby baby.’ It suggests that innocence will get you hurt, get you wounded. So it seems to me to be in many ways emotionally defensive, and there’s an undercurrent of alienation. You have to remember that seventy percent of black kids are illegitimate. Black women get married at half the rate of white women, and get divorced at twice the rate of white women. That suggests an adolescence that is much, much more alienated than the one I knew. To me it’s ridiculous to criticize hip-hop because it is an outgrowth of a very real change in the culture. It’s just telling us what is there, whether we like it or not, and it’s not a very attractive picture.”
The deaths of the Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac Shakur brought another picture into focus: the side effects of mythologizing thug life and death. Their murders marked the decline of gangsta rap: Dr. Dre had left Death Row Records to form his own label, Aftermath Entertainment, in 1996, and Suge Knight’s criminal management tactics landed him in jail. Countless rappers have borrowed from 2Pac and the Notorious B.I.G.; many, such as Ja Rule, profited more, as Eminem says in “Marshall Mathers” on The Marshall Mathers LP, and have all of the dollars that belong to Biggie and 2Pac, as if they had switched wallets. Violence, gunplay, and the drug game never disappeared from rap, but the flagrant celebration of it took a backseat as if rappers learned from 2Pac and Biggie that boasting could turn bloody and lyrically obsessing about your death could deliver it to your door. At the same time other hardcore rappers were eager to fill the void, they were also careful not to follow in Biggie’s and 2Pac’s footsteps too closely.
Toward the end of the century, the Wu-Tang Clan, DMX, and Jay-Z took the helm of what came next: a diverse range of hardcore rap view points—from the Five-Percent-Nation-of-Islam-inflected, martial arts- and mathematics-obsessed rap of the Wu-Tang Clan to the spiritual gangster tales of DMX. The upside of gangsta rap—high living—became the focus, mythologized and exaggerated as guns and murder had been. On MTV and BET, for all intents and purposes the strongest outlets for nonurban youth to access popular culture, the hedonistic spoils of the game were celebrated to the fullest. Gangsta became synonymous with ostentatious consumption, the be-all and end-all of rap life. Violence, guns, and death were never far behind, in lyrics and reality, but it was as if rappers chose to accentuate the positive and reiterate what it was all for: the money. A display of power was no longer made by a street soldier’s lyrical cold-blooded killing, it was asserted through boasts of popularity, wealth, and style befitting a kingpin. Puff Daddy epitomized the new gangsta, who preferred to be tough only in reputation, while dressing, rapping, and playing