Black British cultural studies and the rap on gangsta.

The term gangsta rap started to gain currency in 1989. Its first American broadsheet appearance was in the Los Angeles Times (Hilburn 1989), when the controversial single "Gangsta, Gangsta" by N.W.A. (Niggaz with Attitude) was in Billboard's Hot Rap Singles chart. (1) The new coinage denoted a fresh and provocative rap sound--a cocktail of bass-driven and usually minor-key tracks, heightened first-person street gang rhymes, irreverent and humorous stories, and antiestablishment social commentary on deindustrialized black life--created by a cluster of rap artists chiefly in the Los Angeles region. The genre tag stuck, and by the early 1990s, this most controversial strain of hip-hop was fast becoming the market leader.

At the same moment that gangsta rap began to make an impression with audiences and critics, debates were heating up in the field of black cultural studies. Across the Atlantic in England, Stuart Hall proclaimed "the end of the innocent notion of the essential black subject" in a 1989 conference paper and article entitled "New Ethnicities"--a controversial statement that was to take on manifesto resonances. Along with other notable scholars, Hall (1996c, 443-444) identified "a significant shift in black cultural politics": a shift away from the essentialist strategies of replacing "their" bad forms with "our" good ones and toward the "new phase," which was concerned with "the struggle around strategic positionalities." He characterized the shift as a move away from focusing on the "relations of representation" (a dualistic approach to cultural politics: Is it good or bad? authentic or not?) and toward a concern with the "politics of representation." This view entailed looking behind the relations of individual media representations and self-representations of blackness in order to explore the wider determinants and deeper structures that shape the black popular-culture terrain and that frame and inform the practice of both culture workers and critics.

Hall's pronouncement of a new phase was in fact as much prescriptive as descriptive. In 1992, he provided an extended version of this challenging critique, revised this time for the U.S. intellectual arena. He delivered the paper "What Is This `Black' in Black Popular Culture?" at a New York conference, and this paper was positioned as a kind of keynote article (before those of Henry Louis Gates and Cornel West) in the influential conference collection Black Popular Culture (Dent 1992). Hall's address conveys a note of critical exuberance and intellectual mission: "[B]lack popular culture ... can never be simplified or explained in terms of the simple binary oppositions that are still habitually used to map it out: high and low; resistance versus incorporation; authentic versus inauthentic; experiential versus formal; opposition versus homogenization" (Hall 1992, 26).

Although simplified for rhetorical effect, Hall's description of "still habitually used" binaries were perhaps nowhere more apparent than in much of gangsta rap's reception. The polemical critical climate, the provocative and, to many, offensive nature of gangsta rap, and the high stakes resulting from the music's close connection to an impoverished lived experience all contributed to the emergence of a variety of totalizing judgmental responses. The subgenre was frequently cast as incorporated and inauthentic (gangsta rappers as cultural dupes, as "slaves to the system," as neo-blackface minstrels). Alternatively, critics read it as resistant and authentic (gangsta as a black, proletarian voicing, as antipolice, antihegemonic protest). Very often, and in line with longstanding trends in the criticism of black cultural forms, critics understood gangsta rap as experiential rather than formal, construing gangsta as social realism (reflecting the grim realities of the so-called black experience) and at the same time as formally basic, as musically debased, and as aesthetically unworthy of close attention. Some others reacted to this orthodoxy by inverting its logic; they explored and valorized rap's formal complexity in text-driven work that paid little or no attention to the social relations of its production or consumption. Depending on the texts and contexts invoked, all these positions were understandable and sometimes even persuasive. However, such responses were also symptomatic: gangsta rap was precisely the sort of black cultural form that elicited, and even provoked, categorical and charged evaluations.

This theoretical encounter is worth revisiting because it sets up the conceptual staging ground and provides the analytic tools for the approaches to gangsta adopted in this article. Collectively, Hall, Paul Gilroy (1987; 1992), Kobena Mercer (1988; 1994), and other British scholars--along with many U.S. intellectuals who variously informed, concurred, and collaborated with them, including George Lipsitz (1990, 621-622), Wahneema Lubiano (1991), Gina Dent (1992, 1-20), Henry Louis Gates (1988; 1992), Houston Baker (1993), and Cornel West (1990), who attested to "the new cultural politics of difference" in an article foregrounding Hall and Mercer's ideas--helped shift debate toward more complex notions of identity formation, commercial representation, and cultural resistance and incorporation. Crucial and impassioned debates about the uses of theory for the field of black cultural politics were most fully engaged during the few years around the turn of the 1990s. In particular, scholars identified the dangers that theory posed for the more materialist, humanist, and oppositional strands of race scholarship and subsequently arrived at workable compromises. Thus, as many scholars have since acknowledged (Gray 1995, 49; Baker, Diawara, and Lindeborg 1996), these interventions--which coincided with gangsta rap's emergence--had a profound impact on what represented an appropriate topic of study and on what one could say and what positions one could take up in black cultural debates.

What continues to be interesting is not that these scholars took issue with binary, judgmental approaches but that they tried to understand and explore such positions and their politics of intellectual representation. Particularly pertinent for this article, they analyzed the idea of the "burden of racial representation," which underwrote much of the charged position taking. In what follows, I revisit these ideas about representational burdens before showing how these same discourses were critically engaged in the contemporaneous street-smart rhymes of gangsta rap. I focus in detail on N.W.A.'s 1991 track "Niggaz 4 Life." My choice of this example is due in part to the cultural and industrial importance of the album Efil4zaggin ("niggaz41ife" spelled backward), on which it is the title track. This album generated unprecedented sales, as well as great interest and controversy, marking a turning point in the gangsta production trend. My choice is also guided by the outstanding and exemplary properties of the track itself: in its discursive elaboration, it captures in crystallized form many of the representational concerns prevalent in early gangsta rap. (2) In cultural, social, and industrial terms, the time period from N.W.A.'s "Gangsta, Gangsta" to Efil4zaggin was of crucial importance in the emergence and consolidation of the gangsta subgenre.

Thus, this article focuses on three central objectives: first, to historicize and examine aspects of black critical debates and gangsta rap around the turn of the 1990s, suggesting that some of the same broad social and political circumstances informed both critical and artistic "theorizing"; second, to suggest specifically that early gangsta rhymes display a remarkable critical awareness about representational burdens and the operations of cultural power (which allows us to draw out connections between the preoccupations of artists and intellectuals); finally, to argue that British cultural studies--applied retrospectively and stripped of its polemical charge--provides part of the basis for a workable framework for gangsta criticism (which ultimately insists on the partial disconnection of academic and popular spheres).