Media-Transmitted African-American Attitudes
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rappers who began to organize social movements— including STV (Stop the
Violence Movement) and HEAL (The Human Education against Lies rap
coalition)—promoting an awareness of the negative image of black youth, as a
result of their sensitive response to the media coverage. Yet at the same time, Baker
states, ‘Mt is also time to ‘fight the power’ as Public Enemy knows—the power of
media control. In their classic rap ‘Don’t Believe the Hype,’ PE indicates that
prime-time media is afraid of rap’s message, considering it both offensive and
dangerous” (59, 93).^
This vein of argument on Gangsta Rap indicates that the issue of mimesis
and origin in the age of hyperreality complicates rap’s goal of social critique. Since
the rap lyrics are the source through which the media locate the destructive sex and
violence of the inner-city culture, their paranoid fear that the textual will incite the
actual suggests an interesting mimetic inversion. In classical literary theory, the
world and literary production are assumed to be hierarchically ordered. According
to Aristotle’s Poetics, “[t]ragedy is essentially an imitation...of action and life”
(1450a). In contrast, according to the media’s world view, social life will imitate
the rapper’s literary production. This mimetic inversion manifests what Marx calls
ideology, in which “men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera
obscLira” (47). In the context of these classical and early modern materialist world
views, the locus of rap music, intersected by the media and late-capital commercial
culture, becomes clear. If postmodernity can partly be attributed to the dissolution
of the categories of text and life, the rap “phenomenon” is certainly postmodern.
Hyperreality and the Question of Authenticity
In an interview with Terry Gross discussing the L.A. uprisings of 1992,
Ice-T states that he somehow predicted the occurrence and that the messages
inscribed in his records reflect his prediction. Ice-T replies to a question by Gross,
who defines his style as “intlammatory lyrics” in order to establish a discursive
link between rap music and the catastrophic visual image of “his [Ice-T’s]
neighborhood go[ing] up in flames”:
1 know it was going to happen sooner or later and I’m not
surprised at all. {...} See the problem with this is, America was
not prepared for so many people to be so angry....My attitude
is, if you weren’t prepared for this...then it’s your fault. (126)
Both Gross’s and Ice-T’s emphasis on his South Central origins suggest the premise
that rap lyrics represent the sense of exclusion and exploitation that the inner-city
residents feel in their everyday lives. The connotations implicit in each of their
discourses are, nevertheless, very different. While Gross does not try to extend her