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Popular Culture Review
capacity of understanding Ice-T’s opinion outside of the discussion about the
existence of “rap-related” violence, Ice-T repeatedly suggests the necessity for
mainstream America to hear the messages and warnings rap musicians deliver.
Interestingly, both of them authenticate the content of rap music and
indicate its reality in terms of the uprisings that actually happened in the material
world. To do so. Gross tries to contain the signs contributing to rap's narrative—as
seen in a phrase from Ice-T's “Cop Killer”: “fuck the police for Rodney King”—
her notion of violence within a categorical social injustice. On the other hand, IceT proclaims the “hard-core” of his rap, that is, the empirical basis that provides its
message with informational validity. He also explains a legitimate cause of
retaliation. Implied in this remark is rap music’s raison d'etre, which is now
regrettably supposed, by many critics and rappers, to be largely lost due to the
mass mediation and commercialization of the rap industry. Therefore, the tension
between the white journalist’s criminalization and the rapper’s coarse expression
of his social concern for the inner city ultimately enters into the question of how
one appraises the empirical authenticity of rap music.
The expectation of authenticity in rap’s message informs debates over
what is truly political and what is hypocritical in the hip-hop culture. According to
one camp, market forces have diverted the artists' creative motive in order to
compromise with the mass audience’s taste. For example, Marvin Gladney writes,
“Works of the Black Arts era and hip-hop both provide a distinct and conscious
connection between artistic expression and the frustration of Black people existing
here in America, and indeed in the world” (293). He argues that this aesthetics,
crystallizing through the experience of Black resentment, does not simply mean to
“draw pictures of the urban blight, but seek[s] instead to stimulate thought and
discussion concerning the issues raised in the music” (292). In addition, Rose’s
observation, which basically shares the same commercialism/ authenticity
dichotom y, further pinpoints the way in which the mass m ediation and
commercialism of rap music has cause the gap between the media’s stereotyping
of rap as criminal and the rapper’s original socio-political purpose, as demonstrated
in Gross’s interview with Ice-T:
To participate in and try to manipulate the terms of massmediated culture is a double-edged sword that cuts both ways—
it provides communication channels within and among largely
disparate groups and requires compromise that often affirms
the very structures much of rap’s philosophy seems determined
to Lindennine. (Rose 17)^
The loss of rap’s “authenticity” might be simultaneous with its commercial success