Popular Culture Review Vol. 11, No. 2, Summer 2000 | Page 53

Media-Transmitted African-American Attitudes 49 solely on the postmodern mass media to subvert the existing power relationship, the central issue tends inevitably to be the deconstruction of identity—as either authentic or hypocritical. Ice-T’s intentional authentication of his identity suggests that the question of identity haunts the site of rap music creation based on the massive exposure of black culture in the postmodern culture industry. Insofar as the image of African Americans is articulated with violence, the limitation of Gangsta Rap’s resistance becomes inevitable: its paradoxical self-image generates a certain identity-effect. The asymmetry of power between the disciplinary institutions and black youth invalidates a rapper’s perfonnative commitment to the process in which the black identity-effect ciystallizes itself in the media. If one tries to rely on the postmodern mass media to subvert the existing power relationship, her/his central objective should be to disclose the constructedness of identity, which ultimately allows her/ him to control the process of its construction. The blindspot of the rapper’s postmodern manipulation of African-American images is, however, the fact that their image itself is a cultural capital not equally distributed. In this context, NAACP’s opposition to Gangsta Rap seems to be based on their anxiety about its possibility of creating subaltern subjects silenced by both the mainstream culture and the visible counter-cultures, in addition to the possibility of the hegemonic cultural gate keeper’s distortion of rappers’ messages. The mass media have a strong potential to be the most powerful agents of intellectual colonialism, due to their ability to acquire, (re)produce, classify, and circulate knowledge. Rap music, on the other hand, exemplifies the present-day contestation over the validity of knowledges and representations between a cultural agent and the mass media. Rappers’ fighting words—generally perceived as violent—coincide with the intensity of both physical and symbolic violence the dominant society has inflicted on the inner-city culture. The metaphors ‘'Black CNN” and “under ground reportage” state clearly that rap music itself is the network of the counter-interpretations of social institutions in the periphery of modernity. However, the mainstream media’s cannibalization of rap’s message into “sex and violence” exclusively has unavoidably diversified some rappers’ goals. The contradiction between authentic and commercial rap then seems to be an expression of a tension that hip-hop, as today’s major cultural force, inescapably has to face. In 1997, the San Francisco-based rap group. Spearhead released a record entitled Chocolate Siipa Highway. In its liner notes, the lead vocalist Michael Franti writes: “The Chocolate Supa Highway is the other side of the information superhighway....Hip-hop is our world-wide internet.” The older metaphor echoes in Franti’s. The imagery resonating in the metaphor, furthermore.