Media-Transmitted African-American Attitudes
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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.