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).

Black Cultural Studies and the "Burden of Representation"

The notion of a burden of representation is, of course, nothing new to African-American social thought. The idea of attaining social and economic equality by means of cultural achievement has had a long and venerable history, mounting a two-pronged challenge to dominant discriminatory and racist assumptions. Cultural achievement helped verify and affirm black artistic and intellectual capability and prowess. At the same time, in the depiction of black life, sensibility, and aesthetics, cultural forms have long worked to disrupt the incapacitating regimes of dominant stereotypical representation, fostering instead a powerful sense of group allegiance, social awareness, and "myth, ritual, and cultural memory" (Floyd 1995, 276). Because black Americans, of all racially subordinated groups, have achieved the most in the cultural sphere while at the same time being the most relentlessly typecast in dominant image repertoires, discourses about representational responsibility have accrued an arresting importance. As Henry Louis Gates (1992, 82) has remarked, the "Responsibilities of the Negro Artist" is "one of the oldest debates in the history of African-American letters." James Baldwin (1968, 56) first used the actual term burden of representation in a 1968 press article about black Hollywood superstar Sidney Poitier, whose "ebony prince" roles provided perhaps the pinnacle of what Kobena Mercer (1994, 91-92, 214) has called the "positive image canon."

However, unlike Hollywood film, with its history of black misrepresentation and underrepresentation, music is the sphere of black cultural preeminence--the sphere in which, among other things, black people have historically created and wielded powerful self and group representations. Rhythm and blues music, to take the obvious example, provided the soundtrack for the most effective civil rights campaign in U.S. history, helping to forge a sense of community, protest, and pride. In light of this exalted tradition, a deep sense of responsibility has been vested in the "race musician," as Cornel West (1993, 289) explains: "Since black musicians play such an important role in African American life, they have a special mission and responsibility: to present beautiful music which both sustains and motivates black people and provides visions of what black people should aspire to."

If West's pronouncement expresses some of the representational freight borne by black artists, it also gives in its normative, interventionary tone an indication of the pressures on the black critic and scholar--particularly the much-discussed "black public intellectual" (see, for instance, Michael 2000, 23-43). And this was the central point of contention for Hall, Isaac Julien, and Mercer. Notwithstanding pointed differences in their critical positions, all were interested in drawing attention to the representative roles or discursive burdens of black critics: those that are imposed on black and other minority scholars; those that they readily take on; and those that they in turn impose on black cultural producers and other critics. Taking the lead, Stuart Hall (1996a, 262-263) readily laid out "the many burdens of representation" that he bears. "I carry around at least three," including being expected to speak "for the entire black race on all questions theoretical, critical, etc." Yet, in case the notion of the burden of representation starts to seem essentially, even overbearingly racial, the other two burdens that he names are speaking as delegate for British cultural studies and sometimes even for British politics. Hall rightly extends the application of this discourse beyond the race-line. However, black representation remains the primary and necessary focus here, for, as Michael Omi and Howard Winant (1994) have demonstrated, "race thinking" and racial meanings continue to suffuse everyday American life.

In the influential article "De Margin and de Centre," Julien and Mercer (1996, 454) explain that Hall's "argument that current shifts demand the recognition of the `end of the innocent notion of the essential black subject' enables us to analyse and unpack the burden of racial representation." Developing a distinction first proposed by Paul Gilroy (1988), Julien and Mercer broke this racial burden into two types of representation. First, the idea of "representation as depiction" expresses the idea that black culture should reflect "how life really is out there," culture as social realism. This "reflectionist" idea recalls, above all, the discourse of authenticity: how accurately, genuinely, or effectively does a given song depict black lived experience? Second, "representation as an act of delegation" expresses the idea that to speak for "the black community" is to speak as, and assume the responsibilities of, a delegate (Julien and Mercer 1996, 450-452). This kind of representative status (expressed by West) leads to calls for respectable and uplifting images of black life, produced by responsible race delegates. It pertains to the "social engineering" role of culture, of providing positive images for the good of society and/or in the interests of a particular group. Overall, the two discourses can be dubbed as authenticity (representation as depiction) and uplift (representation as delegation).

A central question motivating this debate was whether, by the turn of the 1990s, the strategy of racial uplift and the discourse of black authenticity had much explanatory force, or whether they had become disabling cultural-political strategies. In particular, Julien and Mercer launched a polemical critique of what they called "the logical impasse of the positive/negative image polarity" (456). Citing The Cosby Show as an example, they contended, in a now-familiar argument, that positive images of black life could serve neoconservative ends (see Gray 1995, 80-84).

Despite the force of this critique, there was understandably a strong and ongoing moral and rhetorical investment in the idea of representation as uplift. Momentous battles have, after all, been won with its help. The questions may be, therefore, why so many U.S. scholars were receptive to the ideas of these British intellectuals, who arrived on the scene with their spirited rebuttals of certain orthodoxies in black social thought. Why countenance and even embrace the ideas of outsiders, who had experienced very different conditions of racial identity and racial exclusion? Where were these scholars coming from that made it possible for them to present these kinds of arguments, and what were the contexts of reception that rendered their message palatable to U.S. intellectuals?

Understanding from where they came requires an examination of the founding principles of cultural studies: a combination of structuralist theories, culturalist principles, and Marxist roots. First, by the late 1980s, the deep influence of structuralist ideas in British cultural studies had allowed scholars to develop a complex understanding of cultural systems and of the structures that frame and enable the production of meaning. This provided an important corrective to the liberal humanist, individualist tendencies in traditional American culture criticism (see Lipsitz 1990; Giles 1994). At the same time, the culturalism of the discipline's founding ideas insisted on democratizing the idea of culture and on the ability of individuals to shape their own lives. This commitment to individual agency (if always tempered by historical circumstance) guarded against some of the more pessimistic and mechanistic impulses of cultural theory, necessitating serious engagement with the context-specific practices of people. Again, this provided a new impetus in the United States. According to Hall (1992, 24), "There is a kind of `nothing ever changes, the system always wins' attitude, which I read as the cynical protective shell that, I'm sorry to say, American cultural critics frequently wear, a shell that sometimes prevents them from developing cultural strategies that can make a difference." Finally, British cultural studies had its philosophical and political roots in Marxism. It had developed a "critical" Marxism (Hall 1986), broadly based on Gramscian ideas, which (if far less materialist than classical Marxism) helped to ground the field's theoretical flights in material conditions and which placed issues of inequality and oppression (originally class-based but then reworked to tackle race, gender, colonialism, and so forth) squarely on the agenda. This material grounding cohered with the oppositional strands of African-American studies. Overall, the combination of theoretical nuance, a commitment to the everyday, and strong political objectives made for a persuasive and productive mixture.

From cultural studies' political agenda developed an urgent need for fresh strategies and approaches that could critically engage what Hall and others writing for Marxism Today called the "new times." Broadly dating to the rise of Thatcherism in Britain and Reaganism in the United States around the turn of the 1980s, the "new times" had produced new social formations in which traditional political allegiances and group solidarities along class and race lines were breaking up (Hall and Jacques 1990). These neo-Marxist scholars identified a defensive pessimism in leftist and oppositional criticism in response to the rightward realignment and argued that racial as well as class formations needed to be reconceptualized. African-American scholars may well have been receptive to this thinking because it marked out new social terrain on which oppositional critics needed to argue if they were not to be politically marginalized. Such approaches sought new kinds of theoretical ammunition to counter the ascendancy of the conservatives (Omi and Winant 1994, viii). This wider Anglo-American context helped drive the shift away from the relations and toward the politics of representation.

"Why do I call myself a `nigga' you ask me?"

Although the scholarly debates that I have outlined may appear rarefied, they are not essentially divorced from the critical negotiations that circulate in and around gangsta rap itself. Indeed, these burdens of racial representation permeated gangsta; they were thrust on gangsta rappers by their fans, by their voluble critics, and even by themselves. Furthermore, I contend that the rappers were acutely aware of these discourses. First, they mobilized the authenticity discourse (representation as depiction) to an unprecedented degree, in order to give expressive shape to materially grounded conditions, experiences, and desires and at the same time to fuel and feed the vast appetite for "black ghetto realness" in the popular-culture marketplace. Second, they reneged on the contract to act as delegates, self-consciously repudiating uplifting images of black life in a gesture of rebellion and dissent. Through cultural transmitters such as news media and television and radio talk shows, through the work of other rappers, and through the local public sphere, censorial and angry reactions from the black community and beyond were fed back to gangsta artists. From a very early stage in the subgenre, these artists built this perception into their music and star images in complex ways.

Close engagement with an exemplary case study readily illustrates how gangsta rap of this period was informed by and in turn critically engaged these profound cultural questions and representational problematics. In reaching number one on the Billboard Top Pop Albums chart in its second week of release, Efil4zaggin marked the moment of gangsta's emergence as rap market leader and music-industry powerhouse. Only four rap albums had previously hit the number-one spot--two by party rappers, Tone Loc and MC Hammer, and two by white rappers, Beastie Boys and Vanilla Ice. Unlike any of these much more mainstream acts, N.W.A. reached the top without the aid of a single or MTV video (Grein 1991b). Thus, with N.W.A.'s chart-topping success, "hardcore" went mainstream. Although much of gangsta rap provides intimations of and momentary insights into its own politics of representation, certain tracks present far more fully developed accounts. "Niggaz 4 Life" is one such track, offering an intriguing, if convoluted, commentary on the contexts of gangsta's encoding and decoding that folds these competing contexts into its playful and provocative rhymes. The refrain of the track--"Why do I call myself a `nigga,' you ask me?"--opens each verse, rapped by group members Dr Dre, Eazy E, and MC Ren. The track offers a complex and reflexive take on the personas adopted in gangsta music and artists' publicity images, all of which coalesce around the charged and multivalent term nigga.

Most conspicuously, the track incorporates an awareness of its detractors' views with an opening montage of audience reactions. These over lapping samples present male and female, educated and noneducated, and old and young voices from the black community:

   "Why you brothas and sistas using the word `nigga'?' "Don't you know it's
   bringin down the black race?" "`Nigga, nigga nigga'--that's all I hear you
   muthafuckas talkin bout." "Personally, I think the lyrics are a bit too
   harsh." "I ain't no `nigga,' fuck that shit." "The way you talk about women
   is bullshit, plain bullshit." "What you muthafuckas doing for the black
   community any way?" "Muthafucka, I've got kids. I don't want them listening
   to that bullshit." "How can you call yourself a `nigga' and be proud of
   it?"

This opening is a "calling forth" of the burden of representation--an invocation intensified by the pensive, minor-key background notes and the sound of a monitored heartbeat as it descends into flatline. It charges N.W.A. with breaking the proverbial contract to act as delegate for the black community. After this overture draws to a grim and thought-provoking close, the rappers burst in with their vivid rejoinders, accompanied by the tautly produced backing track, driven by a playful piano riff and momentous bass. The second-person address ("you ask me") of the song's key refrain is N.W.A.'s response to the representative critiques of the black community.

Incorporating critics into the music through sampling and spoofs is a commonly used rap device--especially in gangsta rap, precisely because it has received so much criticism. Why include such sound bites of black public disapproval and mainstream remonstration? Above all, they make the music topical, subcultural, and rebellious--all of those features that provide subcultural self-definition and credibility. The sampling of critics installs a dramatic backdrop, enhancing the vivid storytelling by providing bold relief for the controversial personas these artists adopt. By incorporating such views, gangsta rappers anticipate critical position taking, thereby preempting the authority and depleting the rhetorical force of gangsta antagonists. In the case of the sampling in "Niggaz 4 Life," the wry critique rests in part on the inclusion of numerous expletives: the "bad language" of many of their detractors implies hypocrisy. In setting up implied listening communities, rappers enact and rework on their own terms the circuits of pop-cultural mediation and transmission. The sound bites (which include some defensible, reasonable objections to gangsta) set up a sounding board of the black public sphere, setting the stage and providing the motive for the ensuing rhymes, which take the form of a series of justifications. If nothing else, the track indicates that the racial burden of representation is alive and well in contemporary black culture.

So what does nigga signify? The word has received much critical attention: linguists and ethnographers have explored the history of its usage; many have understood its black use as a reflection of negative self-image and internalized oppression (proponents of the "uplift" school denounce the term's use by black people); poststructuralists have explored the sign's vernacular reclamation by African Americans, which subverts conventional spelling and racist meanings. More recently, scholars have provided social and historical context for the term's proliferating use by the "hip-hop generation" to denote a post-Civil Rights, working-class masculinity (Kelley 1994, 209-214).

Much of the recent work stresses the unavoidably plural meanings of the word, which is shot through with, but far from delimited to, its racist legacy (see Butler 1997). Concurring with this work, N.W.A. makes its own intervention. The following rhyme calls up dominant, racist meanings of the term, only to switch abruptly into mythic connotations of racial difference:

   Nigga, nigga, nigga, nigga, nigga, nigga, please! I'm treated like a fuckin
   disease You say, why can I call myself a nigga so quick? `Cause I can reach
   in my draws and pull out a bigger dick!

Eazy E's chanted repetition of the word, his "aggressive reappropriation of injurious speech," invites the listener to reflect on its conventional meaning and force (Butler 1997, 99-100). He registers timeworn but still current racist meanings of difference (he is treated like a "disease"), followed without explanation by use of "nigga" to connote the mythic stud of primitivist difference (he has "a bigger dick"). Along with Eazy's brattish, high-pitched delivery and the staccato playfulness of the piano riff, the confluence of mythic and realist meanings suggests a refusal of the traditional difference that "nigga" makes. In this way, the music provides a robust and astute illustration of stock poststructural ideas about the slipperiness of meaning, the multiplicity of identity, and the materiality of language.

This critical thinking is not some simple case of postmodern reflexivity. There is a clear perception that something more is at stake in gangsta's critical questioning, just as there was in the politically motivated interventions of the British scholars. Black-culture workers have long been forced to interrogate their own positions and come up with explanations. To understand the reasons for the elaborated reflection and critical awareness of "Niggaz 4 Life" (which was not itself a single), we need to locate the track within the textual flow, and indeed, extratextual flow, of the album as a whole. Efil4zaggin is one of the most offensive of all gangsta albums. Dr Dre frankly asserted that N.W.A. was deliberately out to offend when he explained one of the group's basic music and marketing strategies: "I wanted to make people go: `Oh shit, I can't believe he's sayin' that shit'" (Cross 1993, 197). After the exciting shock waves of their previous, groundbreaking album (well captured by Nelson George's [1998, 135] description of its first playing: "It was too obscene. Too radical. If that was Compton, then it was too Compton, wherever that was"), N.W.A. was trying hard to find fresh shock tactics to repeat the success. The tactics that they deployed, all typical of gangsta, included sexual bawdiness, shocking humorous stereotypes, boasting about their own physical and mental prowess, and stories of violence against others and, notoriously in this case, against black women. To give a European example of the public furor, when Efil4zaggin was released in the United Kingdom, the police raided a Polygram warehouse, seizing more than 24,000 copies on the grounds of obscenity. There followed a high-profile court case (typical of the many censorship battles that attended gangsta rap), which resulted in the album's U.K. clearance (Toop 1992, 42-46). (3)

The broader context of the album, which includes cuts like the grim, misogynist, albeit supposedly humorous, "One Less Bitch" (which recounts stories of abusing and killing promiscuous and unfaithful women) and "To Kill a Hooker" (which begins with a stark, nonmusical interlude of the shooting of a prostitute), suggests why the group might include a discursive cut such as "Niggaz 4 Life." The album set out to be so beyond the pale that the rappers may have felt moved to provide an explanation, using this track to deliberate on the wider contexts and motivations of the album. In this way, the song serves as a kind of public relations bid, which puts a critically engaged, if self-serving, spin on the nastiness of the rest of the album. Thus, the "bad rap" itself worked to instigate gangsta's self-awareness. "Niggaz 4 Life" exemplifies gangsta's broader reflexive energies and the motivations directing the subgenre's defensive/offensive thrust.

If gangsta rappers deliberately and flagrantly repudiated the traditional role of acting as "race delegates," they by no means escaped representational burdens altogether. Instead, the discourse came to be redirected toward a heightened investment in "representing" an image of working class black male youth. Gangsta's narratives of police harassment, social dislocation, and dangerous living were of central importance to fans and journalists (who talked relentlessly about gangsta's "unmediated" chronicling of ghetto life), as well as to the producers themselves. As Clarence Lusane (1993, 49) stated: "In a sense, Cube, N.W.A., Too Short, the Geto Boys and others are the `organic intellectuals' of the inner-city black poor, documenting as they do their generally hidden conditions and life-style choices." On "Niggaz 4 Life," MC Ren combines action-packed storytelling and salient social critique:

   Why do I call myself a "nigga" you ask me? Because everytime that I'm
   rollin They swear up and down that it's stolen They make me get face down
   in the street Throw my shit out down on the concrete In front of a
   residence, A million white muthafuckas on my back like I murdered the
   President

A compelling reason for defensively embracing the term nigga as a badge of honor is that working-class black men still habitually face racist treatment--the conventional meanings of nigger still, lamentably, have currency. Gangsta rap has rightly been acclaimed for its dramatic exposure of aggressive and racist law enforcement, especially in the "carceral city" of Los Angeles (Davis 1990, 265-322). The oppressive samples of helicopters (or "ghetto birds"), police sirens, remarks of racist police officers, and mock courtroom scenes vividly conjure rhymes about police surveillance and harrassment, racial profiling, and the punitive criminal justice system.

However, because gangsta is vitally linked to an impoverished lived experience and because African-American culture has long been constructed as authentic rather than cultivated, natural rather than crafted, this music is (returning to one of Hall's either-or polarities) nearly always treated as experiential rather than formal. The routine representational assumption or burden here is that gangsta authentically depicts ghetto life--or that if it fails to do so, it falls short. This burden can weigh very heavily indeed. In the striking case of Tupac Shakur, to turn briefly to a different example, the overbearing discourse of authenticity (the distinction between "representing" and "fronting") centered around his construction as "archetypal young black man." As such, he carried the competing and laden representational freight of his black nationalist upbringing, his nihilistic "thug life," his status as "average" black man (although, to be sure, he was far from average), and by contrast, his status as proverbial black success story and Death Row mascot--all of which he tried to fold into his fittingly paranoid musical poetics (Quinn 2002).

Like Tupac, N.W.A. displayed a complex, if highly contingent, grasp of the operations of representational power. Sometimes the realist rhetoric in gangsta rhymes is very earnest; at other times, it is a self-conscious marketing ploy. N.W.A.'s oeuvre must be read as a heady mix of social criticism and market exploitation, but undoubtedly--and increasingly, with the departure of former member Ice Cube--it tended toward the latter. In "Niggaz 4 Life," Eazy E proclaims himself the "underground poet," mobilizing a sense of street realness:

   In the city you see action first Then hear about it later in the verses I
   curse Because I'm real with this to keep my shit straight bumpin Murder
   created by the streets of Compton I get it from the underground poet I live
   it, I see it, and I write it, because I know it

The sense of authenticity is itself presented critically. The ritual invocation of the "streets of Compton"--tapping into the gangsta capital's great subcultural cachet generated by their previous seminal album Straight outta Compton--speaks to a genuine sense of belonging (N.W.A. members do come from deindustrialized south Los Angeles). Equally, it speaks to the fantasized, commodified space of ghetto authenticity (avidly consumed by suburban fans). Eazy astutely expresses the blurring of fact and fiction ("Murder created by the streets of Compton"): it is created, thus fabricated as well as documented, by gangsta rappers. In turn, this music's arresting role in constructing place images helped to produce Compton as a murderous site in the popular imagination (which, in a feedback loop, probably worked to perpetuate street gang violence there). When gangsta rappers present themselves as "underground poets" and "real niggaz," they are commenting on their own roles as pop-cultural mediators and their roles in the creation of black underclass imagery. It is interesting to note that such reflexive commentary does not seem to bruise or interrupt the sense of street authenticity. Many fans and critics still think that they are gaining unmediated access to an unadulterated account of grim ghetto realities.

An analysis of "Niggaz 4 Life" suggests that gangsta's assertions of lived experience must be read as highly mediated, as deeply knowing. Still, it is not enough simply to state that gangsta music is constructed and self-conscious--that although frequently verisimilar, the music does not accurately represent real life. A tempting line of argument, especially one informed by the ideas of Mercer and Hall discussed above, might be to begin by outlining the experiential, authentic claims of gangsta rap and then to refute them in order to offer a poststructural reading such as "fans and critics may think that this music is authentic, but in fact it is cleverly constructed." Instead, assuming poststructural ideas as only starting points forces a return to taking seriously the compelling sense of authenticity and the genuine representational constituencies activated in gangsta, without falling prey to their authenticating mystique.

Shifting the focus from authenticity to uplift brings more parallels. Julien and Mercer's "logical impasse of the positive/negative image polarity" finds bold analogue in gangsta rap. "Niggaz 4 Life" expresses the view, widespread in gangsta, that disaffected black youth no longer feel that fighting freedom battles through cultural achievements is a viable approach in view of persisting and entrenched political and economic disadvantage. Dr Dre rejects the assimilationist ethic of entrance into the professional-managerial class:

   Why do I call myself a "nigga," you ask me Because my mouth is so
   motherfuckin nasty. Bitch this, bitch that, nigga this, nigga that In the
   meanwhile my pockets are gettin fat. Gettin paid to say this shit here
   Makin more in a week than a doctor makes in a year

The comparison he makes between himself and doctors is offensively salient because the medical profession stands as a beacon of liberal respectability, an emblem of occupational responsibility and civic status. Dre brazenly asserts that he makes more as a kind of social parasite ("poisoning minds") than do trained specialists who heal and care for the sick.

At the same time, Dre intimates the defensiveness of this position. Perhaps the more pertinent occupational comparison Dre sets up is between professional-managerial occupations and menial, dead-end, service-sector work:

   Why do I call myself a "nigga," you ask me. I guess it's just the way shit
   has to be. Back when I was young gettin a job was murder. Fuck flippin
   burgers, `cause I deserve a 9-to-5 I can be proud of, that I can speak loud
   of.

The road to professional occupations like medicine, which involve protracted and expensive schooling and apprenticeship, remains closed to all but a few young black people. Chronic unemployment and the laissez-faire underfunding of urban areas leave devastatingly few resources to invest in public welfare and education. Thus, Dre rejects even the desirability of entering the medical profession--and other bourgeois nine-to-five jobs that he could "speak loud of"--in large part because it is already so desperately out of reach for the constituency for which he purports to speak. He expresses a generational sense of political disaffection and inertia ("I guess it's just the way shit has to be"), voicing a profound sense of diminished prospects for legitimate and meaningful black economic and social advance. In an era of increasing black class polarization, gangsta rhymes express the repudiation of middle-class values and, in terms of generational riff, of the striving black "parent culture" (another term developed by Stuart Hall and others at the Birmingham Centre for Cultural Studies) (Clarke 1976). Dre's rhyme both acknowledges and repudiates the responsibilities of the race artist and the liberal bourgeois social positioning with which these debates are associated. Through this process of self-justification, he intimates his awareness of the pitfalls and dangers involved in gangsta imagery.

Of course, the track evinces a tension between self-representation and group representation. Dre has to tread carefully between his role as delegate for impoverished black youth (who might well be "broke as a motherfucka" or "locked away") and his own public image as celebrated wealthy rap producer. Much of the continuing street credibility and sense of ghetto realness of these rappers seems to rest precisely on their "needs must" approach not to daily life but to their own cultural and entrepreneurial practice. Dr Dre construes gangsta as a kind of exploitative hustle, in opposition to respectable occupations. This track celebrates the ethics and aesthetics of flexibility, style, and survivalist opportunism. The deployment of the term nigga for profit and power in the face of earnest objection and the embodiment of the nigga persona crystallize this hustling image and its all-important ghettocentric legitimacy. Thus, although the members of N.W.A. ostensibly reject the status of role models, they emerge as both rebellious and entrepreneurial role models for alienated and impoverished male youth.

Dre's claims to the status of self-made black music mogul signal the importance of creative and financial control, revivifying long-standing black mobility stories about profitable pop-cultural endeavors, rearticulated for the intensive free-market enterprise culture of the Reagan/Bush era. It must be remembered that Eazy E's Ruthless Records paved the way for the phenomenal recent rap business success of Suge Knight's Death Row, Master P's No Limit, and Sean "P. Diddy" Combs' Bad Boy (all founded on lucrative new "joint-venture" deals). Widely publicized as black financed and black owned, and having negotiated a favorable "hands off" deal with "major independent" distributor Priority, Ruthless circa 1991 was the prototype for rap's fierce new entrepreneurialism. Billboard carried lead stories for two consecutive weeks on Ruthless's Efil4zaggin success in part because, as the first number-one album on an independently owned and distributed label since 1981, it both defined and drove major shifts toward increasing self-determination in the burgeoning rap industry (Grein 1991a; 1991b).

In his study of hip-hop culture and black film (which acknowledges the pivotal importance of Stuart Hall), S. Craig Watkins (1998, 100) identifies "a very important shift in the logic governing African American media production: whereas black protest efforts throughout most of the twentieth century urged the communications media industry to create more `positive' representations of African Americans, post-civil rights era protest trends emphasize asserting more creative, administrative, and organizational control over the resources that govern the production and content of popular media products." This change involves a shift from a brand of role modeling predicated on positive representation to one emphasizing economic self-determination, so that battles have come to be fought over the means and contexts of production at least as much as over textual representation. In turn, a shift in focus has been necessary for culture critics who have had to adapt in order to remain relevant. Gangsta rap poetics express this new kind of cultural struggle over resources. The pronounced entrepreneurial dimension of the gangsta scene and the vital seat-of-the-pants publicity images of gangsta rappers exemplify the shift of emphasis toward discourses of creative, administrative, and financial control.

The ever-expanding circuits of mass-market and niche-market transmission of black culture have fueled and informed the critical awareness of Dr Dre, Eazy E, and MC Ren as entrepreneurial role models. If Baldwin recast "race responsibilities" (always a contentious discourse) as "burdens" in the 1960s, the problems with and limitations of the discourses of uplift and authenticity only became more apparent by the turn of the 1990s. At the core of gangsta's pop-cultural energies was the expression of two ostensibly opposing but ultimately complementary discursive impulses: the affronting of black middle-class uplift and the representing of a black working-class authenticity. Although gangsta rappers spent much time critiquing the former and some critics in turn spent much time defending it, it is the newly invigorated discourse of authenticity that in the post-1970s period has grown to become the more encumbering. Gangsta rappers, and other black culture workers, have been so successful in portraying, manufacturing, and selling ghetto imagery that market demands have channeled black commercial output into certain narrowly defined coordinates. A kind of tyranny of authenticity--or what Craig Watkins (1998, 226-229) calls an "authenticity impasse"--has arisen that is dangerously tied to a sensationalized black lived experience, leaving less room for other kinds of stories to be told.

Overall, the knowing, ambivalent, and internally contradictory verses rapped by this pivotal gangsta group seem to provide their own treatise on the politics of representation. In increasingly media-savvy, media-saturated times, they offer robust and often humorous critical insights. N.W.A. worked through its own various roles and identities: as artists, as entrepreneurs, as generic poor black youth, as symbols for its own and others' racial and gendered imaginations. "Niggaz 4 Life" is nothing if not--to return to Hall's unwieldy phrase--an expression of "the struggle around strategic positionalities."

The Rap on Gangsta

One can draw revealing parallels, although very different in content and context, between the pop-cultural expressions of gangsta rap and the critical pronouncements of new-phase black intellectuals. The gestural timeline set up at the beginning of this article--from Hall's groundbreaking speech and the emergence of gangsta rap in the late 1980s to the widespread dissemination of new-phase black cultural politics and gangsta rap by the early 1990s--starts to seem more than coincidental. Some of the same rhetorical and political energies fueled the positions of black critics and artists. Both were met with unease from many traditional black and leftist critics; both seem to chime with and give voice to a widely perceived sense of disappointment and frustration with old-phase strategies of cultural engagement; and both were eagerly received by the disparate constituencies that they helped forge. For N.W.A., much of the power and pleasure of the music rested on its repudiation of traditional strategies of black culture protest, of uplifting images that were no longer deemed efficacious or relevant in the context of radically restructured and deindustrialized urban life. For Stuart Hall and others, the conservative and individualist new times demanded a more complex understanding of cultural power relations, taking to task some of the same traditional strategies of engagement. Both moves, then, connected reactively to the rightward realignment in the social and economic spheres of the time and to the concomitant crisis of the liberal left.

In Street Smarts and Critical Theory, Thomas McLaughlin (1996, 5, 160) persuasively draws out the connections in the theoretical practice of academics and what he calls (appropriating Houston Baker's expression) "vernacular theorists." The latter are "those who lack cultural power and who speak a critical language grounded in local concerns," surely an apposite description of the social constituency from which gangsta rap emerged. When he argues that "[t]he impulse to theory comes out of a dissatisfaction with conventional thinking and authorized premises," he could equally be talking about Stuart Hall or N.W.A. Scholars and rappers were, in the broadest terms, arguing against the conventional thinking of racist dominant society but more specifically, against the authorized assumptions of "old-school" black and liberal-left culture criticism. The commitment of cultural-studies scholars to the everyday rendered their theoretical ideas sensitive and well suited to the study of the cultural practices of vernacular critics.

As McLaughlin states, "those who are pushed to the margins have the critical distance necessary to see cultural power in action" (21). The same can be said for identity politics scholarship: one of the central contributions made by cultural studies is the insistence on the critic's own complicity in the culture under examination, the embeddedness of all cultural criticism in the everyday, and the necessarily partial, contingent perspectives that proceed from this knowledge. As such, the burden of representation on artists and on critics is not in any simple way "a bad thing." Although the product of societal inequalities, this intense reflection on one's own politics of representation has enabled intellectuals and artists to carve out productive and sophisticated intellectual and cultural projects.

If the flashes of theoretical insight in the vulgar verses of N.W.A. and the ideas of Hall, Gilroy, Julien, and Mercer were all grounded in the same broad historical terrain, it hardly needs to be said that gangsta's critical questioning of conventional thinking--if at times remarkably incisive and intricate--was highly partial and inconsistent. Working from inside the popular-culture marketplace in a retrenching conservative era, gangsta rap was necessarily deeply implicated in the structures it exposed. If gangsta rappers gave voice to the real frustrations and desires of poor and working-class people, if they poignantly called into question depleted rhetorics of liberal and leftist cultural politics, and if they insightfully commented on the terms of their own cultural production, gangsta was also an antiliberal, antiprogressive, and at least in the traditional sense, politically inert project. As Stuart Hall (1996b, 439; 1992, 30-32) has argued, "subordinated ideologies are necessarily and inevitably contradictory," and (a sobering lesson of the Thatcher/Reagan years) antihegemonic practice can pull in a rightward as well as left direction.

If the black bourgeoisie (along with many other mainstream commentators) has rebuked and scapegoated gangsta rappers as symbols of wider social problems, this same group has been at least as misrepresented and misused by gangsta artists. To be a "nigga 4 life" is a polarized and polarizing identity position. Indeed, it may be surprising that gangsta rappers have been able to squeeze so much mileage out of reviling black bourgeois beliefs. The black middle class has itself not fared very well in the post-Civil Rights era, as anthropologist Mary Pattillo-McCoy has demonstrated in Black Picket Fences (1999). Although Pattillo-McCoy complicates easy generalizations about black class polarization since the 1960s, the force of gangsta's anti-middle-class, anti-assimilation invective nonetheless draws on new kinds of class identity, tension, and resentment.

Gangsta was also a product of wider antiliberal sensibilities of the 1980s and 1990s, which shaped the views of gangsta rappers and extended to the attitudes of their eager cross-racial youth market. Speaking out against uplifting images and black culture protest models comes uncomfortably close to the practice of "PC bashing." "The "positive-image canon" may have become something of a straw target, wheeled out to provide an easy mark for antiliberal sentiment. It can never be a matter of rejecting, or of dismissing as a defunct discourse, the idea of representation as delegation because it continues to be underpinned by crucial and inescapable questions of pop-cultural effects. Culture can help shape popular consciousness, perpetuating and disrupting group allegiances and antagonisms. Dr Dre's rebuff of medical doctors and his own entrepreneurial and ghettocentric public image--which has no doubt inspired vast numbers of young people--speak to genuine frustrations, resentments, and desires, but they also help reinforce polarized positions in the black community. Indeed, the power of Dre's comparison rests on this understanding: however loudly gangsta rappers deconstructed the rhetoric of positive images, in doing so they still registered its force.

This article's title pun--"rap on gangsta"--captures the various ways that representational burdens were assumed and assigned in and around gangsta. In addition to the two more obvious resonances, a "rap" is an allegation, a charge. Gangsta rappers "get the rap": these young artists receive undue blame as discursive targets and media scapegoats. Gangsta rappers are nothing if not charged symbols of "post-soul" malaise. They also "beat the rap": they escape the social and economic status of the majority of young black people through their lucrative self-portrayals. Quite literally, they may escape a prison sentence or, more prosaically, poverty (although for several artists, a rap career has proved fatal). And they "take the rap": they shoulder responsibilities to speak for black youth and readily accept the allegations of their critics, incorporated through samples and spoofs. The critical insights and pleasures of this music derive in part from the deft shifts of emphasis between these competing, charged representational roles and problematics.

Although we can marvel at the theoretical acuity and sophistication circulating in gangsta rhymes, these young artists did not hold all the answers. The same can be said of certain currents in rap scholarship. However, my intention has not been to demonstrate that debate has tended to stall around the charged issues of authenticity and uplift. Rather, I have suggested that, beneath its polemical charge and rhetorical overstatement, the enterprise of Stuart Hall and black British cultural studies provides an important key to understanding why debate may have stalled here. Applying the notion of the burden of representation to gangsta involves setting up some intellectual distance, however contingently, to examine how getting, beating, and taking the rap were all absolutely central to early gangsta poetics. It allows us to examine where these "raps" came from, how they were foisted onto gangsta, and how, in turn, these young artists provoked and exploited the controversy for publicity and content value. Along with many other engaged intellectuals, then, the British scholars sought a translatable understanding, fashioning analytic tools to help us better understand black commercial culture in the post-Civil Rights world.

"Niggaz 4 Life" George Clinton, Jr/Bernard G Worrell/William "Bootsy"Collins/Tracy L Curry/Lorenzo J Patterson/Andre R Young; embodies elements from "Flashlight" and "Sir Nose d'Voidoffunk" both written by George Clinton, Jr/Bernard G Worrell/William Bootsy Collins [c] copyright 1991 by Bridgeport Music Inc,. Southfield MI. All Rights reserved. Used by permission. Lyrics from "Niggaz 4 Life" George Clinton/Bernard Worrell/William "Bootsy" Collins/Tracy Curry/Lorenzo Patterson/Andre Young [c] 1991. Used by permission of Sony/ATV Music Publishing. The context surrounding the lyrics for "Niggaz 4 Life" is conjecture. Lyrics from "Niggaz 4 Life" (Collins/Clinton/ Worrell/Curry/Patterson/Young) [c] 1991 by kind permission of Universal Music Publishing Ltd. Earlier versions of this article were delivered at University of Keele, Department of American Studies; University of East Anglia, Departments of Film and American Studies; and University of Liverpool, Institute of Popular Music. My thanks go to Eugene Quinn, Frank Chapman, and above all Peter Kramer.

(1.) The first usage of the term gangsta rap is based on the findings of a Nexis computer search of the U.S. broadsheet press for the terms gangsta and gangster rap conducted by the author on May 8, 1997. "Gangsta, Gangsta" is a single take from N.W.A.'s groundbreaking 1988 album Straight outta Compton.

(2.) Elsewhere, I have examined gangsta's early representational politics using a wider range of textual examples (see Quinn 2000).

(3.) In "Not Taking the Rap: N.W.A. Get Stranded on an Island of Realism," Martin Cloonan (1995, 55-60) shows that the N.W.A.'s U.K. legal defense mobilized the authenticity discourse without any attempt to defend the music's artistic credentials--another instance of rap's "authenticity impasse."

DISCOGRAPHY 

N.W.A. Straight outta Compton. Priority Records CDL 57102 (1988).

--. Gangsta, gangsta. Ruthless/Priority Records 57105 (1989). (Also on Straight outta Compton.)

--. Efil4zaggin. Priority Records CDL57126 (1991).

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EITHNE QUINN is lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of Central Lancashire. She is currently completing a book titled "Nuthin' but a G Thang": The Culture and Commerce of Gangsta Rap and has published related articles and book chapters on the contemporary popular culture of black America.