gangsta rap has lost its creativeness

I found Ice Cube’s view of gangsta rap and hiphop culture really intriguing. He stated that artists like him were commenting on things in their culture, the black on black violence, car jackings, drive-bys. He then compared it to the country he was living in, stating that it wasn’t right to discriminate the content of their music because America was doing these things on a much larger global scale.

In one respect I agree with his response. It’s not Ice Cube’s fault that people aren’t glamorising the war on terror, the battle for oil, or America’s aim to democratise every damn nation in the world so that critics like us can spit peas at it.

But as much as I like his argument I don’t it’s the kind of justification that convinces rap critics on rap music legitimacy. Maybe when this genre wasn’t as commercial and overused as it is now, rapping about these topics would be interpreted as a creative expression of their culture. It is unfortunate this cycle happens, where creativity is no longer viable in certain such genres because it becomes a generic and overused way of expressing one’s gangsta-ness. The repetitiveness and exposure of gangs, guns and violence I think has an impact on the number of gangs and violence that erupt on the streets. It’s no longer a creative representation of the hood, but it’s growth into a generic response to gang culture has made it a genre that gives a representation of this culture as well as being represented in return through real gangs.

I think rap music was legitimate. If gangsta rap is a way of expressing one’s life as a gangsta, I think rap artists today have less work to do to make their claim of hard life, drugs and crime because previous rappers have already set up this genre to make these elements of gangsta’s legitimate. Now all a rapper has to do is say gun, and we assume he’s got a gun, he’s shot a gun, he’s been shot at with a gun, he’s a gangsta, done drugs, robbed, car jacked, lived on the street and basically had a rough life. It’s just another generic story now.