Rap Attitude

I found the clips shown in the lecture on Wednesday pretty interesting, particularly The Darker Side of Black. After seeing them, I know I'm a bit guilty of taking the representations in the music videos and films at face value or as gospel, when in reality they are crafty parodies that play on the construction of race. I thought Ice Cube and N.W.A's were striking in that they take elements such as the iconography of gun culture, rap colours, and aviator wearing 'redneck' policemen, and construct an aestheticised image of the city, which refracts back to the audience their mediated perception of social reality and life in the 'ghetto'. I also thought the idea of nihilism in gangsta rap was interesting, and to link back to the idea of morphing, I think that it reinforces the blurriness of the boundaries, that is, how genres, in their unadulterated form, are constructed as belonging to only one group. I think a group like the Beastie Boys, with their eclectic style, exemplifies the idea of taking elements from across the rap continuum, with their knowing parody of the 'white boy' rapper and caricatural punkish antics. The 70s cop film and TV references are interesting too. Here is a link I stumbled across to 'Stop Snitchin', a 60 Minutes segment on the stand-off between kids of the 'ghetto' and the authorities in the US. I think it links back to Ice Cube's idea of a double standard operating, and the macro and micro levels of racial politics, how it reinforces the idea of musical stereotypes operating in the community, the impact of the rap ethos off-screen, and the rapper as a kind of scapegoat.
Stella