Gangsta: Merchandizing the Rhymes of Violence

by Ronin Ro

In Gangsta, Ronin Ro looks at the perversion of the music called hip-hop - the syncopated verse with a political edge and an emphasis on hope - into a medium of rage and hyper-violence. Gangsta is about selling evil in a marketplace already glutted with faulty, combustible goods. Who supplies and who demands? Can we trace the engineers behind this star-maker machinery? This is packaged, sanctioned violence - a message without a source.
Few rappers opt to stay in the 'hood; many more are lured to abandon it for the music video's version of the 'hood - the cartoon slash-and-burn community, the bloodbath, the vision of unassignable rage, anxiety, and revenge.
Ro is asking, Whose rage is this, and are the predominately black and Hispanic artists involved in a minstrel show gone out of control? Are we giving society what it wants or are we telling it what it wants?
What is clear is that society is getting what it does not need. What is most disturbing is that the music that carries the message was conceived to galvanize communities. As in the fifties, when television was supposed to function as a great teaching tool, hip-hop promised to promote pride and hope. Now it has morphed into cruelty, selfishness, the fracturing of communities and all this to the thwack, thwack of the plastic charge card. You can't trace who wants what, who believes what, who needs what. This book is Repent for your sins.

Genres: Nonfiction

194 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1996

Reviews

[Steven H · Rating 5 out of 5]

A MUSIC JOURNALIST REPORTS ON 1990S HIP-HOP MUSIC AND ITS CULTURE

Music journalist and author Ronin Ro wrote in the Introduction to this 1996 book, “1992… The gang scene is out of control… I’m assigned this feature on Kid Frost… In California, I immediately see that this will not be a clean-cut interview in a record label’s conference room. I’m exposed to mad violence. I see how Frost is really living and how that reality … is buried in the lyrics on his album… Surrounded by teenage killers and aging gangbangers, I feel out of my element… At home in New York… I realize that these Harvardite ‘Source’ kids would rather use their pages to promote albums and stereotypes than to reveal the truth and urge their predominantly Black and Latino audience to pursue more positive paths. So I hand in my uncorrected notes. I become a household name in the hip-hop industry… and I jump-start a rise in gang-related hip-hop articles… With the Frost story, West Coast artists discovered a new marketing strategy: talk about your set and have a hip-hop journalist ‘riding shotgun.’” (Pg. 1-2)

He explains, “The media … never really discussed the white gangs, which definitely existed… Leon Bing pointed out that gang nicknames were popular with white kids, and that they’d begun to form ‘small wannabe groups with names like South Side Gang and Palmetto Boyz.’ … But the stereotypes of Black, hip-hop-listening gangsters made for better newspaper reading…” (Pg. 36)

He recounts, “The heavy-metal music made conversation impossible … I sat in a colorful plastic lawn chair next to members of Street Mentality, a gangsta rap group… and observed a different side of the Mexican-American community in California… This was a more upscale gathering---office workers and civil servants on a night off---and on the surface, there was nothing gang-related about the evening… (Speaking with gang members ‘Bandit’ and ‘Slow Pain,’ he was told, “See, gang members aren’t looked up to like they were in my dad’s day…. Back then, they were respected for helping the community, helping to build it, ‘cause they knew they’d spend the rest of their lives there.’ Where a neighborhood was once a barrio (‘where you grow up with everybody and they take care of each other’), it was not a ‘hood’ (‘where you’re just protecting your gang’). But Bandit felt gangs had their positive virtues. He provided the usual excuses: a gang supplies love; they’re filled with surrogate father figures for youth from mother-centered households; they teach you about the street and help you earn money through drug trafficking.” (Pg. 46)

He reports, “Itomi began to detail the ascendance of modern hip-hop music and style into mainstream Japanese youth culture. ‘They’re catching on, I think,’ she said of the multitude of b-boys storming nightclubs. ‘They’re going in for the fashion, wearing those caps, sneakers, T-shirts, long shorts. Many kids think hip-hop is a very Black culture so they tan themselves; they go to tanning salons and perm their hair very strong to look like a brother. The language barrier is the only thing that gets in the way. They learn some words but they can’t really understand.’ After Run-DMC and the Beastie Boys toured Japan in the early 1980s, youth began wearing the Adidas footwear, Volkswagen medallions, sheepskin coats and Kangol hats.” (Pg. 81-82)

He observes, “Interracial couples were everywhere: Jordan-scaled suit-clad Black men hugged Yoko-like women, unaware that they were pawns in a national game of ‘Let’s make Daddy angry!’” (Pg. 102)

He states, “That ass-kissing Blacks like to be around them was irrefutable proof, however, that these hip-hop whiteys were DIFFERENT from their suburban racist relatives, former neighbors or schoolmates. Acceptance from Uncle Tom Blacks confirmed these whiteys’ inherent sense of SOUL. They knew every prevailing dance… or slang term… and could tell you more than you ever wanted to know about Richard Wright, James Baldwin or any other Black writer whose book was displayed in the African bookstore. And if you mentioned James Brown? ... They’d chew your ear off, regaling you for hours with knowledge gleaned from tomes, biographies, liner notes on ‘Vibe’ magazine. They’d infer, in their most reverential tone, that being white and well-studied meant they could more fully appreciate a Black artist. Black audiences, they believed, did not know where their race’s true genius lies. ‘Kriss Kross’s new album’s fat as hell,’ they’d intone, before standing silent sipping their beer and eyeing any passing Black girl, waiting for us to shuck, jive and say, ‘Well, tha’s mighty good, white boy!’ And this young, white college grad who had somehow become Whodini’s publicist was no different. But people like her were, sadly, always awarded with the most vital positions in this industry.” (Pg. 135-136)

He concludes, “This would be my last story for ‘The Source,’ I told myself. There was a four-year relationship but it had soured. The original editors, once my friends, had walked off and a new squad of scabs had been hired. The thrill of competition was gone; there was no longer any greatness. By simply appearing in print, I bested the replacements. It was time to move on to the world of books, I sadly told myself. The pleasant days of hip-hop as a culture had ended; I could no longer delude myself; I could no longer ignore that major labels had destroyed this music and controlled its direction.” (Pg. 180-181)

[Ronin Ro did indeed 'move on to the world of books'... he more recently wrote the book, ‘Have Gun will Travel: The Spectacular Rise and Violent Fall of Death Row Records.’]

This book will appeal to some who are interested in hip-hop culture.

[John Grace · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ro gives us a Great White Shark Hunt for hip hop, collecting slightly revised pieces he wrote for The Source , Spin, etc. Interesting to look back on how rap was viewed back then. Many of these acts are forgotten, some remembered for all the wrong reasons. 2 Live Crew would be cancelled today by the same liberals that vehemently defended them in the 80s. Ends on a down note with the death of Eazy E, which also ended most of my interest in the genre. A damn good read if you, like me, bought Ice Cube's Amerikka's Most Wanted the day it dropped.

[M.i. · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a weird book to review, if I had read this before Ronin's classic "Have Gun Will Travel", I probably would have ignored anything else from him. Thankfully I didn't and this book hasn't soured me completely on his works.

From the first few pages he lets it be known that he is anti-gangsta rap music and makes it known that it must be stopped at all costs. The further you get into the book the more you realize just how much he hates it. The characters he covers are portrayed mostly as destructive, non-intellectual types who somehow lucked into stardom through music though of his friend Guru (RIP) he seems to treat him differently than the other rappers, letting us know he graduated from college and his parents were scholars. Yet even the chapter dedicated to Guru is a somber one, of a man who the music industry hadn't been kind to. In fact thats a recurring theme throughout the book. The industry is shady and the participants learn that the hard way eventually.

It's just shocking how he makes folks like Dr Dre, Snoop and Scarface look like brawny thugs making destructive music. Scarface especially who many regard as a legend in the game, was probably the harshest hit in the book. It's hard to think otherwise when the instances and the events he writes about seem to corroborate this. I suspect at the time of writing Ronin was at odds with gangsta music because when you read his later classic, his tone on guys like Dre and Snoop changed considerably. It's also hinted throughout the book that he wasn't too happy with the direction his life was taking. I guess when you take all that into consideration you get the type of book we are left with.