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

[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.