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4. real niggas Black Men, Hard Men, and the Rise of Gangsta Culture The first time I recall hearing gangsta rap was in 1988, in the dormitory room of a private, predominantly white liberal arts college in the Southwest where I was belatedly earning my bachelor’s degree in English literature. N.W.A.’s album Straight Outta Compton had recently dropped, and a small group of male students whom I knew fairly well were gathered around a CD player giving it the kind of attention one would give a highly anticipated sporting event. I had found my way into the room by following the sound of some seriously funkified music that reminded me of old school bands from back in the day. These kids, all privileged upper-middle-class white students in their late teens who came from safe suburban neighborhoods, were listening to N.W.A.’s “Fuck Tha Police,” which sounded to me like a street riot with machine gun fire. I had never heard of the group, or for that matter gangsta rap, but then neither had most of these kids, except for the one who had brought the CD. The language and scenarios filling the room rendered me speechless. It was not that I had not heard this kind of language on records before, littered with the words nigger, motherfucker, and bitch, but only on comedic party records, and never in the presence of whites. The kind of language I was listening to was the black working-class folk vernacular I grew up hearing in night clubs, juke joints, house parties, and other places where black folk congregated, partied, and talked trash to each other. I was not the only person in the room who was speechless at what I was hearing, but the nature of our various silences could not have been more different. I was probably visibly unnerved by the violence, the graphic depictions of “cops dying in L.A.,” and the enraged voices of some seriously pissed off black men seemingly running amok. These kids, all much younger than me but who all knew me as the resident assistant in the dormitory, looked up at me vacanteyed but said nothing, going back to the music, totally entranced. No one seemed chagrined even a little by the fact that a black man had just entered the room in the middle of the racial mayhem unfolding in our midst. I was of no consequence. The real niggas were jumping out of the loudspeakers. The underground success of N.W.A. and Straight Outta Compton set in motion a sea of change in American popular music and culture, and I was unwittingly watching it unfold in its nascent stages—white adolescent males fascinated by young black men weaving narratives of ghetto violence and shootouts with cops told in the most graphic of language. Its tone, use of language, and delivery of vocal rhymes was like nothing I had heard before, at least not as music. Straight Outta Compton flipped hip-hop music on its head and began the bumrushing of the American pop music mainstream, the aftershocks of which would exile political and socially conscious styles of hip-hop to the commercial abyss. N.W.A. would have the most profound and lasting impact on the direction of hip-hop music and its cultural milieu for the remainder of the century and into the next, and as such lays credible claim to being the most important rap group ever formed. N.W.A. began the mainstreaming of hardcore styles of gangsta rap that would reintroduce into popular culture historical representations of black males as the hypermasculine brutes and hypersexual bucks turned street-hardened gangbangers and drug dealers, told in graphic ghetto narratives involving casual black-on-black violence, drug trafficking, misogyny, and gunplay. These were bad men. Bad because they were dangerous, took what they wanted, and didn’t give a fuck. Bad because they were young black men with guns shooting up the place. N.W.A.’s representation of the reformulated black brute as hardcore rapper was seen by adolescent youth as a real antisocial hell raiser, not just another rock ’n’ roll bad boy wannabe. For young males—blacks, whites, indeed of many racial and ethnic stripes—hardcore rap transformed black males from the ’hood into totemic performers of a powerful masculine authenticity and identity at a time in which there appeared to be few real men left. bad men, bad niggers...

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