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c h a p t e r 10 Rap Going Commercial Perhaps the most strident, certainly the most self-promoting, badman of all explodes in “gangsta” rap, a complex social development wrapped in a poetry that, like the toasts, is sometimes doggerel, sometimes cleverly original. It marks the triumphal “crossing-over” of a black badman sensibility into mainstream entertainment , a creative extension of the toast into a new style of expression that also draws on Caribbean forms. As a dozen books and countless articles show, the hip hop style that spawned rap had, by the mid-eighties, taken a powerful place in mass taste in music, clothes, dance, language, and “attitude.” The traditional badman of the ballad and the toast reemerges in rap only slightly changed from his folk origins, settling into the world of sports, entertainment, leisure, and fashion, bringing with him his most calculatedly de¤ant, in-your-face manner. In the last decade and a half young black street poets from all over the country, some still in high school, have modulated the traditional man of violence into a more commercial form of badness. To the surprise and consternation of many, these young “gangstas” have acquired a huge audience, especially a cohort of equally young white males who have been buying their records, making them rich, and propelling them out of ghetto anonymity into the celebrity ranks of pop stars. These rap poets have given the black badman a vast, new, totally unprecedented notoriety. To a pounding, or sometimes merely rattling, beat, they pour forth avalanches of rhythmically uttered words, boasting of their rapping prowess, mocking other rappers, recounting generic sexual conquests, Rap | 155 gun¤ghts between “niggas,” fantasies of cop-killing. And they take us on grimily realistic journeys through the devastated neighborhoods that they celebrate as home turf and complain about as results of years of racial prejudice and municipal neglect. Rap is neither fully folklore (it is far too commercialized and widely known) nor completely ¤ction (i.e., it is not a novel or short story). So, technically , it falls outside the scope of my study. But so many of its manifestations directly engage the traditional badman type that I feel obliged to take note of the form that has, over the past couple of decades, become a powerful cultural phenomenon . It is important at this point, though, to remember that rap is not all of a piece. It has an “old style” and a “new style.” Women as well as men rap, whites as well as blacks. Some talk to animals, some summarize the cracks in the ghetto’s social fabric, and some outline their own philosophies of life.1 Rap may have started in the Bronx, but virtually every major city in America, and some not so major, has its own school of rappers with their own subjects and style. There is a plethora of information about rap. The originators of genuine folk forms like the badman ballad and the toast lie shrouded in anonymity, but rap had a huge audience at its birth, and everyone who was near seems eager to testify to what he or she saw, heard, and did. Books on rap’s “history” began appearing even before it really had a history, and proliferated in the 1990s.2 There is no need to return to this well-trod ground, so I intend to examine rap’s youth only in its broadest outlines and as it applies to the badman tradition. Early rap was utterly benign, more like the scat of Cab Calloway and Ella Fitzgerald than anything else, ¤nger-snapping nonsense words designed only to stimulate the young to dance. The ¤rst recorded rap to hit the mainstream, the Sugar Hill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” (1979), begins, I said a hip hop the hippie the hippie To the hip hip hop, a you don’t stop The rock it to the bang bang boogie say up jumped the boogie To the rhythm of the boogie, the beat. Their aim is “to move your feet,” to “bang bang the boogie to the boogie.” “I’m gonna rock the mike till you can’t resist,” says Big Bank Hank. It was another¤ve years before rap took a turn toward social awareness. In 1982, Grandmaster Flash, one of the founders of hip hop music, recorded “The Message,” a mournful recitation of ghetto conditions that destroy the young: Broken glass everywhere People pissing on the stairs, you know they just...

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