ABSTRACT
This chapter emphasizing rap music's situatedness within hip-hop culture, its criticism of the dominant white culture's racial and economic discrimination, and the contradictory urban expressions of African American economic and racial marginality. Gangsta rap is merely the latest incarnation of the rap music industry in general. The public debate is similar to that surrounding gangsta rap. Gangsta rap creates identity through a racial system of intelligibility that produces binary distinctions between blacks and whites, against-them discursive matrix. Bell hooks lucidly illustrates that the context out of which rap has emerged is intertwined with the public stories of black male lives and the history of the pain suffered by black men in a racist society. Despite the always-present threat of commodification, gangsta rap still poses a serious challenge to the formation of new identities of resistance and social transformation. The recent death of Tupac Shakur provides a bitter lesson about the best and worst of gangsta rap.
