Does rap have a future? Will gangsta rap sink hip-hop?

Ebony, June, 1997 by Joy Bennett Kinnon

What's the 4-1-1? Or, for the culturally deprived, what's happening? Glocks (semi-automatic weapons) and gangbangin'--that's what's happening, and slangin' and early death.

Hip-hop's recent adventures have been so chilling that even its founders are concerned about its future.

The music is still young--so young most of its veterans haven't yet hit 40. And some of its stars never will.

The recent violent deaths of rappers Tupac Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G., a.k.a. Biggie Smalls, a.k.a, Christopher Wallace, and thousands of other children without big names or lucrative record contracts have led analysts, industry officials and rappers to step back and, as they say, recognize.

For the music that showed such promise in the early 1980s with the emergence of stars like Will Smith and LL Cool J made an unexpected detour around 1988 with the beginning of a sub-genre called gangsta rap. Since that time a national controversy has erupted over the medium's glamorization of violence and its put-down of Black women.

Quincy Jones, the legendary producer and musician, has stated that while he loves hip-hop music, he is saddened by the recent violence. "The gangster lifestyle that is so often glorified and heralded in this music is not `keeping it real'; it is fake, not even entertainment. A sad farce at best and a grim tragedy at worst," he said in an editorial following the murder of Smalls.

Actor and former rap star Will Smith said in an earlier EBONY inter view that rap music has become so strange to him that he is virtually retired from the music business. Smith started rapping in 1986, he said, when the hard-core rappers were considered to be Run DMC and Public Enemy, groups that would barely raise an eyebrow now. In 1987, rap was awarded its own separate musical category by the music industry, rated with R&B, jazz and rock.

"Rap music has really changed from when I was doing it," Smith said. "It was kind of uplifting." Now he terms the music, "bizarre."

"The thing that really shocked me is the mainstream acceptance of music that's just not good," he adds. "It seems that's just not that the more ignorant that someone is, the more records they will sell."

While ignorance in rap music may be debated, violent death seems to cause already high sales to skyrocket.

The Notorious B.I.G.'s posthumous double album Life After Death sold 690,000 copies in its first week of release, according to industry officials, the biggest first-week record sales in more than a year. Rival rapper Tupac Shakur's posthumous The Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory sold 664,000 in its first week. Shakur's album has sold 2.5 million copies total and is still on the charts. Released in 1994, Biggie's first album, Ready to Die, sold 1.5 million copies. In 1996 rap music sales generated more than $1 billion in receipts, according to industry sources.

With so much at stake, the quest for the minds and the money of the young has become a major pursuit, leading analysts to ask whether "Show me the money" has become a death sentence for gangsta rap.

C. Delores Tucker, a prominent gangsta rap critic, says she focuses her attention now on the "gangsters in the suites rather than the gangsters in the streets...the people who promote gangsta rap and have made it possible to distribute this music around the world."

In 1995, Tucker, chair of the National Congress of Black Women, and others won a major victory when Time Warner agreed to get out of the gangsta rap business by selling its interest in Interscope Records, one of the larger gangsta rap music record companies and distributors.

Tucker doesn't hate all rap music, she said. "Rap in its purest form is prose," she says, "it is poetry." Tupac Shakur was very talented, she says, "in Shakur's soul you could see a wellspring of poetry." She says gangsta rap could have made wonderful music. "Songs full of hope and faith, but they weren't paid to sing that."

Dr. James Comer, professor of psychiatry at the Yale University Child Study Center, says that economics, in a sense, is at the root of rap's problems. The majority of the artists and their fans come from a generation that isn't, on the whole, getting paid. "The point is that society has set up conditions in which gangsta rap flourishes and has negative outcomes, and people act on it," he says. "If the same people had meaningful jobs and opportunities and most of the followers had jobs and opportunities, we wouldn't be looking at this."

Michael Eric Dyson, author of Between God and Gangster Rap and Race Rules, sees rappers struggling with the perennial theme of good versus evil. "We allow The Godfather, and rightfully so, to probe for us as a culture the contradictions between being a gangster and a person who has a family and who loves his wife and is religious," he says. "We allow them to have moral complexity, but we want to reduce the Tupacs and the Biggies to cartoon characters. They are not one-sided characters, they are complex moral creatures who are attempting to use art to illumine pain."