Eithne Quinn. Nuthin' but a "G" Thang: The Culture and Commerce of Gangsta Rap

African American Review, Fall, 2006 by Lovalerie King

Eithne Quinn. Nuthin' but a "G" Thang: The Culture and Commerce of Gangsta Rap. New York: Columbia UP, 2005. 251 pp. $62.50 cloth/$16.35 paper.

The subtitle of Eithne Quinn's Nuthin' but a "G" Thang does not really prepare one for the dense cultural and commercial history of gangsta rap that unfolds in the volume's eight chapters. Quinn's book reads like a Toni Morrison novel in that every page is crammed with so much information you feel the need to go back and read it over before you can continue to the next. Quinn's general purpose for the study is to reveal both the "aesthetic pleasures and complexities" of gangsta rap in a way that moves beyond what other critics have done with the genre. Quinn's study is both selective and interpretive, covering the period from 1988 through 1996, the period of "classic gangsta rap." The term "gangsta" was actually coined by O'Shea Jackson (a.k.a. Ice Cube) of NWA (Niggaz With Attitude) in his song "Gangsta Gangsta" (produced by Andre Young, a.k.a. Dr. Dre) from the Straight Outta Compton album. Nuthin' but a "G" Thang focuses on key artists of "classic gangsta rap" from the West Coast and the Southwest. The genre's importance, notes Quinn, derives from its emergence as the voice of an oppressed community during a time of socioeconomic transformation. In other words, gangsta rap speaks to the social ills that were the result of destructive "government policies, chronic unemployment, political disaffection, and ... police repression." It tells the stories of a particular American subculture. Structuralism, culturalism, and Marxism thus comprise the triangular framework for Quinn's approach, and she acknowledges her indebtedness to Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, and British cultural studies in general. Two central ideas emerge: that gangsta rap is founded on a "marginal, streetwise, politically savvy perspective," and that "gangsta vividly dramatizes" the type of false consciousness that ensues when members of a sub-ordinated class in a capitalist/colonialist system are "too overworked and undereducated to fully grasp wider circumstances."

Chapter titles, from one through eight, include "A Gangsta Parable," "Gangsta's Rap: Black Cultural Studies and the Politics of Representation," "Alwayz Into Somethin': Gangsta's Emergence in 1980s Los Angeles," "Straight Outta Compton: Ghetto Discourses and the Geographies of Gangsta," "The Nigga Ya Love to Hate: Badman Lore and Gangsta Rap," "Who's the Mack? Rap Performance and Trickster Tales," "It's a Doggy-Dogg World: The G-Funk Era and the Post-Soul Family," and "Tupac Shakur and the Legacies of Gangsta." Quinn explains that the eight chapters in Nuthin' but a "G" Thang are actually organized into chapter pairs. The first three pairs focus on the period from 1988 to 1992, a period she designates the "upward arc" of classic gangsta. The last two chapters deal with gangsta rap beyond 1992. In framework chapters one and two she examines black cultural contexts of the genre as well as scholarly debates surrounding it. Specifically, chapter one makes use of Ice Cube's 1991 rap "A Bird in the Hand" as a parable that explains why gangsta rappers were and are willing to do what they do in the face of criticism from various spheres. "A Gangsta Parable" discusses the use of relatively unknown rappers in Los Angeles to market a beer of high alcoholic content, St. Ides. The advertising agency for St. Ides wanted to reach a young audience, so it dropped the Four Tops around 1990. They hired DJ Pooh (a.k.a. Mark Jordan) to produce the commercials, and Pooh would eventually hook up with NWA's Ice Cube. By early 1991, both St. Ides and rap were on top. The 40-ounce bottle of St. Ides beer prominently featured in Boyz in the Hood was no coincidence. Notes Quinn, St. Ides represented "roughneck authenticity" and was a symbol of the values of a particular subculture opposed to "acquired bourgeois tastes." An interesting parallel might be seen in Venus and Serena's collective refusal to adopt the standard white dress of the established professional tennis community.

In chapter two, Quinn focuses on introducing critical approaches to the socioeconomic implications of gangsta, situating its rise in relationship to shifts in black and left cultural politics. She argues that "gangsta rap was a self-conscious, timely (though largely nonprogressive) rejection of traditional modes of cultural and political protest." The third and fourth chapters examine urban sociology within the contexts of globalization and neoconservative social policy, a central concern being the responses of black urban working-class youth to a growing dearth in economic opportunity access. Quinn casts deteriorating socioeconomic conditions as the necessity that fed the invention of hardcore rap and the resources that it produced. In other words, she provides the how and why of gangsta's emergence and charts its rise to the top of the rap marketplace.

Quinn's next pair of chapters highlights the relationship between black oral traditions and gangsta rap. For example, where black folklore referred to the badman figure Stackolee (also Stagolee) in the third person, the gangsta rapper took on the identity of the badman (or, in other cases, the trickster pimp or thief) and rendered his story in the first person. Thus, Quinn contends that gangsta is actually "participating in longstanding vernacular traditions," and that a consideration of gangsta's vernacular roots, particularly in the models of black masculinity that it advances, not only allows for language and meaning based analysis, but also analysis that engages gender, sexuality, and class matters. While she seems at times to be drawing an unnecessary hierarchy of, or false dichotomy between, art or aesthetics and politics, she generally avoids being reductive. She is careful, for example, to "explore ostensibly contradictory aspects of the gangsta ethic and aesthetic," posing and responding to such questions as whether "contrasting impulses of forty-drinking nihilism and bootstrap aspiration" can coexist. In other words, she stays consistently alert to the two central ideas articulated above.