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From Michael Pereira's, "The Raw and the Cooked," Fall '97 From Michael Pereira's, "The Raw and the Cooked," Fall '97 Rap's hidden struggle, like its legacy of quiet musical subversion, remains marginalized, self-contained and popularly invisible. Rap maintains a rare, dual citizenship in American culture -- speaking from the center and critiquing from the sidelines. Rap is a music of protest, and inevitably, of paradox. Rappers struggle for meaning and public space against a vast, media-supported construction of black urban America as a source and signifier of all social ills. Television and magazines invent a popular, perverse iconography for the music; instead of 'reading' rap for its intertextual import, the media plunders its violent imagery to feed and reinforce our nation's voyeuristic addiction. In place of prophesy, we get pornography. And rap reportage -- like the cult of O.J. Simpson or the Rodney King frenzy -- ruthlessly transforms tragedy into farce. Rap's reality trickles down to the public at one remove, and media maintains its stranglehold on meaning. Events in the rap world are given press time based on their presumed power to fascinate. In 1995, the death of Eric "Easy E" Wright was reported according to the gangsta profile imagined by the press. Wright used repressive structures to liberate himself -- he rapped his way out of dead-ends. But the media simply literalized his lyrics by way of eulogy. Then in 1996, Tupac Amaru Shakur was shot and killed in Las Vegas. He was 25; and denial in the wake of his death proved his iconic status. As a fan wrote to Word Up! magazine, "I've heard at least a hundred Tupac stories. The weird thing is that they all seem to have one thing in common -- the conclusion that Tupac isn't really dead." Media, it seems, have even infiltrated the realm of the divine, but all in the name of record sales. As another fan put it: "I became a huge fan after he died." More recently, just six months after the drive-by murder of Tupac, Christopher Wallace -- a.k.a., Biggie Smalls, a.k.a., the Notorious B.l.G., -- was shot to death in the passenger seat of a GMC suburban. He was 24; his daughter is four; and his son is less than a year old. His second record was due to "change the world" (according to his manager Lance "Un" Rivera) upon its release 14 days later. The press instantly invented an East Coast/West Coast feud between Marion "Suge" Knight's Death Row Records and Bad Boy Entertainment run by Sean "Puffy" Combs. The legend is basic and catchy, superimposing wild-west style family feuds onto the rap world. But it's also an exaggeration. In the tragically ironic April 1997 issue of The Source with Biggie on the cover at the peak of his fame, he says "[t]hey done made a personal beef between me and [Tupac and Death Row] into a coastal beef, East against West. And that's crazy. That's bananas right there." Who does he blame? "The media. The media definitely." Wallace's death, therefore, necessarily included the social construction of his killing. And no one foreshadowed this with more chilling accuracy than Wallace himself. The opportunistic dramatization of violence in rap can be traced back to 1988, just nine years after rap's first hit (the Sugar Hill Gang's 1979 debut single "Rapper's Delight"). Rap had emerged as the most prominent cultural element within hip hop's larger social movement. It had extended and revised Afrodiasporic musical traditions and recast them in New York's post-industrial urban context. By the late '80s, rap had amassed the cultural capital to play large, suburban stadiums. Then late in 1988, the stabbing death of 19-year-old Julio Fuentes at a Nassau Coliseum show attracted the nation's gaze to "violence" in the rap community. The public was appalled, yet satisfied in a perverse way. They wanted more. So in subsequent years, "violence" became rap's strongest popular selling point and grew to the stature of myth. Rappers, especially L.A. Gangsta stylists from Compton and Watts, played on the image; and media preyed on it. Rap's focus shifted from violence to representations of violence; yet popular media failed to make the distinction. The reality of "black-on-black" crime, therefore, was misunderstood and mistreated. Instead of examining the social and economic contexts within which crime happens, media misdiagnosed crime as a pathology of culture and impeded successful campaigns to increase the peace. Even the well-intentioned, industry-based Stop the Violence (STV) movement overlooked the socioeconomic situational matrix that promotes the vicious, ghetto-based circle of victim and victimizer. The real crisis in communication -- institutionalized racism mixed with class oppression -- remains pervasive, insidious and deceptively hard to pinpoint. To really subvert hegemonic discourse requires both the free expression of rap's aesthetic and an acknowledgement of the structural constraints that retard rap's progress. As Tricia Rose points out in Black Noise in reference to the music's cultural politics, "?the forces that constrain black agency must be acknowledged while the spirit and reality of black free will must be preserved." Rap must be a battleground of compromise, where the dialogue of opposition brings rap's hidden struggle to prominence. Rap is judged by a power which wants to hear only the language it lends. But rap is irrepressible: an alternative to dominant discourse, a beat, a musical identity and a song of liberation.

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