| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
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efforts among subgroups of HIV/AIDS high risk takers and shown to be effective (Bowser, Quimby, & Singer, 2007). Not until I began research on gangster rap did I realize that the addicts, drug dealers, pimps, sex workers (in gangster language, hos), and street teens we interviewed and worked with were the very same people gangster rappers claim to represent. I discerned immediately which communities and time spans gangster rappers have fixated on and what they have missed about these worlds. Insights derived from research done deep in the ’hood have been brought to bear on the contents of this book. And whenever possible, I have interviewed aspiring rap artists.
Finally, I had to be convinced from personal experience to write this book. I took the advice given to those over age 30 who get involved in the discourse on rap: Listen to the music. Therefore, for the last seven years I have listened on the Internet and while driving to an untold number of hip hop and gangster rap best-selling songs and focused on the messages of their lyrics. Some of the music is infectious; many times I got lost in the beats, forgot about the lyrics, enjoyed the music—and had to replay the songs. I now know that even before I realized that gangster rap and hip hop are distinct, I enjoyed hip hop but found gangster rap painfully repetitious, boring, thoroughly predictable, and not at all metaphorically interesting.
My most important qualification for writing this book is that I am a partner and father in raising three young men who have all needed to figure out their stances on the music and the values expressed in it. When I mentioned to each of them that I had learned through reading and interviews that hip hop and gangster rap were opposites, their response was “Of course; we could have told you that.” For them to realize this, however, required all of us to engage in years of hand-to-hand combat and guerrilla warfare regarding cultural and individual identity and the outcome of which was never guaranteed. Nothing we did or that my sons experienced before adolescence prepared any of us for the struggle we would go through or for the choices they would have to make relative not only to the