Gangster Rap and Its Social Cost: Exploiting Hip Hop and Using Ra ...

Before hip hop was introduced, visiting the South Bronx was like entering Dante’s Inferno. If someone got lost, he or she would become a “present” to hordes of heroin addicts, who massed at the first sign of prey. Late at night, stopping the car even for a traffic signal was extremely imprudent. Drivers had to lock their car doors and simply drive through red lights, regardless of traffic, if they valued their lives. Junkies even dug potholes in the roads to force cars to stop, for car parts were valuable to them. (In fact, the South Bronx became the first consumer market in the nation to use steering-wheel restraints to deter carjackers.) All over New York City, this was the era when any driver who needed to stop on the side of the road was in trouble. Other cars would pull over almost immediately, and their drivers would ask what parts of the car the driver was taking. They would take the rest. Imagine what it must have been like to be a young person living in the South Bronx under these circumstances. Poverty was the least of a person’s problems. Anything of value, at home or in one’s possession, belonged to the streets. In truth, it was only a matter of time before the streets might claim each person, as well.

Young people formed street gangs in the Bronx to defend themselves and their neighbors and to fill the vacuum left by the city’s abandonment and neglect. In such circumstances, the rise of youth gangs in the South Bronx was a good thing. Their first task was to create security zones and push back the hordes of heroin addicts who preyed on young people. This required amassing enough fighters to outnumber the addicts, and it meant increasing levels of violence in order to take back public space.

The rise in anti-drug-addict street gangs in the South Bronx came at a special moment in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The South Bronx was between drug epidemics. Heroin addiction and the war in Vietnam had claimed an entire generation of young men during the 1960s. They were dead, strung out on heroin (living dead), or if they were lucky, in jail. The most fortunate escaped both the war and the community. Hip hop’s founders—and their generation—witnessed the devastation of heroin and wanted no part of it. At the same time, drug traffickers had not yet come