p artists. The images and lyrics show and tell us that it is a time of intense poverty and differences between the haves and the have nots, that it is a time of urban crime and violence, a time of gangs and drugs, a time of STDs, HIV, and AIDS, a time of buck-wilding and extreme sexuality, a time when the urban underclass is striking out and striking back, and thus is a tense and frightening time for the culture at large.
The lyrics and images of rap stars like Ice-T and Ice Cube anticipated the L.A. uprisings, which henceforth became a significant part of the iconography of rap. Thus, rap engages a specific political era and spaces, showing what is going on in the urban underclass and its rage and fantasies at the end of the millennium. Public Enemy's music video of "By the Time I Get to Arizona" shows black revolutionaries going to Arizona to protest the state banning of the Martin Luther King day holiday and depicts them assaulting white politicians and attempting to bring revolution to the state. Their video of "Shut it Down" also projects images of black revolution, evoking the legacy of Karl Marx, Malcolm X, the Black Panthers, and Angela Davis, with the PE rappers calling for the shutting down of the system of exploitation and oppression.
The rap spectacle therefore resists the ruptures of signification within much music video in favor of narrativization and contextualization, telling their stories and getting out their messages. Indeed, voice, lyrics, and rhyming are very important in rap which can be read as an acronym for Rhythm And Poetry. The songs are often long, highly complex, and expressive, continuing an African-American tradition of extended stories with individual variations each telling, as well as drawing on the forms of the solo riffs of rag-time, jazz, and the blues. Rap continues earlier African-American traditions of "signifying" and "playing the dozens" (Gates 1988), involving ritualized verbal contests to demonstrate verbal dexterity, mental acumen, and creativity. The "dissing" of other rap groups, women, and white politicians reproduces the African tradition of the toast or boast, rendering some rap highly confrontational.
Yet other rap artists are like a minister in the black church, with a message for the audience, which the rapper conveys in distinctive ways, and like in the black church, rappers often have choruses in the background. Rhyming in complex patterns, rap songs create tension between the spontaneity of the performance and the fixity of the lyrics. Thus, in opposition to fragmentary, disconnected, flat, and one-dimensional postmodern texts, which only refer to themselves or lack depth of meaning, most rap music strongly signifies and the collaging often adds up to a political statement, rather than fragments of nonsense. This approach identifies with politics like '60s black radicalism or Afrocentrism, and uses transgressive sounds such as the noise of police cars, helicopters, bullets, glass breaking, and urban uprisings in order to underscore the tension, desperation, and violence in the inner cities.
Rap thus involves an articulation of black aesthetics, experience, style, and cultural forms in a hybridized syn
thesis of black culture and new technologies. By the late '80s, Rap replaced R&B as the most popular music for young blacks, but the largest audience for rap music is white suburban youth, thus continuing the phenomenon of the "white negro" diagnosed by Norman Mailer in 1957. [
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