The Gangsta Rap Era and How It Was Influenced by Environmental Factors
Cultural Intruduction of the Era
Many of the earliest rappers that set the culture, idea of the sound, and lyrics produced music as early as the 1950’s. Between 1979 and 1995, rap music contained more than ten motifs, including physical intimacy, romance, brutality, gender norms, economics, race, partying, wealth, comedy/parody, and boasting. These classifications are neither mutually exclusive or exhaustive. During the late 1980s, black male unemployment and incarceration rates increased, and thousands of blue collar jobs fled Los Angeles. Robin Kelley claims that in 1982, “Unemployment in South Central communities increased by 50%. (p. 192). According to Quinn, by 1989, “36.7 percent” of African Americans were earning earnings at or below the poverty line (p. 43). Following the end of the Cold War conflict in 1989, the government announced a new war, the war on drugs, which quickly turned into a campaign targeting poor black men. According to the author, “twenty prisons were built in California between 1984 and 2000,” but the state still “had the highest rate of overcrowding. (p.46). This illustrates the realistic understanding of how events in history influence the cultural environment and the people who live in it. This resulted in a genre of rap known as “Gangsta Rap,” in which individuals or musicians of the time expressed their true feelings regarding their cultural surrounds and previous experiences reflecting on their environs.
Ice-T
Ice-T started his rap career in the early 1980’s.Topper Carew, an African American filmmaker, claimed that hip-hop was a more far-reaching and influential cultural force than music reviewers were ready to admit in the early 1980s, and Los Angeles provided an opportunity to put that idea to the test. That year, he finished his Los Angeles documentary, titled Breakin’ ’N’ Enterin’, a loose allusion to break dancing, the acrobatic dance craze that thrived along Hollywood Boulevard and the Venice Beach Boardwalk.The film implied to the spectator from the opening scenes, which included visuals of automobiles plodding along expressway ribbons, palm trees towering above manicured lawns, and weightlifters and roller skaters relishing in the sun, that Los Angeles was not New York and that its subculture was, similarly, distinctive. Carew enlisted the services of local hip-hop musician Tracy “Ice T” Marrow to lead his cameras throughout town. Ice T, a frequent performer at The Radio, a vibrant downtown hip-hop nightclub, gave the filmmaker direct access to what the rapper characterized in rhyme as a unique regional “movement” characterized by “graffiti turning inner cities into art” and “kids that dance on the street and in the park.” Ice-T signed with Sire Records in 1987. Ice-T recorded the theme song for Dennis Hopper’s gang-themed film Colors in 1987. His album O.G. Original Gangster (1991) was considered as a crucial role in the development of the gangster rap genre. He worked with Body Count once more on their self-titled debut album, “Cop Killer,” in 1992. This album was widely panned for promoting violence against police officers.
Ice-mother T’s died while he was in third grade, and four years later, his father passed away. Ice-T became immersed in inner-city life as a sixth grader, which would characterize his career as a rapper. In high school, he admitted to “acting like I was ditching class when I was really ditching my friends so I could slip back to school”. Ice-T wrote through his music about what he witnessed as a kid growing up which was low education levels, abuse of communities due to the law system, the environment he grew up in, and the actions of others around him.
Eazy-E
Eazy-E, a local drug dealer, founded Ruthless Records in 1987 and used his street connections to distribute his recordings to black-owned music stores in the area. Eazy-E was born in Compton, California and dropped out of high school in the tenth grade. He started to turn to gang life selling drugs shortly after dropping out in order to provide for himself. N.W.A.’s first album, ‘Straight Outta Compton,’ established the concept that Compton was a singularly problematic, rough, and violent area, and that anyone who could live in Compton was someone to be feared and admired, according to the Sides of Compton branding that was exploited. Compton, in fact, was a fairly typical illustration of the urban problem spawned by gangsters, hard drugs, and the disintegration of practically every effort to combat the “War on Poverty” in the 1980s. However, what made Compton distinctive was — and continues to be — its proximity to the entertainment business, which has turned the city into an international emblem of urban disorder in the United States.
Ice Cube
Ice Cube, another N.W.A. rapper, was born O’Shea Jackson in South Central Los Angeles, California, on June 15, 1969. Ice Cube was reared by his mother, Doris, a medical clerk, and father, Hosea, a groundsman at the University of California, Los Angeles. Cube was able to maneuver the hazardous terrain of his community, which was becoming influenced by drugs, firearms, and violence, thanks to the support of his parents. Cube was a great student who enjoyed football and music. Ice Cube’s half-sister Beverly Jean Brown was murdered by her husband in 1981, when he was only 12 years old, and was brutally shot to death in her residence just a few streets from where her brother lived in South Central Los Angeles. Cube’s parents yanked him out of his local school and moved him to a rural high school in the San Fernando Valley while he was in his adolescence. The luxury and stability that distinguished his new surroundings created a profound impact on the young Cube, who’d known little beyond the crumbling South Central L.A. He saw his city in a fresh perspective and questioned why the savagery and drugs causing mayhem in his city weren’t creating more attention. Ice Cube grew up to write compelling rhymes about the impact of violence on his community and the temptation of weaponry. Ice Cube (O’Shea Jackson) of the rap group NWA (Niggaz with Attitude) composed the song “Gangsta Gangsta” in 1988, and according to scholarly sources its violent, sexist, and profane lyrics stunned America. “Gangsta Gangsta” popularized gangsta rap, which became associated with Compton, a predominantly black and Latino working-class and working-poor district in Los Angeles.
Tupac Shakur
Tupac Shakur is another influential rapper who influenced the genre of Rap and his lyrics were about his environment, the justice system, and the overall struggle of poverty. Tupac was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1971 and was born into a member of the Black Panther Party. His mother Afeni was thrown into New York City jail on bombing charges before Tupac was born. His father, Mutulu was a party leader of the society and was on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List until the 1980’s.Tupac learned to assume that racism, economic marginalization, and other forms of injustice contributed to the poverty and powerlessness of working-class Blacks, according to experts. Shakur performed on two Digital Underground albums in 1991, This Is an EP Release and Sons of the P, before his solo debut, 2Pacalypse Now, later that year. Tupac spent much of his youth on the road with his family, who landed in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1986, where he attended the prestigious Baltimore School for the Arts. He excelled intellectually and artistically as a student, however his family migrated to Marin City, California, before he could finish. Consequently, Shakur took to the streets, peddling narcotics and becoming embroiled in the gang culture that would offer inspiration for his rap rhymes one day. In 1990, he joined the Oakland-based rap duo Digital Underground, which had a Billboard Top 40 hit with the novelty track “The Humpty Dance.”
Conclusion
Many of the rappers lived on farms or in low-income areas. The Gangsta Rap genre was influenced by these neighborhoods’ high crime rates, drug use, and abuse. We can see from the examples of notable rappers above how they were exposed to criminality or narcotics, and were inspired by living in such an atmosphere, for example, Ice Cube. We also find influential rappers, such as Eazy-E, who resort to such agendas as a result of life conditions delivered to them as a result of family events, which are usually affected by the environment around them impacting the family. We can infer how growing up in a certain ethnic environments and having a stereotype founded on the environment and family characteristics impacts you in this area, with Tupac Shakur as an example. Overall, history demonstrates that these early musicians affected the gangsta rap era via creative art because of their environs and difficult life tales.