Gangstas and Playas
A closer look at the 90s rap scene
An analysis of the role of luxury brand references in rap music first requires an understanding of the changes observed in the genre during the 90s, the discourses that emerged in response to these changes, and the implications on the genre’s trajectory. Although mid 90s rap saw an increase in themes of luxury, this didn’t occur in a vacuum. Rather, 90s rap music and hip hop culture was characterized by many simultaneous developments all in response to various social, cultural, political, and economic shifts.
Hip Hop and The Crack Epidemic
A significant development in rap music during the 90s was the emergence of various regional adaptations, carving out space for artists outside of hip hop’s birthplace in The Bronx. The hardcore delivery of New York-bred rappers like Run-DMC, Public Enemy, and KRS One, paved the way for West coast rappers and the evolution of what would become known as “gangsta rap,” a subgenre that went on to achieve significant mainstream success. Throughout the late 80s and early 90s, artists such as Ice-T, N.W.A, Ice Cube, and Tupac were instrumental in crafting a distinct West coast sound and subgenre known for its “rich descriptive story telling laid over heavy funk samples” (Kelley, 129). Though this subgenre wasn’t nearly as focused on luxury as the music that developed in the following years, the style and themes present in gangsta rap played a large role in anticipating the prevalence of luxury in hip hop.
“The political economy of crack precipitated the rise of gangsta rap on the West Coast.” (Dyson, 115)
As noted by many hip hop scholars, gangsta rap is often understood as a product of the detrimental economic and social policies affecting Black and Brown working class communities during the Reagan-Bush era. The influx of crack — the cheaper and highly addictive rock form of cocaine — throughout predominantly Black and Brown urban communities “fueled a crack epidemic that devastated thousands of poor blacks and latinos.” (Dyson, 83). Though the effects of the crack epidemic were felt in Black communities throughout the nation, poor Black and Brown communities in Los Angeles were among the hardest hit populations (Dyson, 83).
In the midst of the crack epidemic, deindustrialization and “uneven development of L.A.’s postindustrial economy” led to economic displacement accompanied by rising rates of unemployment and poverty in areas such as Watts and Compton. Lack of economic opportunity created an environment in which drug dealing seemed like one of the only viable sectors for upward mobility. At the expense of those suffering with crack addiction, all of these socio-economic factors converged to form what urban theorist Mike Davis (1990) refers to as the political economy of crack (309). In response, Ronald Reagan relaunched Nixon’s War on Drugs campaign, an initiative that had damaging effects on Black and Brown low income communities. The policies associated with the War of Drugs essentially demonized and targeted those suffering from economic disenfranchisement and addiction. On top of this, the Anti-drug Abuse Act of 1986 differentiated between cocaine and crack, implementing longer and harsher prison sentences for the latter. This primarily affected Black populations leading to an increasing population of Black citizens within the U.S. prison system.
This was the environment in which gangsta rap came to be. West coast rappers used music as a platform to narrate the lives of those on the margins, depicting the material consequences of institutional racism and state violence. Though other forms of rap music addressed similar themes, gangsta rap was particularly rampant with tales of crime, gang violence, violence against women, misogynoir, and homophobia.
In songs like the one above, N.W.A. constructs a subversive narrative in which they get the chance to put the LAPD on trial rather than the other way around. By switching roles with the system, N.W.A. is able to perform an identity that they don’t have access to in reality. This is a strategy adopted by many artists within the rap industry. N.W.A. poignantly calls out police brutality, racial profiling, and everything in between, adapting the same violence in their lyrics that they’ve witnessed police enact on their communities daily. However, in the midst of their message against the police, the song is also filled with unapologetic profanity and topics which seem to glorify violence.
“Rather than attempt to explain in global terms the relationship between joblessness, racism, and the rise of crime in inner-city communities, gangsta rappers construct a variety of first-person narratives to illustrate how social and economic realities in late-capitalist L.A. affect young Black men.” (Kelley, 124)
While hip hop was known to contain politically charged sentiments, N.W.A. didn’t toe the line of respectability in the same way as more celebrated forms of rap music. Instead they trampled the line, much to the disapproval of various audiences.
Gangsta Rap Advocates and Critics
Owing a significant amount of its mainstream success to young, white — mostly male — suburban consumers, gangsta rap along with its associated themes and imagery constituted a certain iconography of Blackness and more specifically, Black urban masculinity. White conservatives used gangsta rap to uphold narratives of a Black pathology which deemed Black communities as inherently violent, criminals, and self-destructive.
Meanwhile, socially conscious rappers on the East coast resisted this narrative and often condemned the glorification of violence in gangsta rap music. An example of this resistance can be seen in the Stop the Violence Movement spearheaded by several rappers including KRS One, Public Enemy, and Heavy D (Dyson, 116). Another group that condemned the genre was the growing Black middle class who argued that the subgenre conformed to historically-rooted negative stereotypes. The success of gangsta rap contributed to a specific monolithic view of Blackness which didn’t align with the respectability politics that governed Black middle class values.
“While the leading critics of the gangsta rappers gained the spotlight, many observers began to construct a monolithic view of hip-hop as an art form characterized by misogyny and violently hedonistic lyrics” (Ogbar, 165)
Gangsta rap advocates have resisted such criticisms arguing that the subgenre provides a counter narrative that caters to the experiences of Black working class youth. While the Black middle class could aspire to 80s media representations depicted in The Cosby Show or the success of Oprah Winfrey, such figures failed to address the immediate concerns and lives of Black working class citizens. In communities where the crack epidemic was most violent, the experiences of the Black working class couldn’t be more different from those of the Black middle class. Gangsta rap forced society to reckon with these contrasts.
Ultimately the debate between gangsta rap advocates and critics recalls the perennial question of what constitutes Black authenticity and who decides what such authenticity looks like. As white supremacy has granted white citizens jurisdiction over what Black authenticity means, Black citizens have been clamoring to reclaim this power, aiming to define for themselves what is or isn’t authentic. This struggle over authenticity has manifested throughout history in various ways.
“the controversies surrounding hip hop in the black community have revived an ongoing debate over who best tells black stories: our blues people or our bourgeoisie” (Tate, 1997).
Though, until this day, debates around authenticity have persisted, the commercial viability of gangsta rap seemed to have the last word as the subgenre took hip hop to new economic heights. The influence of gangsta rap could be observed in the shift in the lyricism, imagery, and culture of hip hop in the 90s which Dyson analyzed as causing a “deepening aesthetic and rhetorical rift between older and younger blacks” (Dyson, 177). The narratives within West coast Gangsta rap resonated with working class Black communities throughout the nation. The commercial success of gangsta rap created space for rappers throughout the country who were dealing with the same issues that came along with the crack epidemic. Artists from various regions began to explore gangsta rap themes within the context of their own creative interests.
“L.A.-based gangsta rap reopened a space where it is not sinful to link black pleasure with materialism” ( Baldwin, 168).
The Emergence of Playa Rap
Inspired by classic mafia films as well as the lifestyle of popular mob figures, many rappers, especially on the East coast, integrated mafia narratives and references into their lyrics and even adopted mafia personas of their own, establishing a style known as Mafioso rap. In fact, Biggie, one of the most successful rappers of the 90s, formed a rap collective at the start of his career called Junior M.A.F.I.A., an acronym for Masters At Finding Intelligent Attitudes. Furthermore, it was common for Biggie to adopt the alias, Frank White, referencing a drug lord from the 1990 mobster film, King of New York.
“These artists are specifically attacked for their lines of commodity endorsements from Versace to Lexus and for their obsession with Italian-American mobsters” (Baldwin, 168).
While Mafioso rap often engaged similar topics as gangsta rap, it differed from the West coast subgenre in that it almost always included mafia references with a particular focus on the attainment of wealth through organized crime. Over time, themes of wealth began to overtake some of the core aspects of gangsta rap resulting in the emergence of what some would consider another subgenre on its own.
Sean Combs entered the rap and R&B scene with Bad Boy Entertainment in the midst of gangsta rap’s expansion. While the reign of N.W.A. had come to an end with their final album in 1991, their legacy continued, paving the way for the success of Dr. Dre’s solo career along with the careers of Snoop Dogg and Tupac — all of whom were signed to Dr. Dre’s Death Row Records. Meanwhile Bad Boy’s roster spanned genres of R&B as well as hip hop consisting of notable acts like The Notorious B.I.G., The Lox, Total, Faith Evans, and Diddy himself. The extreme talent that both record labels were cultivating on opposite coasts of the US culminated in what would become an intense and ultimately lethal rivalry between the two labels and consequently the East and West coast rap scenes. While West coast gangsta rappers had refined their “G” funk sound, P. Diddy was busy crafting a culture that took gangsta rap in a different direction with less violence and more money.
This was evidenced by the lavish lyricism and lifestyle that Bad Boy artists embraced. From private jets to endless bottles of Cristal Champagne, Bad Boy Records married the “gangsta” roots of the Black working class with luxury — an unlikely pair which went on to form the foundation for the Bad Boy brand. Scholars have described this contradictory hip hop aesthetic in various ways. Davarian Baldwin (2004) refers to the style as “hip hop-inspired black bourgeois aesthetic,” as it “rejects both black petit-bourgeois respectability and ghetto authenticity.” Roopali Mukherjee (2007) describes this as the “ghetto fabulous aesthetic” which “elevates the black urban experience as ultimate crucible of cool.” For the purposes of this blog, I’ll be borrowing the term “playa rap” from Antonia Randolph (2006).
Luxury and Memetics
Luxury continues to be a feature of rap music until this day demonstrating just how impactful the playa rappers of the 90s were. The particular influence of 90s rappers can be seen in data tracking the mention of alcoholic beverages in rap music. A study found that between 1994 and 1997, 42% of songs mentioning alcoholic brand names referred to expensive champagnes and 56% of them referred to spirits, especially high-end ones. (Herd, 2005)
A content analysis of 2004 and 2010 song lyrics from popular music genres found that rap music had the highest concentration of brand references with 65.44% of raps songs mentioning brands in some form. Rap songs with at least one brand mention in the lyrics increased from 53% in 2004 to almost 83% in 2010. Furthermore, within rap music, luxury brands or products were found to have been mentioned 3 times more than common brands. (Baksh-Mohammed, S., & Callison, C., 2014)
In The World Made Meme, Ryan Milner (2016) provides an analysis of memetics noting the fundamental logics of memes and how they interact with society. While memes are often perceived as the combination of visuals and text, Milner’s analysis demonstrates that memes can take almost any form as long as it fulfills what he identifies as the essential logics — multimodality, reappropriation, resonance, collectivism, and spread (Milner, 2016). The presence of luxury throughout rap music since the late 90s has embodied every single one of these logics. Through an analysis of the song, “It’s All About the Benjamins” and its relation to other songs and discourses of its time, it is revealed that luxury has spread memetically throughout hip hop culture.
