Abstract
Over the last decade and a half, there has emerged a veritable subfield known as Hip-Hop Studies, of which rap music is a central component. No subgenre of rap has drawn as much attention by scholars than gangsta rap. Bryan J. McCann, an assistant professor of communication studies, makes a worthy contribution to the field with the Mark of Criminality: Rhetoric, Race, and Gangsta Rap in the War-on-Crime Era.
Gangsta rap emerged in the late-1980s with a handful of artists who shifted the tone of rap music—generally a festive, radio-friendly style with braggadocio rhymes—toward a more nihilistic style that chronicled various criminal narratives without a conventional moral or ethical voice. Gangsta rappers adhered to the irreverence and confidence of rap, yet infused it with tales of crime, misogyny, and antiauthoritarianism. McCann builds upon the work of other scholars who have traced these tropes to certain Black folkloric “badmen,” like Stagger Lee, and Dolomite. In many ways, the author weaves a common narrative, yet adds a rhetorical intervention: “the mark of criminality.” The mark of criminality, McCann explains, comprises three parts: “(1) privileging masculinity as an essential characteristic of blackness, (2) portraying black masculinity as inherently violent, and (3) portraying black masculinity as hypersexual” (p. 14).
Beyond a tool of oppressive utility, this mark, he explains, is potentially useful for challenging racial subjugation. “Many black Americans made use of the mark of criminality even as it was made for them” (p. 17). McCann writes that “one could express masculine prowess, exact revenge, and channel one’s rage against white supremacy through a black substitute. To do bad, in other words, felt good” (p. 20). The author’s argument that these figures were subversive to White supremacy is not convincing, given that their violence was almost totally directed at Black people, not the agents of White supremacy. Even McCann equivocates, noting that the badmen, themselves, often “met a violent end by the gun or in the gallows” (p. 18). If anything, these badmen offered race-neutral cautionary tales that, while resonating with Black cultural sensibilities, did not necessarily challenge White supremacy.
In the first chapter, the author grapples with the ambiguity of this mark arguing that the image of Black men as criminals has functioned as a very precise tool to support racist policies, including the prison industrial complex. At the start of the 21st century, the United States had more people incarcerated than any peace time country in history. Much of the precipitous expansion occurred under the rhetoric of law enforcement waging a “war on drugs.” No demographic had witnessed the impact of the war than Blacks and Latinos, who used illegal drugs at rates similar to Whites, but were multiple times more likely to be arrested, charged, and sentenced than Whites. McCann argues that, as these communities suffered from economic deprivations, some, in turn, drifted to gangs, and an employment of the mark of criminality as a rhetorical or cultural protest. No group represents this process more than the pioneering gangster rap group N.W.A, which debuted in 1988.
Chapter 2 centers its focus on N.W.A’s song “F—the Police” and the video “Straight Outta Compton” as important inversions of the conventional police relations with the inner city by “redeploying the mark of criminality as a resource for heroic, playful masculinity and artistic mastery, while vilifying the colonizer police officer as an unwanted fool in the streets of Compton” (p. 53). The author’s positioning of N.W.A as a proto-political expression of subversive Black politics is muddled, given the group’s largely anti-Black body of work. He also admits that he is “ambivalent” about the political thrust of the group.
In Chapter 3, the author posits that the mark of criminality, as expressed through the g-funk styles of Los Angeles-area rappers Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg of Death Row Records in the early-1990s offered a subversive take on Black leisure, pleasure, and physical presence in public space. As these artists were releasing songs, the rapid expansion of the carceral state and hyperpunitive policies were shaping the degree to which simple leisure activities like cruising and parties in the park were outlawed for anyone who was gang-affiliated, like many artists on Death Row.
These artists, the book argues, offered a “racialized fear” through their music videos and songs about cruising and parties in the park. This is an analytical stretch, given that popular music—from White and Black artists—has always been dominated by leisure, joy, and presence in public spaces. These themes are found in rock, rhythm and blues, country, soul, funk, and non-gangsta rap. Its presence in gangsta rap does not immediately suggest an intended subversion as much as a quotidian practice among young people. In the end, however, McCann notes that Death Row Records was “chiefly interested in transforming such practices as well as a continued appetite among black and white listeners for hyperviolence and misogyny, into exorbitant profits” (p. 75). The commentary on Death Row is sound, but substantive interrogation about White music executives is missing. These executives wielded considerable influence in promoting music that some rappers have derided as minstrel music for White fans eager for crude Black stereotypes.
The final chapter gives a thoughtful critique of one of the most successful rappers ever, Tupac Shakur, who famously promoted “Thug Life” as a personal identifier (and name of a rap group that he promoted). As the author explains, the term “created new conditions of possibility for public deliberation regarding race and criminality. Shakur was the self-fashioned savior of the mark of criminality from its entrapment within dominant American discourses of law and order” (p. 96). Shakur’s subsequent move to Death Row Records, however, significantly muted the political thrust of his earlier work, as he conformed to the label’s g-funk mode of anti-Black violence. McCall details that “aside from signing his artistic and financial autonomy away, Shakur also signed away much of the emancipatory potential of ‘Thug Life’” (p. 111). Without a stern dedication to a “more coherent analysis of criminality,” McCann notes, “a cultural politics grounded in deployments of the mark of criminality was, perhaps, doomed to failure” (p. 112). Centered attention to Black nationalist-inspired gangsta rappers like Ice Cube may have more potential for some of the coherent analysis of criminality.
While the mark of criminality has utility as a term in the field, the book does not offer an authoritative voice about its political thrust in the employment of gangsta rappers. The conclusion more vigorously addresses the limits and contradictions of the mark of criminality in gangsta rap. In fact, in addition to challenging the carceral state and its logics, this mark can reify rhetoric of “supporters of mass incarceration … to justify their own hateful rhetoric of race” (p. 117). Like any tool, this mark functions with uncertain meaning and its potency depends, of course, on who controls it.