‘Here come the cops’: Policing the resistance in rap music

Abstract

When rap music broke into the mainstream in the late 1980s, it was quickly hailed as a vehicle for political resistance against the blatant social and racial inequalities in the United States. However, a closer look at even the most ostensibly rebellious and confrontational songs reveals that the resistive potential within rap music was often undermined, or at least complicated, by the pervasive culture of policing and surveillance from which it emerged. Through close readings of classic tracks by Ice Cube, Goodie Mob and the Geto Boys, this article argues that traditional scholarly formulations of rap-as-resistance need rethinking, and that we must account for the aggressive strategies of social control that have been integral in shaping, and often circumscribing, the kinds of defiance that rap embraces.

Rap Lyrics as Evidence

“…Even here, the interpretation may not be clear. Given an emphasis on authenticity and lyric formulas favoring the first-person accounts, artists may draw inspiration from people they know or have heard about but present the stories in a first-person narrative (see, for instance, Kubrin & Nielson’s, 2014, discussion of Clyde Smith’s case). The argument is not that no artist has even written about a criminal act they committed, but instead that having written about a crime—even alluding to a real crime—cannot be interpreted as equivalent to an admission made by an actual person (rather than a character or persona) made outside of the artistic context of a musical composition.…”

“…One of the consequences of the bias and harsh treatment involved in these criminal justice strategies is a fundamental lack of faith in the police and the justice system in communities of color, even among the majority in these communities who are law-abiding and wish to live in a safe community (E. Anderson, 1999; Drakulich & Crutchfield, 2013; Hagan, Shedd, & Payne, 2005). While some have identified resistance to this treatment as a theme in rap songs (e.g., Martinez, 1997), others have noted that the aggressive law enforcement response to such resistance made it hard to maintain (Nielson, 2014).…”

Introduction

“…This resistance culminated in the heralded 1992 Los Angeles riots that expressed messages of resistance, empowerment, and social critique against a racist police department and legal system. Nielson (2012) claims that while this creates messages of resistance, it also creates further responses of enhanced pervasive surveillance and pressure by police institutions. Clay (2006) similarly finds activism through ethnographic fieldwork within the San Francisco Bay Area's youth of color in their attempts to create youth empowerment and political activism through breakdancing.…”

Bridging and bounding Asian-ness in hip-hop : a content analysis of Asian hip-hop lyrics and media discourse

“…These four framing functions may be simultaneously presented in one sentence, although many sentences of a text might not function as any of the four (Entman, 1993). How rappers include social problems, critiques, their resistant attitude, and potential solutions in their lyrics has been studied by several scholars (Martinez, 1997;Miller, 2009;Nielson, 2012), but these scholars have not mentioned framing.…”

“…Several scholars describe rap music as "a communicative tool" (Durham, 2002;Nielson, 2009Nielson, , 2012Ball, 2011), and rappers express themselves in terms of race and identity in their lyrics.…”