Gangsta Rap Supporters

Snoop Dogg is a prominent symbol of the gangsta rapper. A lot of people associate Snoop Dogg with the black community. But has anyone really looked at who Snoop runs with these days?

Mr. Dogg has been featured in a number of movies such as Starsky and Hutch, Baby Boy, Training Day, and that god awful Soul Plane. Snoop has appeared in television shows such as the Chappelle Show, the Bernie Mac Show, Mad TV, the L Word, Saturday Night Live, and the King of the Hill. I’ve seen Mr. Dogg do commercials for Chrysler with Lee Iacocoa. He does videos about white girls going crazy and exposing themselves naked on camera. Rumor has it that Snoop’s debut on one of the Muppet Show movies was cancelled after a handful of people realized who he was and what he represents.

Ice-Cube is another old school gangsta rapper who’s able to make more movies than Denzel Washington. Ice-Cube has appeared in a number of movies as well such as the Friday series, Ghosts of Mars, Are We There Yet, the Players Club, Three Kings, and All About the Benjamins.

Nelly has been in the movie the Longest Yard and has been on Saturday Night Live. DMX has appeared in Exit Wounds and Romeo Must Die. Tupac had his movie star moment acting like an actor with Janet Jackson in Poetic Justice. The great actor Sean “Puff Daddy” Combs made an appearance in Monster’s Ball. 50 Cent appeared in the movies Home of the Brave and Get Rich or Die Tryin’ and has more or the way. Eminem made his acting moment in 8-Mile. Li’l Kim made her movie career with Juwanna Mann and some forgettable regrettables such as Nora’s Hair Salon, Gang of Roses, and Those Who Walk in Darkness.

Now a lot of people will call gangsta rap a black community phenomenon. However, it appears that a lot of American corporate dollars are being invested into the success and development of the gangsta rapper image. Like the war on drugs people talk good game about stopping music that promotes violence. But if one follows the corporate dollars people are more apt to invest in the development of Nelly’s image than they are to invest in the development of Jill Scott. Why? Someone like Jill Scott isn’t conducive to the image a lot of people want to be representative of the black community.

There are an awful lot of these gangsta rappers making acting appearances in movies and television on a very regular basis. The vast majority of movies that ever see the light of day here in America are produced, controlled, financed, distributed, and marketed by corporations and entities that are typically reflections of the white dominated American culture. A black man may want to direct or produce a movie but without assistance to get a movie marketed and distributed the production would be for naught. It would appear that the successful gangsta rap actor is a phenomenon which owes a great deal of its cultivation to the white corporate culture.

The white dominated American culture has a narrowly focused image of black culture stereotyped into two different flavors; the violent urbanite or the I’d rather forget that I’m black tom. With very few exceptions movies produced with black characters represented by gangsta rappers are known to be of the violent variety. Children and impressionable adults are easily attracted to these images and will work diligently to emulate and perpetuate them. White people who need to feel superior will point to these characters and say look at how the black culture is so violent and uncivilized. The black skin is wrapped around an animal that knows no shame, self-respect, or any redeeming characteristics.

The propaganda perpetrated through the use of the gangsta rapper is little different from any of the other propaganda used by white people against their targets for centuries. Blacks have always been defined by the majority of white culture with thick racial slurs, caricatures, and misinformation about their way of life as if they were somehow other than human. Bugs Bunny and Popeye were featured in cartoons that depicted black people as happy ballooned lipped idiots with bones in their hair and nose. The caricatures with exaggerated features of years gone by have been replaced with the caricatures of today with exaggerated attitudes reeking with hyper aggressive, psychopathic tendencies.

While the black caricature of the past was an obvious parody engineered by dominant American culture, the modern caricature used to symbolize black culture has been carefully nurtured to appear as if it was a natural inevitability of the black community and its proclivity for violence. This has been done so cleverly that a lot of people, blacks and others, think that all that needs to be done is for black people to just say no and look the other way. But the propaganda machine that has been launched against black culture is a lot more sophisticated than that.

The image of cool personified in the rebel is attractive and alluring. When the rebel Elvis swung his hips on the new media of television for the first time mainstream America gasped in revulsion. But the youth of the day ate it up. Elvis didn’t just happen to walk off the street. He was picked out from the crowd, dusted off, imaged up a degree or two, and then marketed to America and eventually to the world. The resulting product was one of the first rebels that was engineered and delivered onto the world. To this day people keep shrines in their house for the king.

Today’s youth are just as impressionable and will fall for the same attractive and alluring packaging formula. The only difference is that the rebel factor has to be maximized in order to grab the attention of the seriously over stimulated youth of today. The gangsta rapper is the ultimate rebel and appeals to the youth of all races. Although stereotyped to lead people to believe that black youths are the ones drinking gin and juice and partying at the Holiday Inn, it is the white youth who have the means to buy this music and finance the production of the thuggish music. Yet no one would think of calling young white women some lice infested whores because of the music they are assumed to be listening to.

Black people can be their worst enemy. A black person hears a white man call an organization composed mostly of black women a bunch of tattooed, nappy headed whores. The black person then has the nerve to turn around and say other black people are being hypocritical for attacking the white man when black people are producing and listening to gangsta rap. Black people really need to take a moment to stand back, take a deep breath, and examine the world for what it truly is. Gangsta rap is a phenomenon of the music industry which is run predominately by white people. A handful of blacks who choose to tom for white people by fronting an image of a thuggish lifestyle should be rejected as our normal behavior instead of accepted as black behavior. It is propaganda.

Black people should learn to relax, see the truth, come together, and resist the propaganda that is threatening our unity.