`As I walk through the valley of the shadow of death . . .” So begins Coolio’s “Gangsta’s Paradise,” a sumptuously orchestrated hip-hop epic from gangbanger country, Compton, Calif. It is one of the biggest hits of the year, selling more than 1 million copies, and also among the unlikeliest, a voice of compassion from the heart of an African-American holocaust.
In the soaring, heartbreaking chorus, delivered by singer L.V., the song asks, “Tell me why are we so blind to see that the ones we hurt are you and me?” Even as the song acknowledges the brutality of the streets, it prays for a way out. It is the centerpiece of Coolio’s second album, also titled “Gangsta’s Paradise” (Tommy Boy), one of a handful of recent releases that offer a fresh perspective on gangsta rap, a style of music so controversial and so commercially potent that this year it has become campaign fodder for presidential candidates, publicity-making grist at congressional hearings and the subject of contentious board meetings at multinational corporations.
Gangsta rap, a style of hip-hop that combines ferocious funk rhythms with explicit rhymes about life in the ghetto war zone, is typically portrayed as music that glorifies a culture of death and depravity, a selfish pursuit of pleasure and power. It is seldom regarded as a portrait of conflicted youth, lured by the security and promise of easy money offered by gang life, and dejected by the dwindling prospects for a future outside the ghetto.
Like “Gangsta’s Paradise,” Cypress Hill’s recent “Cypress Hill III (Temples of Boom)” (Ruff House) offers a multilayered portrait of the ghetto. It can be viewed almost as a day in the life of a gangbanger, a critique of the gangsta myth, as it takes the listener through the harrowing ordeal of the gang initiation to the celebratory sense of inclusion offered by the gang “family” (“Throw Your Set in the Air”). But the triumph is revealed to be nothing more than “Illusions,” and the bravado of the stick-up men in “Locotes” is shattered by their deaths.
In Cypress Hill’s world, expressed in three increasingly dense and personal albums since 1991, the gangbanger life is essentially a lonely one. The only relief is obtained through marijuana, but even this well-publicized aspect of the group’s message has been de-emphasized on the new album. What is left is an emotional hollowness.
“More than anything I’m trying to paint a picture for young people that this is what happens to certain people who do certain things, and hopefully they will be turned off, or at least they may think about it before getting themselves into similar situations,” says Cypress Hill rapper Louis “B-Real” Freeze, a former gang member from Los Angeles.
Freeze was once shot in a gang confrontation, and though he survived, the ordeal haunted him. “When you’re a gangster like I was, you have dreams of getting shot,” he says. “When it finally happened, I had nightmares for months afterward.”
Whereas the blurring of the line between reality and fantasy happens occasionally in other art forms, it is a chilling routine in gangsta rap. In 1987, Boogie Down Productions’ rapper KRS-One and producer/deejay Scott La Rock appeared on the cover of their debut album, “Criminal Minded,” brandishing guns. A year later, La Rock was killed by a gunshot while trying to break up a dispute in New York. It was the beginning of a sad, violent era in hip-hop music.
Now, as 1995 winds to a close, gangsta rap has never been more popular, more despised or more enmeshed in harsh reality. When the year began, rapper Tupac Shakur was in prison for sexual assault, even as his album of thug-life vignettes, “Me Against the World,” was No. 1 on the pop charts for four straight weeks. Then Eric “Eazy E” Wright, one of the architects of the Compton-based gangsta-rap empire carved out by the group N.W.A., died of AIDS, leaving behind seven children by several women, and fistfuls of songs about pimps, whores and sexual promiscuity.
Congressional hearings were held denouncing rap lyrics, activists C. Delores Tucker and William Bennett used the contents of gangsta discs by Snoop Doggy Dogg and Dr. Dre as evidence in attacking sex and violence in the entertainment industry, and Sen. Robert Dole took up the anti-rap crusade as part of his presidential campaign. Feeling the pressure, Time Warner Inc. decided a few months ago to divest itself of its 50 percent stake in Interscope Records, which handles releases by Shakur and the Death Row label’s stable of hard-core rap artists, including Dre, Snoop Dogg and Tha Dogg Pound.
Snoop sold 4.5 million copies of his 1993 release “Doggystyle,” an album in which hedonistic releases are pursued with a vengeance, all temporary escapes from the prospect of violent death. The content of the disc took on sickening relevance last week in a Los Angeles courtroom, where the Long Beach rapper and his former bodyguard faced charges of murder in the 1993 shooting of an opposing gang member. Calvin Broadus, a k a Snoop Dogg, and his fellow defendant say the shooting was done in self-defense.
All of this notoriety has done little to stem the public’s appetite for gangsta rap records. Following the successes of Shakur and Snoop Dogg, Tha Dogg Pound’s first album, “Dogg Food” (Death Row), recently debuted at No. 1 on the pop charts, ringing up 278,000 sales in its first week, nearly double that of the No. 2 album, Mariah Carey’s “Daydream.”
“Dogg Food” is an insidious combination of funk beats and the acrobatic rapping of Ricardo “Kurupt the Kingpin” Brown, as well as guests such as Snoop Dogg. The phrase “do or die” comes up in numerous contexts, as a code of street behavior and a justification for all manner of pathology. The songs are preoccupied with self-assertion and power, and lust for guns, sex and cash, cognac and marijuana.
On KRS-One’s recent album, “KRS-One” (Jive), there is also a song titled “R.E.A.L.I.T.Y.,” which asserts that hip-hop culture is full of contradictions: “Every black kid lives two or three lives.” It explains how a rapper–Tha Dogg Pound’s Kurupt–can be strutting in one song, and fearing for his life in the next.
“That contradictory attitude creates hip-hop,” says Kris Parker, a k a KRS-One. “I wrote the song `Stop the Violence’ (released on Boogie Down Productions’ second album) before any record I ever made, but I got caught up in this emcee battle with MC Shan, and it was a battle of words. There was no place for conscious lyrics; it was `kill’ the emcee. We realized what we were becoming out of this battle. Scott (LaRock) said we can’t do the consciousness stuff, that we had to gain street credibility first.”
From there Parker and LaRock made the unsparing, gun-brand ishing “Criminal Minded.” Afterward, Parker went on to make records of a deeply philosophical bent, some of the most enlightened discs in the hip-hop canon. His new album, which like all of his releases since “Criminal Minded” is far removed from the gangsta mind-set, includes a discourse on religious iconography and dispenses career advice, messages on nonviolence and the usual tongue-lashings for artistically bankrupt rappers. Yet Parker says he has no regrets about fashioning such a hard image on his debut album.
“In hip-hop, your image is everything,” says Parker. At age 30, with eight albums to his credit, he’s virtually the grand old man of rappers. “What matters more than anything is your credibility in the streets. If you don’t have that your career is over. We had to start `hard’ to get over.”
Virtually the whole of gangsta rap can be distilled to that preceding paragraph: It is the story of insecure youths struggling with notions of manhood, security, self-esteem and, above all, credibility.
No wonder it is so steeped in contradiction, as perfectly expressed by the title of Coolio’s “Gangsta’s Paradise.”
For Artis “Coolio” Ivey, 32, “keeping it real” means “showing all sides of myself and the place I come from.”
“I’m not afraid to show compassion, sadness, to laugh and to smile,” he says. It’s not a sign of weakness. Weakness is when you try to be like everybody else and to follow.”
Because gangsta rap is where the money is, the genre is overrun with followers. “A lot of these guys look at Snoop’s records and they see money,” says Parker. “They’re not living the life. The more you define your reality, the better artist you will be.”
Gangbangers-turned-rappers Coolio and Cypress Hill have done just that. Coolio’s “Gangsta’s Paradise” and Cypress Hill’s “Illusions” define the ambivalence of the gangsta life as few records ever have.
