The Mark of Criminality: Rhetoric, Race, and Gangsta Rap in the War-on-Crime Era (Albma Rhetoric Cult & Soc Crit) by Bryan J. McCann

Author:Bryan J. McCann [McCann, Bryan J.]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780817391171
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
Published: 2017-06-05T16:00:00+00:00

The album’s second single, “2 of Amerikaz Most Wanted,” is especially laden with imagery and language connecting black masculinity and rap virtuosity to discourses of criminality. Indeed, the very title invokes two salient texts relevant to the hip-hop nation and the politics of late twentieth-century law and order. Debuting in 1988, the same year the Willie Horton ad and NWA’s Straight Outta Compton haunted the psyches of white civil society with potent, if divergent, images of the black masculine predator, the Fox series America’s Most Wanted and its host, John Walsh, circulated the mark of criminality in ways that rationalized the tough-on-crime politics of the period. Framed as a direct response to the crime reenactment series’s perceived race-baiting, Ice Cube’s solo debut, Amerikkka’s Most Wanted, featured numerous samples of Walsh’s voice along with lyrics that boastfully deployed the mark of criminality with the same violent rage Ice Cube displayed in Straight Outta Compton.70 By dropping two of three “k’s” in its title and enacting the common tropes of violent hypermasculinity and unapologetic materialism, Death Row presented yet another version of the mark of criminality and, for Shakur, a refashioning of “Thug Life.” White supremacy in “Amerikkka” was no longer the primary target of Shakur’s rage. Death Row was on a new warpath, and the destination was an apocalyptic confrontation with the East Coast.

Before we hear a single beat of “2 of Amerikaz Most Wanted,” its connection to gangsta’s increasingly public embodiments of the mark of criminality is fairly obvious to anyone familiar with the dynamics of the hip-hop nation at the time. Fellow Death Row artist Snoop Doggy Dogg joins Shakur, composing the second half of “Amerika’s Most Wanted.” Snoop Dogg had recently been acquitted of murder, and Shakur was “Out on bail, fresh out of jail, California dreamin’.”71 The track thus contained the two most popularly criminalized rappers in the United States at the time. Shakur recognizes precisely this as he opens the track, stating, “Ahh shit, you done fucked up now! You done put two of America’s most wanted in the same motherfuckin’ place, at the same motherfuckin’ time, hahahahaha!” Various modalities of public culture had come to regard Shakur and Snoop Dogg as the most dangerous figures in hip-hop, for they had forcefully injected gangsta’s criminal fantasies into real life. However, in the artists’ hands, the mark of criminality becomes a source of power as they invoke gangsta commonplaces and their own legal troubles to fashion themselves as aggressive virtuosos who dominate the rap scene. Both survived the apparatuses of the American criminal justice system and were now poised to enlist their criminality toward cultural production, profit accumulation, and vengeance. While deploying the mark of criminality was part and parcel of Shakur’s “Thug Life” ethos, the ensuing lyrics demonstrated a new and less politically radical calculus of battle.

The artists rap over a smooth, g-funk-styled beat consisting of a synthesizer melody one might hear in a popular 1980s rhythm and blues hit and a pulsating break beat. In

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