num_pages: 208
description: Illustrates the ways that the war on crime became conjoinedaesthetically politically and rhetoricallywith the emergence of gangsta rap as a lucrative and deeply controversial subgenre of hip-hopIn The Mark of Rhetoric Race and Gangsta Rap in the War-on-Crime Era  Bryan J. McCann argues that gangsta rap should be viewed as more than a damaging reinforcement of an eras worst racial stereotypes. Rather he positions the works of key gangsta rap artists as well as the controversies their work produced squarely within the law-and-order politics and popular culture of the 1980s and 1990s to reveal a profoundly complex period in American history when the meanings of crime and criminality were incredibly unstable. At the center of this erawhen politicians sought to prove their tough-on-crime credentialswas the mark of criminality a set of discourses that labeled members of predominantly poor urban and minority communities as threats to the social order. Through their use of the mark of criminality public figures implemented extremely harsh penal polices that have helped make the United States the worlds leading jailer of its adult population. At the same time when politicians like Ronald Reagan George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton and television shows such as COPS and Americas Most Wanted perpetuated images of gang and drug-filled ghettos gangsta rap burst out of the hip-hop nation emanating mainly from the predominantly black neighborhoods of South Central Los Angeles. Groups like NWA and solo artists (including Dr. Dre Snoop Dogg and Tupac Shakur) became millionaires by marketing the very discourses political and cultural leaders used to justify their war on crime. For these artists the mark of criminality was a source of power credibility and revenue. By understanding gangsta rap as a potent if deeply imperfect enactment of the mark of criminality we can better understand how crime is always a site of struggle over meaning. Furthermore by underscoring the nimble rhetorical character of criminality we can learn lessons that may inform efforts to challenge our nations failed policies of mass incarceration.
language: English
title: The Mark of Criminality: Rhetoric, Race, and Gangsta Rap in the War-on-Crime Era
publisher: University Alabama Press