PROLOGUEquestioned Ja Rule’s masculinity and place in hip hop. Though hisrecord label, Interscope Records, packaged him as a new style popfigure 50’s image harkened back to a darker and more cynical era inhip hop, a period when ruthless gangstas defined the movement’s pop persona and made its move on the nation’s pop music charts.Many blamed the celebration of all things gangsta for the senselessmurders of two of hip hop’s most talented figures, 2Pac (TupacShakur) and the Notorious B. I. G. (Christopher Wallace). The marketingof 50 Cent came straight from the script that guided 2Pac’smeteoric rise and tragic fall.While his music was a stirring mix of party anthems, hypercapitalism,gangsta swagger, and pop posturing, it was really the selling of 50’s background that upped the ante. His life as a petty drug dealer,the death of his crack-addicted mother, and his miraculous survivalof nine bullets formed a classic ghetto tale that put him on the popmap. That biography earned him the most important credential incorporate hip hop, street credibility. Hip hop’s claim to fame is theclaim of authenticity in its undaunted portrayals of ghetto reality.Cloaked in the armor of authenticity 50 boasted that his rhymesabout ghetto life, struggle, and survival were real and not commercially premeditated.Equally important, the bid for street credibility is also part of themarketing and selling of hip hop, how the movement’s entrepreneurialelite manage to generate that all-important buzz and hip presence in a cluttered and competitive pop culture economy. It was,in essence, hip hop’s own Faustian bargain. In exchange for globalcelebrity, pop prestige, and cultural influence hip hop’s top performershad to immerse themselves into a world of urban villainy that bythe new millennium had lost sight of the line between pop life andreal life.It was, without question, one of the cruelest ironies in the rise andtransformation of hip hop: the fact that its livelihood” indeed itsvery survival as a pop culture juggernaut” rested almost entirely onits ability to sell black death. The embrace of guns, gangsterism, and2Watkins, S. Craig.
Hip Hop Matters : Politics, Pop Culture, and the Struggle for the Soul of aMovement.
Boston, MA, USA: Beacon Press, 2006. p 2.10
Copyright ? 2006. Beacon Press. All rights reserved.
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