Barbaric Poetries: Appetite for Destruction

Reflecting the Blackboard topic from last week, I decided to hold out some of the rap videos created during the 90s. As a soul that grew up on MTV (when they still aired these things called music videos), I noticed a movement of increasing censorship on what you could say and/or do in a video. One of the key differences between the rap videos of old and new is the prevalence of weapons.

In the early 90's, it wasn't unusual to see a gun being flashed at an opposition or shown in the waist of a party attendee. Lately, rap artists have toned down the force that appears and music videos so that they can be aired on mainstream television. Of course, there are the videos that never take it to TV, but those tend to be of much lower quality.

In the embedded music video, N.W.A takes on a mobster-esque appearance that pays court to the organized crime of the early 1900s. As we moved on briefly, rappers often appeal to glorified criminals and mobsters in rank to pad their personas as individuals that are not to be provoked. The various weaponry in the video pale in comparison to the lyrics in this song, in which the members of N.W.A. express their opinions on their individual fearlessness and the requirement of execution to establish a point. In the concluding bars of the song, Eazy E claims to have the "10 Commandments of a Hip Hop Thugster.known as a thief and murderer." The commandments, which vary somewhat depending the lyric site you visit, discuss what it takes to be a real gangsta (further discourse on this in a future post). Basically, the rules highlight and reason with Eazy E's "appetite to kill," which is a brief description of the call as a whole.

This overuse of force in a music video and characterization of a gangster lifestyle is what originally put rap artists in a real bad light in America. Despite the truth of their lyrics on describing life where they came from, it did not raise a better standing for inner-city individuals, especially African-Americans struggling to unblock themselves from mob violence, because these rappers constantly advocated violence and murder. Has the wane in violent rap lyrics and videos led to safer neighborhoods and a reduction in inner-city violence? It would be tough to measure this accurately, but it does appear rap videos like this are simply memories of a different era in rap history.