Nuthin' but a "G" Thang

The Culture and Commerce of Gangsta Rap

Eithne Quinn

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9780231518109
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: African American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

In the late 1980s, gangsta rap music emerged in urban America, giving voice to—and making money for—a social group widely considered to be in crisis: young, poor, black men. From its local origins, gangsta rap went on to flood the mainstream, generating enormous popularity and profits. Yet the highly charged lyrics, public battles, and hard, fast lifestyles that characterize the genre have incited the anger of many public figures and proponents of "family values." Constantly engaging questions of black identity and race relations, poverty and wealth, gangsta rap represents one of the most profound influences on pop culture in the last thirty years.

Focusing on the artists Ice Cube, Dr. Dre, the Geto Boys, Snoop Dogg, and Tupac Shakur, Quinn explores the origins, development, and immense appeal of gangsta rap. Including detailed readings in urban geography, neoconservative politics, subcultural formations, black cultural debates, and music industry conditions, this book explains how and why this music genre emerged. In Nuthin'but a "G" Thang, Quinn argues that gangsta rap both reflected and reinforced the decline in black protest culture and the great rise in individualist and entrepreneurial thinking that took place in the U.S. after the 1970s. Uncovering gangsta rap's deep roots in black working-class expressive culture, she stresses the music's aesthetic pleasures and complexities that have often been ignored in critical accounts.

CHAPTER 1 A Gangsta Parable

IN 1986, the San Francisco–based brewer McKenzie River Corporation launched a new brand of malt liquor, a kind of high-alcohol beer, called St. Ides. Two years later, struggling to find a market niche, the brewer dramatically reoriented St. Ides’s brand image by dropping the soul group Four Tops as endorsers and turning instead to rap artists. Rather than employ the services of more established rappers, McKenzie River approached the underground, burgeoning rap scene in Los Angeles to market its product. The brewer signed up producer DJ Pooh (Mark Jordan), who was entrusted with production of the commercials. McKenzie River almost totally relinquished creative control, giving Pooh great latitude in production decisions. The underground producer laid down the tracks and recruited rap performers who would write their own odes to St. Ides in commercials that were aired on radio and television. The marketing coup that McKenzie River pulled off was quite extraordinary. It had tapped into the beginnings of West Coast gangsta rap before the genre term gangsta had even been coined. DJ Pooh was making a living producing records and deejaying as part of LA’s Lench Mob, affiliated with the Uncle Jam’s Army crew. The campaign’s debut rapper was King Tee, affiliated with Ice-T’s Rhyme Syndicate and a native of Compton, California. DJ Pooh soon enlisted the services of Ice Cube (O’Shea Jackson), then a member of a newly formed group called NWA, short for “Niggaz With Attitude.”

The early St. Ides TV spots are exemplary artifacts of the gangsta repertoire. Stylistically, they communicate a strong sense of street authenticity: exaggerated codes of video realism; loose, beat-driven camera movement, jumping frames, and rapid-fire editing; and, of course, the hip street vernacular, dress code, and stylized gestures of the rap artists themselves. Ice Cube became the most successful of the early St. Ides endorsers. One ad shows Cube in concert and includes a controversial couplet claiming that the beverage enhances male sexual prowess and female desire (malt liquor “gets your girl in the mood quicker, gets your jimmy thicker”). Another 1990 spot finds him taking part in a “Pepsi challenge” of malt liquor brands set in Venice Beach (a clear rebuke to chief competitor Olde English 800, known as “8-Ball”). A third commercial, called “Under the 6th Street Bridge,” from 1991, also mobilizes a strong sense of locale, this time representing not LA’s sun-and-sand lifestyle but the authentic rootedness of a bleak, disinvested site in LA’s concrete sprawl. As we will see, such place symbolism, fired by market competition, was central to gangsta’s visual and lyrical iconography. The first cluster of these St. Ides commercials presented some of the earliest widely rotated images of hip-hop regionalism (away from its New York headquarters). DJ Pooh made cameo appearances in most of these ads, signaling the importance not only of what is represented but also of who has creative control. Economic self-determination and creative autonomy—the touchstones of rap “representing”—fueled the publicity images of these St. Ides endorsers.

In two 1991 ads set in recording studios, Cube appears alongside East Coast rap group EPMD and Houston’s Geto Boys. Rather than conceal their marketing function, as “creative” commercials often do, these ads draw attention to their own promotional status by including shots of St. Ides posters and other merchandize as part of the studio mise-en-scène. This deepens the linkage between gangsta production and St. Ides (the ad starts with Cube taking a “swig” from his 40-oz. bottle) by foregrounding the place-based connection between product, place, and practice. At the same time, these spots document collaborations between regional rap scenes. Creative alliances between East and West were to become more fraught as tensions mounted in the 1990s, while those between South (particularly Texas) and West would flourish. Close migratory connections exist between the black South and West, inscribed in gangsta music from its beginnings. King Tee, for instance, began his music career as a teenager in Texas. Returning to Compton he brought with him the “transplanted southerner” attitude and “act-a-fool”¹ sensibility that were to become so important to West Coast rap. To understand the symbolic importance of St. Ides, we need to periodize this ad campaign. For a long time, brewing companies had targeted black, urban, working-class communities with their strong, cheap beverages. Up until the mid-1980s, malt liquor was popularly associated with an older black populace—as music critic Nelson George remarks, then-market leader Colt 45 was the “R&B brew.”² With the arrival and increasing ascendancy of hip-hop, a consumer-driven product realignment occurred. Rap groups Run DMC and NWA started to brandish and “name check” malt liquor in publicity material and on record, particularly Olde English 800, in what one critic called “de facto product placement.”³ With new eager consumers and gratis endorsers, the market for high-alcohol beer was exploding, growing at a rate of at least 25 percent a year in the late 1980s.⁴ Shrewd McKenzie River decided to cash in on this subcultural trend by commercially cementing the rearticulation of malt liquor. Tellingly, where Colt 45 had a “softer” high-alcohol content of 4.5 percent, “new jack” St. Ides was a heady 7.3 percent. Dropping the Four Tops, whom one journalist dubbed “Motown warhorses,”⁵ and picking up DJ Pooh and King Tee was a pivotal decision that both reflected and reinforced a sense of generational shift and schism: from soul to “post-soul.”

Forty-ounce bottles (“40s”) of malt liquor became iconic accessories of gangsta rap, homologous with the focal concerns, activities, and collective self-image of the working-class subculture from which the music sprang. Cheap, intoxicating, and no frills, St. Ides connotes roughneck authenticity. It became, in the words of Stuart Hall and his collaborators, one of those “objects in which [the subcultural members] could see their central values held and reflected.”⁶ The brew boasts a sweeter taste, and in so doing declares a rejection of finesse: it stands, just as gangsta does, in opposition to respectable or acquired bourgeois tastes. As gangsta rapper DOC (Trey Curry) drawls pointedly on his 1989 debut album: “I gotta take one o’ them long-ass 8-Ball pisses—Take me to a commercial!”⁷ Malt liquor’s lower-class status, its lack of cultural capital (or, following Sarah Thornton, its “subcultural capital”), was exactly the point.⁸ Where traditional malt liquor advertising was at pains to link the brew to material success and status, St. Ides commercials were, to deploy that resonant neologism, “ghettocentric.”⁹ This term expresses the focus on poor and working-class urban identity, culture, and values, which increasingly pervaded black youth culture in the 1980s and 1990s—in no small part as a result of gangsta rap. Ghettocentric identity—its roots deep in African American history, as we will see—provided an expressive response to the deindustrialization, rightwing policies, and market liberalization that had been draining away productive resources from America’s urban centers since the 1970s. This powerful, cheap depressant was the favored brew of young people with lots of time on their hands, frustrated aspirations, and little cash. Thus “40-oz. culture”¹⁰ was a response or symbolic solution, as it were, to the problems posed by economic disadvantage and social isolation.¹¹

Sales of St. Ides soared, turning it into the market leader by 1991—the same year that gangsta rap first topped the pop album charts in the U.S.¹² Feeding and fueling this extraordinary dual success was the release of the acclaimed ghetto action movie Boyz N the Hood, starring Ice Cube and containing many scenes in which he prominently displays and consumes St. Ides 40s.¹³ Cube’s charismatic but disaffected character Doughboy exemplifies West Coast ghettocentrism. The striking prominence of the St. Ides placement, granted almost causal narrative status, is best illustrated by teenage Doughboy’s first dramatic appearance on screen and his poignant exit at the end. In the first, the subcultural milieu is quickly established with a shot of four young black men playing dominoes and drinking malt liquor. As the camera pans over to frame Cube’s face for the first time, the shot lingers for a moment in close-up on his St. Ides bottle. Introduced in the very same shot, Cube and St. Ides appear inseparable. His final gesture in the movie, just before we learn of his subsequent murder, is to pour out the last of the 40 he has been drinking. This is an elusive gesture of libation: is he intimating disillusion with his nihilistic lifestyle by discarding the poisonous, warmed-over brew, or, by contrast, commemorating his dead brother? Cube’s role and its deep product linkage were key factors in the drink’s crossover, traveling, along with gangsta rap, well beyond black America into the lucrative white youth market.

With growing success came growing condemnation. McKenzie River and its rap endorsers became the subjects of public outcry and federal complaint. Some pressure groups stressed the target marketing of young blacks; others focused on the targeting of youth generally. State officials described the ads for St. Ides as “illegal, false, and obscene” and called on the government to crack down.¹⁴ Protestors charged that McKenzie River was using irresponsible rap stars to sell this powerful intoxicant to impressionable fans, who in turn wanted to buy into its subcultural cachet. The parallel with the media storm surrounding gangsta rap proper is striking. Where McKenzie River, in manufacturing and selling potent liquor, was seen to be “poisoning the bodies” of young people, gangsta rappers and their videos were seen to be glamorizing social ills and thereby “poisoning minds.” Even worse, in St. Ides ads the twin evils converged, infecting mind and body simultaneously. The following complaint filed with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms over St. Ides advertising could just as well serve as an indictment of gangsta: it “glamorizes gangs, [and] often contains obscene or other sexual references.”¹⁵ Protests against alcohol use among the young led to the labeling of high-alcohol drinks with warnings from the surgeon general—only to find that the labels contributed to an increase in underage drinking.¹⁶ Likewise, the parental advisory labels that came to be printed on explicit rap records inadvertently worked to promote sales. Malt liquor thus became a high-voltage product around which the social meanings and effects of gangsta rap itself were debated and disputed.

Among the most vociferous denouncers was teetotaler Chuck D (Carl Ridenhour) of the leading rap group Public Enemy. In 1991, a St. Ides radio commercial that aired in six cities sampled Chuck D’s voice, evidently without his consent. In response, he lodged a $5 million lawsuit against McKenzie River, suing for copyright infringement and defamation of his name.¹⁷ He refused to settle out of court, instead using the judicial platform to draw attention to the worrying social issues raised by the case.¹⁸ Chuck D corroborated his critique with the arresting Public Enemy track “1 Million Bottlebags.”¹⁹ He challenges the black community to take more responsibility: “Yo, black spend 288 million / sittin’ there waitin’ for the fizz, and don’t know what the fuck it is.” He stresses the harm caused by the beverage (“look, watch shorty get sicker, year after year / while he’s thinkin’ it’s beer, but it’s not / but he got it in his gut, so what the fuck”), and he accuses white-bread corporations of targeting the inner cities (“he’s just a slave to the bottle and the can / ’cause that’s his man, the malt liquor man”).²⁰ The track forwards a familiar two-pronged attack—calling for black responsibility and calling out white corporate exploitation—that would be mobilized many times by gangsta detractors. Damaged by bad publicity, and in an effort to improve its image, McKenzie River made a public commitment to donate at least $100,000 per year to black community projects, to be selected by Cube and financed by the brewer.²¹ The roster of St. Ides endorsers went on to include other gangsta artists like Snoop Dogg and Compton’s Most Wanted, and later still by Notorious BIG and Method Man. In 1998, McKenzie River dropped the St. Ides brand, reportedly because of continuing public pressure. (As of 2004, it was being manufactured by Pabst.)

Looking at adverts and rap music simultaneously is revealing because, as this book will argue, gangsta (more than other rap subgenres) was at pains to expose and critically engage its own commercial impetus and commodified status. There is a frank assertion in gangsta of the need and desire for profit and of the entrepreneurial basis of pop-music production. Instead of incurring the common accusation of “selling out” from its core audience, the promoting of St. Ides actually worked to enhance rappers’ “keepin’ it real” image. Cube’s 1991 track “A Bird in the Hand,” which shares the same momentous loop as one of his St. Ides commercials, provides a preliminary illustration of the deep and self-conscious connections between rapping and endorsing.²² Cube adopts the persona of a young black man who turns to selling illegal drugs in order to support his family. He paints a trademark first-person portrait of how an individual—in the face of deindustrialization and punitive government policy—is cornered into a position of callous individualism:

Fresh out of school ’cause I was a high school grad

Gots to get a job ’cause I was a high school dad

Wish I got paid like I was rappin’ to the nation

But that’s not likely, so here’s my application

Pass it to the man at AT&T

’Cause when I was in school I got the AEE

But there’s no SE for this youngster

I didn’t have no money so now I have to punch the

Clock like a slave, that’s what be happenin’

But whitey says there’s no room for the African

Always knew that I would boycott, jeez

But “welcome to McDonald’s, can I take your order please?”

Gotta sell ya food that might give you cancer

’Cause my baby doesn’t take no for an answer

Now I pay taxes that you never give me back

What about diapers, bottles, and Similac?

Do I gotta go sell me a whole lotta crack

For decent shelter and clothes on my back?

Or should I just wait for help from Bush

Or Jesse Jackson and Operation Push?

This is a quintessential gangsta track: rich, dramatic storytelling in the first person (unlike Public Enemy’s third-person proclamations); an ethic of survivalist individualism; potent social commentary (Cube rejects white Republican and even black Democrat); and—not to be forgotten—playful, robust humor.

The track proffers an implied explanation for Cube’s endorsement of St. Ides. Most directly, the shared backing track of song and commercial invites listeners to draw parallels between the story of selling drugs, endorsing St. Ides, and producing gangsta rap. All are construed as socially irresponsible but income-generating necessities. Moreover, we are invited to make broader connections between the entrepreneurial activities of rapping and product endorsing. Radio ad and rap track work unapologetically to cross-promote each other. The title adage, “a bird in the hand,” captures belief in immediate personal gain rather than in long-deferred promises of social amelioration for the urban poor—promises that were, more than ever, “in the Bush.”

Subcultural-studies scholars have often focused on the subverting of conventional meanings of objects: the bricolage of punk in its use of safety pins and plastic trashcan liners to adorn the body, or the implied critique of early hip-hop’s oversize gold c...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• Further Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1. A Gangsta Parable
• Chapter 2. Gangsta’s Rap: Black Cultural Studies and the Politics of Representation
• Chapter 3. Alwayz Into Somethin’: Gangsta’s Emergence in 1980s Los Angeles
• Chapter 4. Straight Outta Compton: Ghetto Discourses and the Geographies of Gangsta
• Chapter 5. The Nigga Ya Love to Hate: Badman Lore and Gangsta Rap
• Chapter 6. Who’s the Mack? Rap Performance and Trickster Tales
• Chapter 7. It’s a Doggy-Dogg World: The G-Funk Era and the Post-Soul Family
• Chapter 8. Tupac Shakur and the Legacies of Gangsta
• Notes
• Index