Word: gangstas
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He’s far from gangsta infamy—but to tens of thousands, Slug is already a hero. It’s perhaps indicative of the current hip-hop climate that so many youths have latched onto his brand of reflective lyricism. While most mainstream and independent emcees seem perennially obsessed with the exterior—be it ice, skills, intelligence, or hip-hop itself—Slug raps about what eats at him inside. Check “Shrapnel” from the new Atmosphere album, God Loves Ugly: “Check your mail, climb your...
...black nationalists of Public Enemy and the ghetto-crime reporters of N.W.A. while LL Cool J flirted with the ladies and Bushwick Bill and M.C. Hammer kept things from getting too weighty. Some of these performers ran out of things to say; most were subsumed by the wave of gangsta culture that swept over rap in 1993. By the time Snoop Doggy Dogg's Doggystyle became the first rap album to debut at No.1, record labels and would-be rap stars were fully aware of rap's lucrative potential and piled on the gangsta parade. "Once one thing gets through...
...briefly toyed with going hard core himself, but it was a poor fit. He had always been a ladies' man (his name is an abbreviation of Ladies Love Cool James) and, while the rest of the industry has chased trends--from gangsta (Snoop Dogg) to pimp (Jay-Z) to pot-smoking party regionalist (Nelly)--LL has remained a lover...
...Hipman drives around in his one-man European car, worrying about how hip he is. Since this is a Crumb comic, a big-legged, big-chested Amazon soon puts him out of sorts, getting him in trouble with an even more diminutive, backwards-baseball-capped, trash-talking "gangsta'" named "Fishlips." Every era has received a similar razzing at the hands of Mr. Crumb. Fritz the Cat, happy-go-lucky and free lovin' until getting offed by his crazy ostrich girlfriend, became iconic of the sixties and seventies. The new volume of "Complete Crumb," which covers his work from...
...There is archival footage of Shaft's director, Gordon Parks, coaching Hayes as he records the movie's funk-legend theme, and critic Elvis Mitchell explains how Curtis Mayfield's antidrug score for Superfly subtly rebuts the movie's pusher-glorifying plot (the same tension as exists in much gangsta rap). The documentary confirms blaxploitation's lasting influence on music and movies by interviewing Afeni Shakur (mother of late rapper Tupac) and Quentin Tarantino, the white boy whom blaxploitation made. The Oscars may not recognize the legacy of blaxploitation anytime soon. But, Julien shows, the world outside the academy...