Word: gangstas
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
SCAPEGOAT OF THE YEAR: Gangsta rap. Runner-up: Immigrants, legal...
...wary of proximity. Examining a volatile issue--sex, class, race--from too far away can make the resulting work seem bloodless. Standing too close puts the observer at risk of being sucked into the overly confessional world of daytime talk shows. In his new essay collection, Between God and Gangsta Rap: Bearing Witness to Black Culture (Oxford; $23; 218 pages), Michael Eric Dyson, a professor of communication studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, as well as a Baptist minister, gets the distance just right. In his prose one hears the fervor of a Sunday sermon...
...UNTIL NOW, THE TARGETS OF BILL (THE BOOK OF Virtues) Bennett's crusades have at least been plausible sources of evil. But the latest victim of his wrath--TV talk shows of the Sally Jessy Raphael variety--are in a whole different category from drugs and gangsta rap. As anyone who actually watches them knows, the talk shows are one of the most excruciatingly moralistic forums the culture has to offer. Disturbing and sometimes disgusting, yes, but their very business is to preach the middle-class virtues of responsibility, reason and self-control...
...topics like "You Want More Sex Than I Do," "I Want to Be an Escort" and "My Girlfriend Is a Guy." To some viewers that's entertainment. To others it's idiocy. To former Education Secretary William Bennett, it's cause for alarm. Bennett and C. DeLores Tucker, noted gangsta-rap haters, have joined with Senators Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut and Sam Nunn of Georgia in a campaign to wean Americans off what they call "cultural...
...more candid on other topics. He ridicules Senator Bob Dole's suggestion that there's too much sex and violence in movies: "I've looked at C-SPAN and said the same thing." Although he loved the movies Menace II Society and Boyz N the Hood, he feels the gangsta film genre may be exhausted: "I don't pay to see 'life in the hood' movies anymore. That story's been told. If someone has something to spill from their heart, God bless 'em, they should...but if someone's just saying, 'Oh I'm gonna keep doing this 'cause...