Word: gangsterisms
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Rhyme Pays, Marrow -- who goes by his high school nickname of Ice-T -- has set off critics who accuse him of glorifying crime, homophobia, sexism and violence. His profanity-laced descriptions of gang life in a Los Angeles ghetto fostered a genre of hard-core black music known as "gangster rap." Tipper Gore of the Parents' Music Resource Center singled out Ice-T for the "vileness of his message...
...admit that he was wrong. He has eliminated antigay messages from his raps. "I used to make fun of gay people, call them fags," he says. "But my homeys weren't down with that, so now I lay off." He has also left the most extreme, racist gangster rap to the likes of Ice Cube. Instead, he now focuses his energy on what he calls "intelligent hoodlum" material. Quincy Jones says Ice-T's work has "the best poetic quality of any rapper, and the strongest narrative I've ever heard...
Anyway, it stinks of calculation. The film -- about a Reno singer (Whoopi Goldberg) finding refuge from her gangster lover (Harvey Keitel) in a dilapidated convent run by staid Maggie Smith -- allows no room for irony, vagrant inspiration or air. There's something piquant about the look of Whoopi in a wimple, but the star must soar or sink with the vehicle, and this one is a bathysphere. Despite a nice turn by Kathy Najimy as a criminally chirpy nun and some inventive charts by ace arranger Marc Shaiman, Sister Act has corporate fingerprints smudging its smiling face...
...police responded, in part, by frequent "checks" of cars whose inhabitants met the gang members profile. "Black, young and male" covered a lot of the students at my school, however--the ones going to Brown University no less than the one that were members of the Black Gangster Disciples...
...where it was seen as a satire of me-first excesses of the Thatcher years, its central joke struck this reviewer as peculiarly English. For centuries Britons portrayed Italy as the epitome of treachery and mayhem; in this tale, although the McCrackens are enmeshed with five Italian gangster brothers (played by the same quick-changing actor), the real savagery is British born and bred. London's production, directed by the author, had the advantage of Michael Gambon in the lead. His Jack McCracken was a true reformer, alight with the intensity of a zealot, and his pain at being maneuvered...