Media-Transmitted African-American Attitudes
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and with the dominant media's infixing the gangster image in rap music. This
analysis then suggests that the present rap ‘"phenomenon” is a media event, or a
“hyperreality” in the sphere of “televisuality” in Fiske’s sense (Fiske 2).
Jean Baudrillard’s theory concerning the dissolution of representation into
simulation in contemporary society further helps us to unpack the postmodern
condition surrounding rap, the media, and the audience. Even though Gangsta Rap
is a media construction, this fact alone hardly curtails its established commercial
appeal. For, despite Gangsta Rap's constructedness, audience members cannot help
but read signs of reality, or simulate their experience of reality, by accessing the
representation of it through rap. Regardless of the arbitrariness of the signs in
Gangsta Rap, audience members receive some sense o f reality from its
representations; and it is basically impossible to experience the real outside of the
constructedness of the model in this situation. Yet, more fundamentally in a realm
of constructed simulations— including the society in which the televisual reality
of “gangster” prevails over the actual social problems concerning minority lives—
there is no single absolute standard forjudging the epistemological adequacy of
the one-to-one relations between sign and object, which are for Ice-T, the rap
message and black social experiences.
Baudrillard declares the end of epistemology based on the subject-object
relationship, mediated through signification. For, in a realm of constructed
simulation, there is no standard forjudging the epistemological adequacy of sign
to object. Nonetheless, according to Baudrillard, social order requires a certain
sense of reality to provide grounds for truth, falsity, and rational distinction, upon
all of which power depends. This is the moment at which “the power of media
control” emerges (as in the way that Public Enemy proposes); at the same time, as
Rose argues, the connection between rap music and violence is authenticated. In
this ironic inversion, power must derive its reality from the dominant representation
to establish, at least, some possibility of an intelligible distinction between the
senses of true and false. As a consequence, the agency of power of the media
propagates simulation, or a hypeireality (Baudrillard 39-46).
This hyperreality does not mean that musicians called Gangsta Rappers
do not really exist. But rather, as Dyson puts it, this concept explains “the genre's
essential constructedness, its literal artifice”; now “many ‘gangstas' turn out to be
middle-class blacks faking home boy roots” (179). Analyzed in this way, the activity
o f G angsta R appers seems to exem plify the schem e o f strategic selfcommodification. They have, in a sense, fabricated particular black images
complicitOLis with the dominant stereotypes. Flowever, they seem not to be
concerned about the absence of “real life” in their representations, because for
them, the representations themselves, in reality, generate money and attract mass
attention. This is their paradoxical way of resisting the dominant culture by