48
Popular Culture Review
colonizing the postmodern space of info-media. Gangsta Rappers are subjects who
are well infomied about the fluidity of signification in real life vis-a-vis the optical
power of mass-mediated images, a power that engenders a practical effect on their
own artistic activities. This situation suggests that a crucial impact of the mass
media upon the power structure of contemporary society is the diversification of
who gains profits by utilizing the media's capabilities. It is the mass media that
duplicate and disseminate the signs implicit in represented material and thus,
produce the efficacy of self-commodification.
The actual problem with which inner cities are faced, however, seems to
be more serious than what Gangsta Rappers' simulation of “home boys” can
represent. For instance, Mike Davis suggests that the minority gang figure in the
white imagination produces an intense paranoia providing political authorities with
an imagined justification to destroy the inner-city community. According to Davis,
in April 1988, the police action “Operation HAMMER” resulted in the arrests of
1,453 Black youth in South Central Los Angeles, which is more than the number
arrested during the Watts Rebellion of 1965. As the unusual number indicates,
they were arrested “mostly for trivial offenses like delinquent parking tickets”
(268). With regard to “the contemporary Gang scare” that certainly produces hamiful
effects for inner city residents, Gangsta Rappers' personal exploitation of the
mainstream culture industry cannot create a practical solution to inner city
oppression. Even though rappers benefit from manipulating self-representations,
black youth arrested w ithout a legitim ate cause are victim ized by such
misrepresentation by institutional power. Implied here is the inadequacy of
postmodernist manipulation of signs as a realistic strategy of changing the social
positions of those who are actually menaced by institutional oppressions.
More significantly, Gangsta R appers' media politics, through its
spontaneous participation in the media's recreation of African-American identities,
undermines the original purpose of rap music: presentation of counter knowledge
about contemporary society through life-experience. Again, Gangsta Rappers’
strategic self-commodification is the model that presumes the dominance of the
hyperreal over the real; therefore, this postmodern reaction to the media society
does not raise the issue of the legitimacy of the gangster image itself In other
words, this method of resistance only concerns itself with how one can utilize or
reappropriate an image as a symbolic resource for musical creation. The limitation
o f Gangsta R ap’s resistance is thus inevitably problematized in terms of
contemporary debates about identity politics in a multicultural society. Ironically
enough, strategic commodification, which has been enabled by the postmodern
dissolution of the text-life as well as object-subject categories and by multiple
expressions of black culture, suspends the question of identity, an integral issue
concerning the recognition of multicultural social constituents. If one tries to rely