hip-hop - Chicago Hustle and Flow: Gangs, Gangsta Rap, and Social Class

Chicago Hustle and Flow: Gangs, Gangsta Rap, and Social Class

Geoff Harkness

University of Minnesota Press

2014

244 pages

Like many other people, I’ve been interested in the Chicago drill scene since rapper Chief Keef deleted his cruel tweets mocking his murdered rival Lil Jojo. Lil Jojo was, like Chief Keef, a rapper from Chicago’s South Side Englewood neighborhood who was antagonizing the ascending scene star and his associates back in the summer of 2012. Jojo had rapped that he’s ‘BDK’ (meaning 'Black Disciple killer' - Black Disciple was the gang Keef claimed affiliation to) over the beat from Keef’s early hit track, Everyday.

Jojo also drove around Keef’s neighborhood shouting insults at Keef and his friend, rapper Lil Reese.

Within 24 hours of the above video appearing online, Jojo had been gunned down in the street. Chief Keef responded at first with mocking twitter messages, only to delete them a short time later, replacing them with claims that his account was hacked and messages of condolences to Jojo’s family. At this time Keef was a rising national hip-hop star and he must have had people working on managing his image to find that perfect balance of hood authenticity and mainstream acceptability that's so important to obtaining the desired mass audience of white suburban teenagers that make mainstream hip-hop commercially viable. What came across in those tweets, before they were deleted, was the essence of the more-death-than-death-metal, intensely anti-social, nihilism of the Chiraq drill music scene.

I was in the library looking for an entirely different book in the stacks when Chicago Hustle and Flow caught my attention. The title’s mention of Chicago and the book’s 2014 publication date gave me the idea that it might be about the drill scene in Chicago. Drill is characterized by its simplistic and repetitive \ lyrics of street violence, drug use, general anti-social attitudes and self-destruction, spat over beats that are closer to house/techno than hip-hop. The drillers are only mentioned in Chicago Hustle and Flow's Introduction and Conclusion (which were almost certainly the last completed sections of the book), the term ‘drill’ doesn’t appear in the text, and its only the Keef/Jojo rivalry that’s discussed in regards to this component of the Chicago scene. Author Harkness loves hiphop and whatnot but he's discussing pre-drill Chicago hip-hop and he therefore had the bad luck of researching a scene too early in time. 

Chicago and the midwest has contributed a lot to music, especially underground music:

Chicago’s given the world house music while techno came from nearby Detroit,

And industrial rock comes from Chicago

elsewhere in the midwest a lot of the earliest and best punk and new wave bands come from that area as well.

More recently DJ Rashad (RIP) and the Teklife crew have been producing skittering footwork tracks out of Chicago.

But for all of the innovation that's come out of Chicago and its surrounding region, Chicago hasn’t really given hiphop any unique movement to speak of. Obviously Kanye West is from Chicago, but he’s an international superstar that’s successfully blended with the NY crowd, and there are some other rappers who come from Chicago but haven’t created any particular Chicago movement. Chicago, as a city, has in recent years given hip-hop something of its own with the repetitive, joyfully violent, explicitly gang-affiliated, drill music scene led by Chief Keef, Lil Durk, and their producer Young Chop.

Instead of discussing drill, Harkness investigates the tensions between street life and music performance/production among some pre-drill Chicago street rappers, noting their working class or lumpen origins, and the correlations between those origins and their street lifestyles and attitudes towards music. While Harkness is always clear that he’s conducting a sociological study of a ‘microscene’ of Chicago gangsta rappers, his conclusions are already known to anyone who's been paying attention to the things rappers have been saying for the past 30 years. You don’t have to be a sociologist to know that, for example, an unstable concept of authenticity is nearly essential to the success of a street rapper. These rapper's fans contest the authenticity of their favorite hood rappers on a daily basis via youtube comments and you can check any of these videos to confirm that statement. Books like this serve the function of making the things non-academic people already know knowable to sociologists. Thanks to Harkness, future scholars of hip-hop have a text to refer to if they need to explain what a mixtape is.

ultras - 2010 - Football, Fascism, and Fandom: The UltraS of Italian Football

Football, Fascism, and Fandom: The UltraS of Italian Football

Alberto Testa and Gary Armstrong

2010

A & C Black

256 pages

In Italy, Football fanatics are called Ultras and engage in many of the same soccer related activities as the Casuals in England. They fight with each other and they sing songs to their team while insulting the fans of their opponents.... and so forth. There are some differences too, though, unlike the English Casuals the UltraS wear their team colours and that’s about it for differences as far as I can tell from reading Football, Fascism, and Fandom. If there are other differences, they’re obscured by this book’s degree of focus on strictly neo-fascist UltraS firms, and their focus on uncharacteristically large firms.

Alberto Testa and Gary Armstrong make all the connections needed to satisfy the reader that the Irriducibili, supporter of SS Lazio, and the Boys, supporter firm of FC Roma, are great admirers of Mussolini, opponents of immigration, lovers of violence, etc. Just like everywhere, in England the English Defense League recruits from hooligans and in Germany, Football hooligans are thought to make up a significant component of the Islamophobic Pageda movement. It is interesting to read about the unique ways that these attitudes are given form among fans in Italy, the birthplace of Fascism, as the teams whose supporters are the object of study for this book both play in a stadium created by the Fascist regime in a city where some monuments to that period still stand.

While Testa’s and Armstrong’s book gets into all of the specific ways Fascism is given a new voice in Italian sports-fandom, particularly in these support clubs, there’s something disappointing about the tight focus this book places on Irriducibili and Boys when the book’s subtitle ‘The UltraS of Italian Football’ led me to believe that I would be reading an overview of the Italian UltraS scene with a focus on political attitudes. The two firms the book discusses, in that they support major clubs in Rome, are undoubtedly at the heart of Italian football, and they may be taken by the reader, at first, as representative of the larger UltraS scene. When reading through the book though, its suspect how typical they are. Irriducibili have built a brand of merchandise using the logos of their firm. How many other firms have a reputation that’s commercially viable? Additionally, they’re both neo-fascist groups, but its not surprising that there are connections between sports fandom and rightwing politics. Major league sports with city teams has, on a surface level, a lot to offer to adherents of the political right. There are moments in reading Testa and Armstrong’s account of these firms where they allude to other Italian teams having left-wing supporters, and I’d like to know more about them and how they come to be.

So essentially my issues with the book dont emerge from any problem with the book content but rather from a gap I perceive between the book and its content.

There was one statement in the book that I found especially troubling, when the authors noted that the method spectator’s used to express racism, that is, grunting like an animal when a black player took possession of the ball - the same method of expressing racism Bill Buford described witnessing on the English terraces in the 1980s in his 1991 hooligan ethnography, Among the Thugs - was practiced by the spectators at large, and not simply by the UltraS, and are therefore ‘beyond ideological explanation’. It is not at all clear to me how such a statement is true.

outlaw motorcycle clubs - book - 2004 - The Brotherhoods: Inside the Outlaw Motorcycle Clubs

The Brotherhoods: Inside the Outlaw Motorcycle Clubs
Arthur Veno
Allen & Unwin
2004
300 pages

Arthur Veno is, along with Rebels author Daniel R. Wolf (whom Veno refers to as “the late”), one of the only sociologists to look at the outlaw biker phenomenon. Wolf has looked at the clubs in the Canadian context and Veno worked primarily in the Australian. As of March 2013 no one has published research, in book form, on outlaw bikers in the American context.  

Veno is currently either an adjunct professor of social sciences and psychology at Victoria University in Melbourne Australia, or he is an adjunct professor of criminology at Monash University in Melbourne, I don’t know which although he has held a number of other academic appointments in the past. Outlaw bikers appear to be his major research interest and all of his recent publications, according to his CV, are biker related, including a now out of print book about the women of the outlaw biker subculture.  

The book covers much of the same sociological ground as Daniel Wolf’s The Rebels, and Veno positions himself to his object of study in a similar manner as Wolf had, that is, as a cool outsider that the bikers can hang out with and talk to. In The Rebels, Wolf presented himself as a dedicated researcher who loves riding his bike enough that he was accepted by the club he researched. The Rebels ends with Wolf stating that he was ultimately rejected by new group of Rebels who he never rode with or made any agreements with regarding his research. Veno presents himself as someone who is, and will continue to be, an intermediary between the outlaw bikers of Australia, and agents from other social spheres, including law enforcement and media. The Brotherhoods is, at times, Veno’s personal account of life as someone who studies bikies (that’s the Australian term for bikers, by the way). Mostly, however, Veno’s book is a proper, albeit readable, sociological overview of the bikie subculture.

One aspect of the subculture I was hoping to read more about in The Brotherhoods were the self-mythologizing of the bikies. In the US and Canada, biker gangs emerged at the intersecting point between thrillseeking ex-air force returning from war, and delinquent youth gangs - but the myth bikers tell themselves and try to project into the world is that they’re the last living remnant of America’s wild west frontier. I hoped that the Australian bikies would claim to be living out Road Warrior fantasies but instead Veno’s book begins with a quotation from an Australian Hells Angel who claims lineage with Ned Kelly, an Australian bandit and folk hero of the late 19th century.

street gangs - book - 1995 - The American Street Gang: Its Nature, Prevalence, and Control

The American Street Gang: Its Nature, Prevalence, and Control
Malcolm L. Klein
Oxford University Press
1995
270 pages

Malcolm Klein is probably one of the leading experts on twentieth century street gangs, their activities and social formations.  His first books on the subject were published in the early 1970s, when modern street gangs were in their nascent stages (The Crips, for example, now the largest of the Los Angeles street gangs, and prone to internal fracture and conflict, was only a few years old at that time, and still operating with the Black Panthers as their model).  Klein currently holds emeritus status at the University of Southern California with their department of sociology, and he is also a popular media expert on gangs.

Klein analyzes the gangs as social units and largely discerns them from other units which may look similar (like motorcycle clubs, for example) according to a number of different social factors.  Many of which are personal factors wherein the gang is an appropriate social forum in which to express them, such as the need for respect, recognition, and achievement, while other factors are more broadly social, such as poverty. Klein is, however, sure to note that no single factor, including poverty, is sufficient in describing what directs young people to a gang life.

Klein also discusses the criminal activities of gangs, noting that while police exaggerate the crimes of gangs and reduce them to purely fighting units, often the gang members exaggerate their own criminal antics as well.  Furthermore, according to Klein, while gang members gain respect for their demonstrated willingness to do violence or transgress against norms, gang leaders are not necessarily the most violent members, according to Klein, and may not be violent at all.  

Much of Klein's analysis comes from speaking through his experiences in conducting past research and in working directly with law enforcement and with gang members in affected areas.The determination of a city as a 'gang city' circa 1995 had a politics surrounding it with both benefits and detriments to the urban centre that gained such a distinction so he acknowledges that some of his data might be questionable. This book was published during a peak period of gang popularity and hysteria, when music by Death Row Records hip-hop artists, and films like Menace II Society and Boyz In Da Hood were pushing very specific symbols and images of LA gang culture into the mainstream and it serves as a strong academic voice to counter the effects of such cultural forms.