On the allure and
the illusion of gangsters.
From Jesse
James to Al Capone,
Scarface to, well, Scarface, Bonnie and Clyde to Mickey and Mallory, there’s
certainly nothing new about our American love affair with outlaws and
gangsters, with those who make the wrong side of the law seem like the right
response to our crazy country and world. In fact, you could say that self-made criminals have
been idealized in our narratives for about as long as the
self-made man has. So anybody who critiques one of the more recent cultural
representations of that fascination, gangsta rap,
as something particularly new or disturbing is either unaware of these longstanding
histories and narratives or (more likely, to my mind) trying to mask racial
or cultural attitudes toward that particular genre behind these more general, moralizing
critiques.
But on the other
hand, just because gangsta rap isn’t new doesn’t mean there aren’t ways to
critique it, or at least its most excessive versions; and recently I’ve
experienced a striking contrast that has led me to one such critique. I’ve been
re-watching all five seasons of The Wire
and have come to my favorite, Season
4, with its focus on the four middle school boys struggling with childhood
and adult realities in West Baltimore. Each of the four is, in his own
catastrophic way, directly impacted by the culture of the corners, of the drug
trade—a culture that traffics (pun intended) heavily in the gangster mythos (it’s
no accident that the killer Snoop wears a Scarface shirt in one episode). And
while I’ve watched these four young men (fictional characters, but no less real
because of it) experience the darkest realities of those myths, I’ve happened
to hear numerous gangsta rap tracks on the local rap and hip hop radio station,
including (to cite only one example) Snoop Dogg’s “Drop It Like It’s
Hot,” in which he raps “Oh you got a gun so now you wanna pop back?/AK47
now nigga, stop that!/Cement shoes, now I’m on the move/Your family’s crying,
now you on the news.”
Again, the gap
between the image and the reality of gangsters has been part of our narratives
for centuries—but I can’t help but feel that the gap is particularly
destructive when it impacts young men for whom gangster life is a very real
possibility, rather than simply the briefly attractive fantasy it offers so
many of us. One young man for whom it seems to have been an all-too-real
possibility is Aaron
Hernandez, the professional football player currently awaiting a murder
trial here in the Boston area; another was Odin
Lloyd, the local man Hernandez is accused of murdering. Whatever precisely
happened on the June night that was Lloyd’s last, it seems clear (to me, at
least) that both Lloyd and Hernandez were caught up in the pursuit of a
gangster life, of the guns and the crew and the respect and all the myths that
come with it. And when the realities caught up with the myths, their American
stories—like all those I’ve mentioned in this post—ended tragically.
Special post this weekend,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other 2013 events you’d remember?
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