From the penitentiary to the streets, it's on and popping. Thug life is more than spitting rhymes or hustling on the corner. Thugs live and die on the streets or end up in the "belly of the beast." Rappers name-drop guns by model number and call out drug dealers by name. Gangsta rap is crack-era nostalgia taken to the extreme. It's a world where rappers emulate their favorite hood stars in videos, celebrate their names in verse, and make ghetto heroes...

"In its early days, rap was understood as the poetry of the "inner city," which usually meant New York. Few expected anything as hard-edged as gangsta rap to emerge from Los Angeles, home of surf and sun. Felicia Viator tells the story of LA's self-styled "ghetto reporters," whose music forced America to see an urban crisis it preferred to ignore"--

"The Mark of Criminality illustrates the ways that the "war on crime" became conjoined--aesthetically, politically, and rhetorically--with the emergence of gangsta rap as a lucrative and deeply controversial subgenre of hip-hop. In The Mark of Criminality: Rhetoric, Race, and Gangsta Rap in the War-on-Crime Era, Bryan J. McCann argues that gangsta rap should be viewed as more than a damaging reinforcement of an era's worst racial stereotypes. Rather,...

In the tradition of Spinal Tap, this mockumentary parodying gangsta rap follows the career of rap group N.W.H.