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Abstract
This paper analyzes Tupac Shakur's Greatest Hits (1998) to reveal: 1) Shakur's rhetoric employs three African American cultural values (the oral tradition, a diunital orientation, and spirituality), which further defines the unique characteristics that comprise African American discourse; 2) when interpreting Shakur's message through the lens of African American cultural values, his Greatest Hits functions as a musical autobiography that constructs identity and provides a voice for the Black youth culture. Given these two findings, Shakur extends the cultural values that underlie African American rhetoric to construct a message that is more complex, enlightened, and introspective than what tends to characterize the public criticism of gangsta rap. A rhetorical criticism of Shakur's Greatest Hits also highlights how using cultural values as a theoretical framework is a way for rhetorical scholars to demonstrate a more complete understanding of the cultural meaning of texts that are created and consumed in the African American community.
Gangst Rap: The Interconnection of Capitalism, Controversy, and Culture
Since the first successful commercial rap song, "Rapper's Delight" by the Sugar Hill Gang was released in 1979, rap music has evolved into a multi-billion dollar industry that has been appropriated by corporate America to advertise a variety of products from soda to shoes. Although the growth of rap music and hip-hop culture has elevated the genre and its African American artists to icon status, rap's growth has not occurred without controversy. One genre of rap music, gangsta rap, has endured harsh criticism for lyrics that glamorize a gangster lifestyle, which Boyd (1997) has argued places ultimate value on the excesses of our capitalistic culture: materialism, power, machismo, sexism, and violence. By emphasizing the excesses of capitalism, gangsta rap has taken the idea of "getting paid" to the most extreme form. Due to gangsta rap's explicit lyrics, there has been widespread criticism from all points on the political spectrum. A discussion of the congressional hearings into gangsta rap is provided by Kitwana (1994), Ramsey (2003), and Wong (2001).
The denouncing of gangsta rap has also been common among portions of the African American community. During Benjamin Chavis' tenure as Executive Director of the NAACP, he caused internal conflicts between himself and the Executive Board by attempting to embrace gangsta rap as a...