Word: ghettos
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...come up against the odds in a rough part of Philadelphia. The show's producers even taped Turpin running up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art in triumph, just like Rocky. "They always told me, 'You're gonna have to fight your way out of the ghetto,'" Turpin says in a voice-over. "That's what I'm going...
With the best stories already told, the urban poets of the 1990s became fake black mafiosi with legendary gangster surnames, telling fantasy crime tales that were ridiculous to anyone familiar with real ghetto street crime. The socially conscious lament began to disappear with Dr. Dre’s 1992 magnum opus, The Chronic. The music that Chuck D had called the “CNN of the hood” was replaced by a downwardly spiraling culture defined largely by fraudulent performance and outright glorification of ghetto nihilism in exchange for financial success...
...problematic for the advancement of black people worldwide. The rest of America, buffered by lingering segregation, is unable or unwilling to discern fantasy from reality and consumes this imagery as authentic, with real effects. Because they believe they are getting “the real deal” on ghetto life, they absorb gangsta rap’s reaffirmation of society’s devaluation of black life and love, and see ghetto blacks as willing, and even blissful, participants in a chaotic and impoverished existence on society’s margins...
Perhaps even more destructively, the attempt to reconcile the hedonistic lifestyle of the American nouveau riche with “authentic” ghetto nihilism has created impossible aspirations of “ghettofabulousness” for young people. In the fantasy world of the “ghettofabulous,” the empty pursuit of possessions and pleasure pathetically seeks to counteract a self-imposed degradation, while the reckless self-abandonment that occasionally bubbles to the surface is venerated as the highest expression of cultural authenticity...
These individuals celebrate black intelligence and creativity and provide a veritable light at the end of the tunnel. They have combined “Ghetto CNN” realism with early hip-hop’s vitality and an American entrepreneurial spirit. They showcase ways that we can use hip-hop’s best traits to attack nihilism and alienation in America by challenging the prevailing discourse and undertaking political and economic ventures to create change. If our generation fails to reclaim its most powerful cultural achievement from those who would put profit before progress, we will undoubtedly...