Violence in gangsta rap, the subject of countless debates, has been attacked as degenerate and assigned blame as an incitement to murder. Writers such as Cheryl L. Keyes, Imani Perry and Robin D.G. Kelley, however, have nuanced our reading of the brutality in rap by contextualising it within traditions of braggadocio and signification – offering broader readings of the relationship between violence and strength within powerless contexts. Jonathan Munby's Under a Bad Sign: Criminal Self-Representation in African American Popular Culture offers a similarly multi-layered perspective on the seemingly counter-productive depictions of criminality in African American-based cultural forms. To do so, he explores the various roles of the African American badman character in popular cultural production as it operates in complicated societal negotiations – thus offering argument for the value or purpose of artistic representations of violence in various situations. He explains, ‘In exploring the ambivalent value of the black badman figure, this book raises questions about the attribution of moral and political purpose to impoverished forms of cultural production. In the process it rejects the easy syllogism that low-budget fare equals poor culture symptomatic of counterproductive politics’ (p. 9). As a professor of film studies, Munby focuses predominantly on film as well as literature and television; however, he also incorporates music – the blues, funk, and rap. The cross-disciplinary approach, for Munby, is meant to allow examination of ‘the cross-fertilization of different forms and registers of black popular expression’ as well as ‘the relationship between these forms and those of the dominant culture’ (p. 5). The subject matter in Under a Bad Sign thus stretches to include diverse media as well as a vast chronology – from the 1920s through the 1990s – often by specifically discussing little-known figures argued by the author to be of significance: Rudolph Fischer in Chapter 1; Ralph Cooper in Chapter 2; Chester Himes and Julian Mayfield in Chapter 3; Rudy Ray Moore in Chapter 4; and Donald Goines in Chapter 5.

Munby's book is intellectually rich and thoughtful – displaying throughout a keen sense of the ambivalence and contradictions attendant in his topic. In his discussion, in Chapter 1, of the writing of Rudolph Fisher as well as the overlooked work Harlem: A Negro Metropolis, by Claude McKay, he insists that the numbers racket in black Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s was a response to exclusion from the (white) world of finance. This criminality effectively emulated legitimate business. Alongside and within this mirroring enterprise, folkloric traditions endured. The primitive and exotic operated in efforts to attain a modern future (p. 25). Likewise, in Chapter 2, Munby explores the dualities in race films of the 1930s, which were both separate from and connected to white Hollywood. He argues that one significant link was a general striving and desire for wealth, evident in both the films of Ralph Cooper as well as mainstream gangster films. In this way, Munby is sensitive to the complexities of his subject matter; and the authors and filmmakers he chooses to highlight display an analogous awareness of life's grey zones. For example, in Chapter 3, his explanation of the marginalisation of the writings of Chester Himes and Julian Mayfield hinges on their depictions of the problems of integration and freedom, as well as their avoidance of black heroicism. He writes, ‘Understanding both why Himes and Mayfield have been forgotten and in turn need remembering has everything to do with how their work bore an uneasy relationship to the heroic action and rhetoric of the civil rights struggle’ (p. 110). The contextual exploration that informs his analysis of Himes' and Mayfield's work also helps Munby qualify blaxploitation, specifically the films of Rudy Ray Moore, in Chapter 4. Munby explains, ‘A study of the trajectories of Mayfield's and Himes's work hopefully prefaces a need not to be complicit with those who summarily dismiss blaxploitation as bad art and counterproductive to black needs’ (p. 131). Although artless, apolitical and exploitative to some extent (generally financed by whites for black audiences), Moore's films used badman imagery as a means of empowerment.

Of particular interest to me, as a scholar of music, was Munby's inclusion of music. In the introduction, Munby offers gangsta rap as a starting point, much as I have in this review. He writes, ‘The rise to popularity of hip hop culture and rap music – especially gangsta rap – has raised awkward questions about the need of the disenfranchised to be complicit with their oppressors as a prerequisite to success’ (p. 2). What follows reads as a response to current cultural valuations of rap music. However, Munby spends very little time discussing rap – its histories, contexts or controversies. His discussion of music in general is also often vague. After discussing a move in literature from optimism to nihilism, he seeks to reveal a parallel development in funk by pointing to Sly Stone's 1971 album There's a Riot Going On. However, his assertion musically depends for support only on his identification of an ‘overdubbed recording sound’ (p. 125). Perhaps the lack of sustained attention and intervention in the area of music can be credited to the at times overwhelming number of people and cultural products Munby attempts to cross-reference in the space of 181 pages. The vastness of subjects incorporated also leads to organisational problems in the sections that deal with music. For example, in Chapter 1, Munby concludes with a ‘coda’ that discusses the blues and especially Peetie Wheatstraw; in Chapter 4, he inserts a ‘Musical Interlude: The Funk and Post-Civil Rights Disillusion’, which focuses specifically on Booker T. Jones. Both of these sections read as quick insertions rather than integrated interrogations.

Munby's final chapter avoids these pitfalls. He does not sequester his musical ruminations and instead references rap in connection with his primary focus on Donald Goines and the hood film cycle of the 1990s. He also analyses in depth a single film, Menace II Society, rather than summarising multiple films and books. This paring down best showcases Munby's strong arguments, arguments worth framing without distraction. In the epilogue, Munby insists that in African American cultural production there is life in death. The violence on which this death depends is then ‘so much more than self-defeating’ (p. 181). Hopefully points such as this one will not be lost in the shuffle.