In the polemical 2008 The Hip Hop Wars, Tricia Rose bemoaned how the vice of corporate and media prerogatives had minimised the social, critical content of much hip-hop. She also lamented the emptiness of much academic analysis of the genre. Thug Life does much to respond to these issues. It addresses the paradox of how a musical street culture initiated by disenfranchised youth as a response to the south Bronx's mid-1970s urban crisis – a radical vehicle for contestation that emphasised authenticity and assertive social criticism – became commercialised, transformed and institutionalised by big corporations into a market-based, global youth culture. By the late 1980s, early 1990s, white males became hip-hop's main audience, in many cases seeking an affordable sonic vacation in black inner-city misery. As hip-hop's initial revolutionary thrust was replaced by craven consumerism and corporate control, alternative voices went ‘underground’ and the ‘old white men’ running the industry were denounced by the likes of Yasiin Bey (Mos Def) and M.K. Asante, the latter comparing the mass production of hip-hop to a colonial-style arrangement whereby black creativity is appropriated, marketed and sold back to blacks for profit.
Jeffries's appraisal of who is to blame for this transformation is subtle: he draws out the nuances – avoiding the polar position of the ‘purists’, who place guilt exclusively on (white) big business – factoring in the responsibility of comprador elements within the black artistic community. As the author notes, ‘The rap-as-resistance debate implies a struggle against white power, but whiteness alone does not adequately describe the power structure that organizes American society. Hip Hop's struggle is often framed as a guerrilla war against white patriarchy rather than simply whiteness’ (p. 9).
For Jeffries, issues of power and the ‘cultural appropriation’ of hip-hop hinge on the notion of cool black masculinity – defined as authority, pride and control – and how this moulds audience–artist relations. The central focus of Thug Life is an examination of the racial politics of hip-hop as a product and its differential cultural meanings for black and white consumers in their everyday lives. Jeffries is also concerned with how this plays out across social class and what it tells us more generally about masculinity and gender. The epitome of black masculinity selected for analysis is the most notorious and high profile cultural icon within hip-hop: that of ‘thug’ rappers such as Tupac Shakur, the pioneer of the trend, and later exponents like 50 Cent, who have postured as spend-free, female-denigrating, violent hoodlums. For some critics, this style approximates to a ghetto version of the American dream, a trend that has diluted the earlier function of hip-hop as a vehicle for self-expression and its value as an educational and political tool.
While Jeffries is right not to sermonise or demonise ‘gangsta’ rap, at times he overplays the anti-system, protest content of ‘thug’ rappers. Nonetheless, to his credit, by locating ‘thug’ rappers firmly in the context of exclusion and the criminalisation of ghetto life, he paints a far more complex image than the clichéd and one-dimensional views of hip-hop that prevail in some academic studies. For Jeffries, regardless of its commercialism, hip-hop still contains a social message: although it ‘does not wage a cogent and directed battle against the forces of conservatism, capitalism, or racism; it is the political battlefield itself, a field of breaks, raps, sound, and fury, home to armies of all creeds and loyalties’ (p. 198).
This conclusion is reached via the methods of cultural sociology – interviews and ethnography – as well as the textual analysis of lyrics and videos. But it is the interviews with 40 hip-hop aficionados (20 white, 20 black), stratified according to their socio-economic status, which constitute ‘a crucial check’ for teasing out the meaning of the music for the consumers and, in particular, whether the thug narrative is ‘resistant to or compliant with black subjugation’ (p. 5). Accordingly, interviewees were questioned on their perception of the racial and gender content of hip-hop lyrics, as well as themes of thuggery, ghetto life and economic opportunity.
Jeffries paints an intricate picture of his respondents' views, emphasising how they engage critically with music and lyrics along with their overriding concern with authenticity (‘keepin’ it real') as a criterion for appreciating artists. His main conclusion is that African Americans are more concerned with ‘real’ blackness and that hip-hop more heavily conditions their identity. Although hip-hop conditions the everyday life of the white respondents, they are motivated more by what they perceive to be the artistic qualities of performers. Jeffries also makes far-reaching conclusions about masculinity itself, noting how the ‘cool pose inevitably sets black men on a collision course with each other and with whites’ (p. 60). This, however, is highly complex, with potential confrontation mediated, according to Jeffries, because ‘thug love’ simultaneously cements ties among ‘thug brothers’.
In a brief epilogue Jeffries considers Obama as a hip-hop ‘icon’ or what is rather his exploitation of hip-hop culture to appeal to young voters who might not normally participate in institutional politics. Obama and his team certainly are not averse to exploiting music for political ends – witness their utilisation of ‘Keep on Pushing’ at the 2004 Democrat National Convention as eloquent proof of how a song identified with protest can be employed for limited political goals. Although sympathetic to Obama, Jeffries recognises that the quest for votes saw him simultaneously sustain moral panics about hip-hop, doubtless so as not to alienate white or black middle-class voters.
This is beyond question a very important and innovative study; building on earlier ethnographic literature in this field, the focus of analysis is expertly shifted towards the consumers of hip-hop. As such, it will be of immense interest to students and teachers of popular music and of American society and culture in general. It is, of course, not beyond criticism. As the author acknowledges, the sample base of interviewees is limited in terms of gender – his exclusive focus is ‘on representations of men and presenting men's voices’ (p. 9) – and geographically – all 40 male interviewees hail from the Boston area. In part this reflects the origins of this study in a doctoral thesis and the inherent limitations therein, as well as the pressure to publish qualitative research promptly, and probably other early career pressures. Jeffries, nonetheless, calls for further gender-based research in the area of black masculinity in hip-hop, an end to which he hopes his own work will serve as a starting-point.
More debatable, however, is the analysis of hip-hop as a social movement. Jeffries avers that the demand for commercialised hip-hop has forged a collective identity, arguing forcefully that the socio-political sensibilities of his interviewees make them potential agents of change. This is most problematic; indeed, he himself furnishes evidence of the considerable fragmentation and splintering within the ‘hip-hop nation’. This is not, of course, to suggest that hip-hop practitioners cannot and indeed, have not, helped cohere and inspire social movements. Yet if hip-hop today were the kind of social movement its creators once envisaged, it is utterly implausible that any US presidential candidate would find it expedient to flirt with it, even for a political nanosecond.
