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African American Literature Book Club

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Showing content with the highest reputation on 04/12/2014 in all areas

  1. Yep, that was the Ultimate Warrior. He had just signed a contract to get back into wrestling and was entered into the WWE HOF. Don't ask why i know this, I plead the Fif. Your shift into a discussion on non-violence in regard to violence as art with the ability to create catharsis, is interesting and worthy of a book itself. I tend to think that in the black community violence as art, creates more violence. I think the breakdown of the black community was pushed along by West Gangasta rap and imagery that began with the film Colors and was given it's most attractive and sturdy building block in Boyz N The Hood and Menace 2 Society. This was reinforced with the most attractive looking gangbanger lifestyle created by Death Row. I guess I need to explain: In Menace 2 Society you had one of the most handsome young actors in Black Hollywood portray an out of control psychotic killer in O Dawg (Larenz Tate). Girls loved him, boys wanted to be him. Likewise with Boyz. It wasn't Laurence Fishburne's role that stood out was Ice Cube's Doughboy role that was the most compelling. I think John Singleton made a very big mistake by giving Cube the last words in the film and fading him away instead of actually allowing the Doughboy character to be shown physically being murdered. The same with the O Dawg character. At the same time, Snoop Dogg had the song that solidified his career in Deep Cover. You talk about a systematic integration of LA Gang Culture into the Psyche of Black America. Within years you had Crips and Bloods in Little Rock Arkansas, and as far away as New York!!! This introduction of gang culture throroughly wiped out the LA Peace Treaty and the Same Gang movement and then removed the attention from East Cost Hip-Hop which tended to have more variety conscious lyrics. Remember when The Chronic was released so was Digable Planets album Refutations. Talk about two music forms that balanced each other out in Hip-Hop. That was the last year that two albums garnered both critical and commercial success that was from two different extremes in Hip Hop. Since then the West Coast dominated the culture with gang culture and the Hyphy movement and then the South has taken over since then with the Trap rap/Drug culture. New York hasn't really had a huge voice in Hip-Hop which has coincided with the neutralizing of the power of Hip-Hop, save a few emcees like Common, Talib Kweli and Mos Def (Yasin Bey) and even those artists didn't get mainstream radio play. Actually it took Dave Chappelle to really give those artists a bigger platform (kind of). All of this is to say that the cartoonish violence in Game of Thrones and even Boardwalk Empire, the sex in Californication and murder in Dexter have very little effect on Black America or America in general. It is allowing a purge, but I think it is simply entertainment because the people watching tend to understand that this is television. In Black culture however, the sex, trap rap, glorification of commodities is taken more literally which translates into the actions that are carried out in Chicago, LA and other places on a daily basis. Is poverty the underlying cause of crime and murder, yes, but if the images in our community were less about drugs and needs, I do think we would have less murder and mayhem.

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