To understand the relationship that hip-hop has with law & order, you have to go back to its origins. Hip-hop did not begin in a vacuum, and acknowledging the environment from which it spawned is critical to the exploration of its current state. The discourse of hip-hop culture is a response to a void. This void was created by a vast sea of circumstances, but largely it existed because of the repression of urban black youth in the 1980s. These youth needed an outlet for their energy and creativity, but all traditional channels were closed to them. Therefore, they created their own. Hip-hop, as a product of the urban sphere, is fraught with the conflicts of that environment. As the world of hip-hop has progressed and evolved, the new spaces inhabited by its creators have led to a shift in the topics of discourse.
The city has always had its elements of danger and conflict, but in the past these were counteracted by a sense that life in the city could be whatever one wanted it to be. The city has always been a place of opportunity, but at the same time a place where nothing could be taken for granted. John Jeffries writes that ``urban life implied risks. There were no guarantees'' (157). The 1970s and 1980s were not new in their urban conflict. As Trisha Rose puts it, ``Being angry and poor were not new or unusual phenomena for many African Americans in the 1970s'' (26). And yet the city, with its problems, still held an unmistakable allure. It was the city where good things were bound to happen; it was the city where the historically oppressed could finally do something about their situation. Jeffries says that in the city ``Progress (personal and societal) was there for the asking'' (157). Despite inevitable oppression, the city was unique in its offer of a chance at a new way of life.
This opportunity for change was dependent, however, on fair play. When government decided to crack down on urban problems in the 1980s, its heavy hand swept away much freedom and opportunity with very little of the social ills.
This opportunity for change was dependent, however, on fair play. And fair play was not usually what was given to urban minorities during the 1970s and 1980s. This was a time of ``urban renewal,'' yet it was also the time of most strife for those who had inhabited urban areas the longest. Trisha Rose tells of the plight faced by the South Bronx in the 1970s as New York dealt with revitalizing its downtown. Those who bore the brunt of this effort were the minority inhabitants of the Bronx, completely overlooked, and quite literally overpassed. The construction of Cross-Bronx Expressway forced the sudden relocation of 170,000 people already strained by their tenuous hold on viability. According to Rose, ``ethnic and racial transition in the South Bronx was not a gradual process ... instead, it was a brutal process of community destruction and relocation'' (30). This sudden upheaval of so many lives led to chaos. Forced to start with ``few city resources, fragmented leadership, and limited political power,'' there was little urban residents could do to right their neighborhoods (33). By 1977 the South Bronx was portrayed in the media ``as lawless zones where crime is sanctioned and chaos bubbles just below the surface'' (33).
The black urban residents of Los Angeles faced similar systematic disadvantage. LAPD, in its war on drugs and gangs, engaged in tactics that methodically targeted any non-Anglo youth, regardless of the lack of any other determinants of probable cause. Youth violence was a very real problem, but law enforcement magnified it in order to justify means that drastically undercut civil rights protections. Mike Davis, in City of Quartz, says that the ``very real epidemic of youth violence ... has been inflated by law enforcement agencies and the media into something quite phantasmagoric'' (270). The fair play of the city was removed in order for the police to carry out actions many considered blatantly illegal. Davis tells of the NAACP receiving hundreds of complaints about ``unlawful police conduct'' (274). LAPD conducted massive raids that swept up anyone and everyone. According to Davis, ``In some highly touted sweeps, moreover, as many as 90 per cent of detained suspects have been released without charges - an innocent victim rate that belies LAPD demonology'' (277). The only elements able to thrive in such a hostile environment were those who really were at war with LAPD, the innocent bystanders were devalued in the crossfire.
Media representation of South Bronx and Southcentral Los Angeles created a very bleak and sensationalized picture. Davis tells how the media ``ceaselessly throw up spectres of criminal underclasses and psychotic stalkers'' (226). Rose says that media coverage of the Bronx ``rendered silent the people who struggled with and maintained life under difficult conditions'' (33). She quotes Michael Ventura, who says that in popular films depicting the area ``we haven't been introduced to one soul who actually lives in the South Bronx. We haven't heard one voice speaking its own language'' (33). The media depiction of urban life was one-sided and sensational.
Hip-hop's vocal animosity for law enforcement is an attempt to counter that unfair image of urban life. The media had portrayed a certain image as reality, hip-hop therefore counteracts this with its own representation of truth. The Foucault handout states that ``The oppressed and disempowered always work through the arena of culture ... to negotiate and oppose the pronouncements of official power with the social accents of their own everyday experience'' (1). N.W.A., in their song ``Fuck Tha Police,'' takes issue with LAPD's heavy-handed tactics. ``Young nigga got it bad cuz I'm brown / And not the other color so police think / They have the authority to kill a minority.'' Their portrayal of arrests without probable cause plays directly on the public perception of all black urban youths as hoodlums. ``Pull your goddamn ass over right now. / Ah shit, what the fuck you pullin me over for? / Cuz I feel like it.'' Rose says that ``Hip hop gives voice to the tensions and contradictions in the public urban landscape ... and attempts to seize the shifting urban terrain, to make it work on behalf of the dispossessed'' (22). Hip-hop lyrics convey the reality of the world their authors live in.
The anti-law enforcement sentiment of hip-hop also serves to try and claim back power. The war on urban problems, and its associated criminalization of blackness, has taken power away from the urban black youth. Davis says that the drug war in Los Angeles has made it where ``every non-Anglo teenager in Southern California is now a prisoner of gang paranoia and associated demonology'' (284). Loic Wacquant claims ``the formula 'Young + Black + Male' is now openly equated with 'probable cause' justifying the arrest, questioning, bodily search and detention of millions of African American males every year'' (56). While some rappers downplay this image, others revel in it, attempting to reclaim power through the glorification of their criminality. Nas, in his song ``Represent,'' presents unabashed lawlessness - ``Nas is a rebel of the street corner / Pullin a Tec out the dresser, police got me under pressure'' and ``Yo, they call me Nas, I'm not your legal type of fella / Moet drinkin, marijuana smokin street dweller'' are just two examples of his criminal boastings. This strategy works to play off the media image of rampant criminality in order to subvert power from law & order.
When economic reality changes, the topics of discourse change as well. The economic boom of the 1990s coincided with the commercial rise of rap music and brought wealth to many who previously had rapped about the ghetto and violence. Money usually leads rappers to a change in scenery, as they head out of the inner-city and into luxurious estates. Raps topics move from urban strife to the amount of wealth a rapper is able to throw around. Cars, Cristal, and Platinum all become required elements in any successful commercial rapper's videos. In a way, this new focus is freeing. It's a new path to explore, and one that focuses its audience not on the desolation of urban surroundings but on the whimsical fancy of wealth. Though the portrayed world of excess may not match the realities of its listeners, it gives them something to aspire to. This new discourse separates itself from the law & order discourse simply by being concerned about other things.
Throughout its existence, hip-hop has defined itself through its surroundings. People communicate about what they know, and those creating hip-hop are no exceptions. When the space inhabited by early hip-hop artists was the perilous world of 1980s urban violence, that was what they conveyed in their music. Now that their space has shifted to one filled with different considerations, these new concerns are what they choose to articulate.