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Erik Nielson'Here come the cops': Policing the resistance in rap music

  

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International Journal of Cultural Studies 15(4)349 –363 © The Author(s) 2011 Reprints and permission: sagepub.co.uk/ journalsPermissions.navDOI: 10.1177/1367877911419159ics.sagepub.com

‘Here come the cops’: Policing the resistance in rap music

Erik NielsonUniversity of Richmond, USA

AbstractWhen rap music broke into the mainstream in the late 1980s, it was quickly hailed as a vehicle for political resistance against the blatant social and racial inequalities in the United States. However, a closer look at even the most ostensibly rebellious and confrontational songs reveals that the resistive potential within rap music was often undermined, or at least complicated, by the pervasive culture of policing and surveillance from which it emerged. Through close readings of classic tracks by Ice Cube, Goodie Mob and the Geto Boys, this article argues that traditional scholarly formulations of rap-as-resistance need rethinking, and that we must account for the aggressive strategies of social control that have been integral in shaping, and often circumscribing, the kinds of defiance that rap embraces.

Keywordship hop, police, rap music, resistance, surveillance

When Public Enemy released the song ‘Fight the power’ in 1989, it became an anthem for the kind of resistance that rap music had already begun to embrace. Although the earliest rap was lyrically apolitical, with few explicit overtures to resistance or social consciousness, the very act of public performance amidst a ‘complex web of institutional policing…especially in large public space contexts’ (Rose, 1994: 124) revealed its inher-ently political dimension, and by the late 1980s, that dimension was being given lyrical expression by groups like Public Enemy, who espoused a ‘radical social consciousness’ (Dimitriadis, 1996: 186) that took dead aim at institutions of power within the United States in an attempt to address the blatant and growing racial inequities in American society. East Coast groups such as Public Enemy and Boogie Down Productions were soon joined by Ice-T, NWA and a variety of other gangsta-inspired acts on the West Coast

Corresponding author:Erik Nielson, University of Richmond, School of Continuing Studies, 28 Westhampton Way, Richmond, VA 23173. Email: enielson@richmond.edu

419159 ICSXXX10.1177/1367877911419159NielsonInternational Journal of Cultural Studies

Article

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that were taking an equally confrontational posture towards the American power struc-ture, particularly law enforcement. By the early 1990s, critics and scholars alike seemed justified in declaring rap ‘a culture of resistance’ (Lusane, 1993: 41) that revealed a ‘profound potential as a basis for a language of liberation’ (Rose, 1994: 144).1

Although there’s no doubt that rap did become ‘an ardent form of resistance and a definite expression of oppositional culture’ (Martinez, 1997: 268), it is important to con-sider the environment in which this resistance was articulated – an environment that became increasingly intolerant of the very kinds of resistance that rappers endorsed. As agents of political change, rappers themselves were frequently the targets of police sur-veillance and harassment, not only drawing the wary attention of federal law enforce-ment, but also sparking the creation of hip hop task forces in major police departments across the US whose sole purpose it was to monitor (and in some cases, disrupt) the activities of rap artists across the country (Nielson, 2010: 1254). But even African Americans with no connection to hip hop whatsoever increasingly found themselves caught in the ‘web of institutional policing’, most evident in the skyrocketing incarcera-tion rates that saw record numbers of black Americans behind bars. In the 1980s alone, incarceration rates doubled (and they have since doubled again), with an overwhelm-ingly disproportionate impact on the black community. Today, the incarcerated popula-tion in the US (which represents approximately 25 percent of people incarcerated worldwide) is roughly equivalent to the combined populations of North Dakota, Vermont, Wyoming and the District of Columbia, and although they constitute less than 13 percent of the population, blacks represent nearly half of those behind bars. The statistics for young black males are particularly alarming. By the mid 1990s, nearly one in three black men between the ages of 20 and 29 was under some form of correctional control (Mauer, 2006: 137) and, based on current trends, nearly one in three black males born today can expect to spend time in prison (Bonczar, 2003). What these trends suggest is that while resistance may be more necessary now than ever, it takes place within an environment that has, over the last three decades in particular, sought to circumscribe it.

The surprising growth of the criminal justice system’s reach into black communities is evident not only in the statistics on incarceration, but also in the changing urban land-scape. Today’s cities are now the sites of complex and vast networks of policing and surveillance that at times bear such a striking resemblance to prisons that Mike Davis (borrowing from Foucault) refers to Los Angeles – the home of gangsta rap – as a ‘car-ceral city’ that has threatened to become a ‘vast penal colony’ (1992: 253–4). Robin D.G. Kelley describes LA in a similar way:

Black working class communities in Los Angeles were turned into war zones during the mid- to late 1980s. Police helicopters, complex electronic surveillance, even small tanks armed with battering rams became part of this increasingly militarized urban landscape. Housing projects … were renovated along the lines of minimum security prisons and equipped with fortified fencing and a Los Angeles Police Department substation. (1997: 47)

While the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) was in the vanguard of police milita-rization, its tactics came to characterize police forces nationwide that, armed with increasingly sophisticated tracking and information-gathering technologies, were able to monitor and control large segments of their (largely minority) urban populations.2

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In such environments, resistance is rarely given a chance to take root and, as I hope to show, rappers are keenly aware of it. While it is not my goal to undermine the potential for resistance in rap music, I would like to demonstrate the ways in which policing and surveillance have complicated the ways in which opposition is often expressed. I will begin by drawing on classic ‘surveillance tracks’ by Ice Cube and Goodie Mob to dem-onstrate that even within songs that ostensibly resist police pressure and surveillance, we find a tacit recognition that resistance is often self-defeating when it targets a law enforce-ment foe that is far more organized, powerful and technologically advanced. As I will show, in both songs, opposition leads to entrapment, not liberation, and so in the second section, drawing on the Geto Boys’ ‘Mind playing tricks on me’ as an exemplar, I extend this sense of entrapment to rap music as a whole, arguing that the potential for collective resistance has been severely compromised by the pervasive surveillance culture in which it has evolved. Put another way, while rappers were learning how to ‘fight the power’, the power was learning how to fight back.

‘Who’s that peekin’ in my window?’: the thematics of surveillance

As any rap fan knows, the most obvious impression left by surveillance can be found in rap’s thematic emphasis on the omnipresent threat of law enforcement; indeed, there are hundreds, even thousands, of rap songs that directly address a sense of being watched or followed by a hostile police presence. Gangsta rappers, for example, have sold millions of albums chroni-cling constant run-ins with police and (frequently unsuccessful) attempts to avoid detection, as have the more overtly political artists, such as Public Enemy and Boogie Down Productions. Many songs also include references to surveillance technologies such as phone taps, hidden cameras, and embedded computer chips, all put in place either by a clearly defined law enforcement agency like the LAPD or by a loosely defined law enforcement presence, often generically designated as the FBI or CIA.3 As a result, the universe depicted in rap music is often one in which the hostile gaze of law enforcement is ubiquitous, and even in songs that offer resistance, we are left with the sense that rappers are living in what Michel Foucault describes as a ‘state of conscious and permanent visibility’ (1977: 201).

Ice Cube’s song ‘Ghetto bird’ from his 1993 album, Lethal Injection, provides a fitting illustration. As the title suggests, Lethal Injection explores the mechanisms through which the state maintains its power, particularly over the black population, and the potentially grave consequences for those who resist. Throughout the album, Ice Cube preaches ven-geance against the white-run institutions of power that have systematically targeted blacks since slavery. After ‘400 years of gettin’ our ass kicked’, he says, it’s time to ‘get the devil, do a 187’ (‘When I get to heaven’).4 But for all of this militancy, he nevertheless portrays an urban landscape in which the kind of resistance he fantasizes about seems unlikely to materialize, especially in light of the technologies available to police as they monitor black neighborhoods. One such technology appears in ‘Ghetto bird’, Ice Cube’s term for a police helicopter that constantly surveils the black areas of Los Angeles, helping turn them into militarized zones in the process. As the song opens, the first sound we hear is that of a helicopter in flight, a sound that comes in and out for the remainder of the track, sonically reinforcing its pervasiveness in the neighborhoods that Ice Cube describes.

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In his first verse, Ice Cube asks, ‘Why, oh why must you swoop through the ’hood / like everybody from the ’hood is up to no good?’ and then offers himself as an example of someone who is unfairly targeted: ‘At night I see your light through my bedroom window / but I ain’t got shit but the pad and pencil’. It’s worth noting that in highlighting his role as an artist here, Ice Cube briefly alludes to his place within the much broader tradition of black art that draws white surveillance: the ghetto bird reminds him that the spotlight he seeks on stage will follow him home whether he likes it or not.5 As a result, he briefly fantasizes about getting even by ‘Standin’ on my roof with the rocket launcher’ before quickly backing away from such literal acts of vengeance and employing combat-ive rhetoric instead to launch his rockets. He ends the first verse with, ‘The shit that I’m saying, make sure it’s heard. / Mother fuck you and your punk-ass ghetto bird.’

We quickly notice a tension, however, between the bellicose rhetoric of the first verse and what ensues throughout the rest of the song. Indeed, right after his confrontational ‘Mother fuck you and your punk-ass ghetto bird’, he follows up with a chorus of ‘Run, run, run from the ghetto bird’, which repeats twice, just before the next two verses pres-ent us with a man who isn’t challenging the police but attempting to run from them. In the second verse, Ice Cube is no longer so innocent as he rides around in a car that’s ‘hotter than July’ (that is, it’s stolen). Predictably, the police helicopter soon sneaks up on him and a chase ensues:

… looked up and didn’t see it whippin’ in the sky.Saw a chopper with numbers on the bottom.‘Calling all cars, I think we’ve got em’.I hit the gas and I mashed past Inglewood.I think I drove through every single ’hood:South Central, Compton and WattsLong Beach, bust a U, here come the cops.

As we see here, the car – an important symbol of mobility, particularly in African American culture – becomes neutralized by the helicopter. That is, the car allows Ice Cube to drive through ‘every single ’hood’, suggesting his freedom to traverse his sur-roundings, but the unshakeable police presence circumscribes that freedom, reminding Ice Cube (and us) that his liberty is illusory beneath the gaze of the ‘incognito ghetto eagle’. And sure enough, by the third verse, the wide-ranging police chase that circum-navigates much of southern Los Angeles quickly narrows – first to Ice Cube’s own ’hood, where he begins to seek refuge in familiar terrain (even turning onto familiar streets), and then, as the song ends, to his girlfriend’s house. When he says that his girlfriend ‘helped me run like Harriet Tubman’, thereby associating himself with the escaping slaves before him, he no longer represents a viable force of opposition launching rockets from his rooftop. What we are left with is not a defiant man, willing to challenge the police, but a scared fugitive surrounded on all sides whose capture seems inevitable:

… looked out the window by the black bedI saw the pigs and the four on a flatbedThen the light from the bird hit me in the face

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I closed the blinds cause I didn’t wanna catch a case.All that night, I heard the bird circle

It’s not exactly clear, however, what bird he hears circling. At two points during the song, we hear the voice of a man who is inside a helicopter, watching and narrating the police chase down below. He is not a police officer, however, but a television corre-spondent who is presumably following the police ‘ghetto bird’ in the sky and providing broadcast coverage of the scene below. Based on his commentary it becomes obvious that, while not a police officer himself, the correspondent is nevertheless working to reinforce the police perspective. In the first recording, for example, we hear him revel-ling in the confrontation that the police are likely to instigate when they finally catch Ice Cube:

... just put his hat off. He combed his hair and then put his hat back on. So he’s acting nonchalant up there in that cockpit, going 115 miles an hour, with the, uh, police chasing him. Uh, they’re not gonna be real happy when they catch up with him, no matter what, uh, uh, they hate, they hate a big mouth even worse.

The introduction of a second helicopter – another kind of ‘ghetto bird’ – offers an expanded view of surveillance, one that includes news media that profit from (and jus-tify) the police tactics that the song criticizes. Just as, a generation earlier, Black Arts poet Gil Scott-Heron (1971) insisted that the ‘revolution will not be televised’, insinuat-ing that popular media are extensions of a broader system of black repression, by align-ing the news media with the police (to the point where we can’t even be sure whose helicopter is the true ‘ghetto bird’), Ice Cube makes a similar statement. The correspon-dent calls Ice Cube a ‘big mouth’, but the correspondent’s voice, which can reach mil-lions of people via the state-controlled airwaves, is much louder, and by using that voice to provide implicit support for the surveillant over the surveilled, he effectively broadens the reach of the police exponentially.6 In the end, ‘Ghetto bird’ leaves us with a panoptic urban environment, Davis’s ‘carceral city’, where any traces of autonomous space have long been eradicated, where everyone is being watched, and where the only birds that remain are equipped with spotlights. The last line of the song suggests the possibility of opposition, with Ice Cube’s repeating ‘mother fuck you and your punk-ass ghetto bird’; however, the last ‘voice’ we hear is not his, but that of the ever-present helicopter, whose churning blades close out the song and in the process undermine whatever overtures to resistance the song attempts.

Like much of the gangsta rap that emerged on the West Coast, Ice Cube’s narrative of a police chase focuses on the local geography of his ’hood – in this case, South Los Angeles. By contrast, although Goodie Mob’s ‘Cell therapy’ offers a similar depiction of ubiquitous police presence, it does so through a much broader lens, casting the law enforcement presence that targets blacks everywhere as part of a ‘New World Order’ that draws on a staggering range of national and international agencies in an attempt to establish a planet ‘without the black man’. The extent of the conspiracy is evident even in the first verse when Khujo points to organizations like the United Nations who are planning Nazi-style campaigns to exterminate blacks:

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United Nations, overseastrained assassins, do search and seizeain’t knockin’ or askin’.…concentration camps laced with gas pipes linesinfernos outdoors like they had backwhen Adolf Hitler was living in 1945

Helicopters appear here, too, though rather than the easily identifiable ‘ghetto birds’ in Ice Cube’s track, Khujo tells us that these are ‘unmarked black helicopters’ that ‘swoop down / and try to put missiles in my ass’. The images of a secret army in the service of multiple, unidentifiable state agencies are further reinforced throughout the song, such as in Big Gipp’s warning that ‘soldiers [are] coming in the dark by plane / to enforce the new system by reign’.

Ostensibly, the song presents itself as a tool for education and, ultimately, resistance. The rappers address a black audience (as in T-Mo’s first line, ‘Listen up little nigga – I’m talkin’ to you!’) and at various points insist that their goal is to educate their peers who have failed to recognize the dangers of the impending ‘new world plan’. Cee Lo, for example, rhymes,

Time is getting shorter.If we don’t get prepared, people, it’s gon’ be a slaughter.My mind won’t allow me to not be curious.My folk don’t understand, so they don’t take it serious.

The chorus of the song suggests that the slaughter can be averted – through armed confron-tation. Between each verse, we hear all four of the rappers (along with an accompanying female vocal) repeating ‘Who’s that peekin’ in my window? POW! Nobody now.’ Their collective presence in the chorus, where they repeat this anthem of resistance, offers an antidote to the vulnerability we hear in each solo in the verses, suggesting that meaningful opposition is possible if it is predicated on communal action. ‘Cell therapy’, then, positions itself as a Black-Arts-type instrument in that opposition by spreading the word to a black community that doesn’t recognize the threat and therefore ‘don’t take it serious’ enough.

But, once again, the model for resistance offered by the song is undermined repeatedly by the environment in which it is meant to take place. Not only are agents of the ‘new world plan’ merciless in their execution, but they have harnessed numerous surveillance technologies to multiply their presence dramatically. Gipp complains that they tag his skin with a computer chip and employ scanners and satellite dishes to track his movements, giving them such an unfair advantage that in this new environment there’s ‘no more fish-ing for your fish’. For this reason, despite a defiant tone that resonates throughout ‘Cell therapy’, a sense of entrapment is what dominates.7 For example, Cee Lo tells of a ‘gate with a serial code’ that is constructed around his apartment complex with the ostensible function of keeping the residents safe, but he pointedly wonders ‘If the gate was put up to keep crime out or to keep our ass in.’ T-Mo is even more explicit in comparing black urban life to incarceration when he says, ‘ I want outta this hole. I’m in a cell under attack. / Loc

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up, folks – they in the ’hood / got an eye on every move I make.’ It’s even worth noticing that in the chorus, the song’s site for resistance is the inside of a house that is presumably surrounded by agents who are peekin’ in the window. The ‘POW!’ might eliminate one of them, but the song has already shown us repeatedly that the encroaching agents represent an inexorable force that far outmans and outguns the occupants who are fighting back. Their collective resistance marks them off as a kind of terrorist cell, and the result is that they will likely be headed to a jail cell, seeing their physical freedom further circum-scribed and the surveillance becoming literally omnipresent. That appears to be the kind of ‘cell therapy’ that opposition is likely to encounter here.

‘Everybody know me. It’s like I’m a movie star’: hiding in the spotlight

The images of a resistance cell taking a last stand within a surrounded house – or of a fugi-tive holed up in a girlfriend’s house, curtains drawn, with a helicopter circling above – serve as useful metaphors, not only for the relationship between black art and the white normative gaze generally, but for rap music’s increasingly urgent need to locate itself within familiar geographies just as it began to achieve national, and international, exposure.8 As Murray Forman notes in The ’Hood Comes First: Race, Space, and Place in Rap and Hip Hop (2002), although rappers’ places of origin have always been important, there was a growing urgency toward what he calls the ‘extreme local’ (2002: xvii) in the late 1980s, the point at which rap started to become a mainstream cultural force. As it grew more visible, it responded like Ice Cube in ‘Ghetto bird’ – by taking refuge in the neighbourhoods and street corners that it grew out of, and soon enough the notion of ‘authenticity’ in rap music became closely associated with a rapper’s commitment to maintaining attachments to his or her neighbourhood, often to the exclusion of all others. According to Forman:

With the discursive shift from the spatial abstractions framed within ‘the ghetto’ to the more localized and specific construct of ‘the ’hood’ … there has been an enhanced emphasis on the powerful ties to place that both anchor rap acts to their immediate environments and set them apart from other environments and other ’hoods as well as from other rap acts that inhabit similarly demarcated spaces. (2002: 179)

Scholars have offered a variety of explanations for this increased focus on local geogra-phy. Alan Light, for example, describes it as a way for rappers to ‘prove their commit-ment to rap’s street heritage’ (1992: 229) as the genre became increasingly commercialized. By maintaining their connection to the urban areas that they rapped about, performers could avoid the ‘sell out’ label that followed many crossover acts (e.g. MC Hammer, Tone Loc or Vanilla Ice), who were perceived as having gone soft for the sole purpose of making money. As Scarface puts it in ‘Sellout’ (2002):

there’s too many pussies out heremaking bullshit records and ruining rap….I’m a real nigga, a street nigga till it’s done with,

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and I could never let you talk me into dumb shitlike sellin’ out to move a few more units.Just keep me in the ghetto ’cause the ’hood stay truest

Scarface’s association of ‘real’ with ‘street’ and ‘truest’ with ‘’hood’ sets out one of the most important criteria for authenticity in a music that he and many others perceive as being at risk of cooptation by people who have no stake in its continued survival, a process described by bell hooks as ‘a consumer cannibalism that not only displaces the Other, but denies the significance of that Other’s history through a process of decontextualization’ (2006: 373). In other words, as rappers saw their work become increasingly accessible – as Alexander Weheliye tellingly puts it, their work was delocalized (2002: 28) – they turned to the streets as places of refuge against the appropriation of an industry that was interested only in transforming rap into a global commodity. Hence, by tethering itself in the parochial, rap is able to mitigate against its exportability by offering a detailed and re-localized cartog-raphy that remains inaccessible to all but the truest initiates. The language of the ‘extreme local’, then, works as a kind of code, drawing the boundaries of a black insular space and symbolically excluding everyone else in the process. Like the jazz musicians before them who literally turned their backs on the white gaze, rappers turned to their ’hoods to preserve their identities in the face of a homogenizing process of commoditization.

And yet, it’s worth considering the contradictory role that ’hoods are asked to perform in rap. On one hand, they are regularly depicted as lawless, violent and chaotic – places where only the strongest survive as they do in the wild (hence Kool Moe Dee’s famous description of his ’hood as the ‘wild wild west’). On the other, they are, as Forman (2002) writes, ‘relatively secure, bounded home environment[s] beyond which the com-bined variables of risk, threat, and danger increase’ (234) and therefore function as places of sanctuary in an otherwise menacing world. In effect, by turning away from the ‘risk, threat, and danger’ posed by a hostile outside presence (not to mention one with a par-ticular antipathy toward hip hop), rappers choose the devil they know over the one they don’t. In doing so, however, they trade one type of vulnerability for another: by turning inward, they close off any opportunity to build a community based on shared cultural experiences and therefore lose the power of collectivity that is crucial to any meaningful resistance. This is precisely what Paul Gilroy discusses in his criticisms of what he views as increasingly ‘Americocentric’ definitions of black nationalism, which often centre on the black American male, excluding not only women, but also blacks living elsewhere in the world. For Gilroy, such narrow definitions can be felt acutely in hip hop discourse, where black identity has become so circumscribed that it is not just ‘Americocentric’, but often derived from even more narrowly demarcated urban spaces within America. ‘We are told’, says Gilroy, ‘that the boys, and the girls, are from the ’hood – not from the race, and certainly not from the nation. It’s important that the ’hood stands in opposition to foreign things …’ (2004: 89). From his position across the Atlantic, Gilroy was under-standably concerned by this opposition to the foreign:

From London, the untranslatability of the term ’hood’ troubled me. I thought it marked a significant shift away from the notion of the ghetto, which is eminently exportable, and which carries its own very interesting intercultural history that we should be able to play with. But, if the ’hood is the essence of where blackness can now be found, which ’hood are we talking

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about? How do we weigh the achievements of one ’hood against the achievements of another? How is black life in one ’hood connected to life in others? Can there be a blackness that connects, articulates, synchronizes experiences and histories across the diaspora space? (2004: 89)

Gilroy’s concern is that the fragmentation into unique patterns of identification undermines the potential for the mobilization of a politics based on race. As Forman puts it, Gilroy’s anxi-ety stems from ‘the likelihood that, by defending territorial spaces and regional identities, black youths will continue to lose a political motivation that might add convergence … to the black cause in America’, not to mention the extended black diaspora (2002: 62).

What Gilroy overlooks is that the fragmentation he is concerned about did not begin with rap’s discursive shift from the ‘ghetto’ to the ‘’hood’. From the very beginning, rap has been deeply rooted in a tradition of small, narrowly defined group affiliations; in fact, these have always provided one of the basic organizing principles of hip hop in general. In the early days, even the most celebrated breakdancers, graffiti artists, DJs and MCs, known for their individual accomplishments, worked within collective groups. Crazy Legs, for example, probably the most famous b-boy to emerge from New York, was a member of the Rock Steady Crew, and DJ Kool Herc and Afrika Bambaataa, two of the undisputed progenitors of hip hop music, travelled with the Herculords and the Zulu Nation, respectively. These group affiliations are, of course, the standard in rap music as well – both publicly and in their lyrics, rappers are quick to highlight their connections to high-profile record labels, and a number of them have created local or regional alliances and collectives, such as the northeast’s Native Tongues Posse and the southeast’s Dungeon Family. It is impossible to discuss rap, then, without acknowledging, as Greg Tate does, that ‘every successful rap group is a black fraternal organization, a posse’ (1992: 134).

As critics like Jeff Chang (2005) have demonstrated, the posse tradition grew out of the pervasive New York gang culture that immediately preceded (and helped give rise to) hip hop, and so the inherently territorial nature of gangs predictably affected the preoc-cupation with demarcating and controlling spaces that we see throughout hip hop. But such concerns with space and affiliation do not necessarily undermine the kind of race-conscious nation building that Gilroy calls for; in fact, in the late 1980s, when hip hop became highly politicized, it became a vehicle for, rather than an impediment to, a broader awakening of black political consciousness. As a result, rappers from a variety of ’hoods began to utilize their music as a communicative tool, a means through which they could speak to large segments of the African American community and convey distinctly political, agenda-driven messages that often functioned as coordinated attacks on the institutions of power within the US.

Unfortunately, with the rise of gangsta rap came the fall of this broad-based progressiv-ism, though not entirely for the reasons suggested by Gilroy. It wasn’t gangsta’s emphasis on the local that undermined political action, but the way in which the local was put to use. When rap’s discourse shifted from that of the posse or the collective to that of the gang(sta), the fixation on the local became coupled with an intense antipathy toward the ‘Other who is outside’ (Massey, 1992: 12). Rather than view local affiliations as building blocks in a larger political effort, the new gangsta-dominated discourse saw these affiliations as ends unto themselves, effectively closing off communication with anything beyond the nar-rowly-construed ’hoods. In effect, Mobb Deep’s line ‘Fuck where you at, kid / it’s where

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you from’ and their anti-global declaration that ‘around my way niggas don’t got remorse for out-of-towners’ (1995) came to characterize the new ethos in rap, and one of the results was a protracted series of internecine battles within the industry that culminated in the infamous East Coast/West Coast feud. In an effort to insulate themselves from the hostility of the outside world, rappers began using local affiliations to draw concentrically tighten-ing circles of authenticity around themselves, going to such extremes that they were unable to trust anyone but those within their ever-constricting circle of peers.

The Geto Boys’ 1991 track ‘Mind playing tricks on me’, widely regarded as one of the finest rap songs ever made, offers an extended commentary on the kind of paranoia that seized rap as a whole. Throughout the song, the three members of the Geto Boys (Scarface, Willie D and Bushwick Bill) each offer a schizophrenic account of being watched and followed by a threatening presence that, it turns out, is a figment of the rap-pers’ imaginations. However, at the same time we see that the Geto Boys’ collective paranoia is a very real byproduct of their living in an urban environment characterized by constant violence and surveillance, one in which mistrust grows so powerful that the suspicion directed at the outside world turns inward, causing a profound sense of isola-tion that destabilizes them emotionally and psychologically.

In the song’s spoken introduction, Scarface begins by depicting his isolation, saying ‘I sit alone in my four-cornered room staring at candles’. It’s worth noting that he empha-sizes the ‘four-cornered’ room in which he sits, playing on the word ‘cornered’ to sug-gest, even in the song’s opening line, that this isolation is not self-imposed, but in fact the result of being ‘backed into a corner’. With this line – and just a few lines later his description of ‘four walls just starin’ at a nigga’ – we get our first glimpse of the isolation and concomitant psychological instability that goes on to permeate the rest of the song. Not only does Scarface suggest that his now-personified room is somehow actively involved in his containment, but he demonstrates his inability to distinguish between things that are actually recording him and those that are not. After describing the four-cornered, candle-lit room, he unexpectedly asks, ‘Oh, that shit is on?’ referring, it seems, to the recording equipment into which he’s speaking. Although he quickly composes himself and prepares to ‘drop some shit like this here, real smooth’, he first insinuates that the recording equipment capturing his utterances is part of the much broader set of intrusions into his life that he perceives all around him. The effect on his audience is that the song occupies two spheres: that of the contrived performance, but also of the sponta-neous (and private) musings of a psychologically unstable man. We find ourselves in the uneasy space between welcome participants in the performance and unwitting voyeurs who resemble the surveilling presence that the rappers try to confront in the song.9

The progression of Scarface’s first verse is in many ways typical of the unpredictable oscillations within the song itself, with the individual rappers sometimes identifying the source of their surveillance as an external threat, while at other times seeming to recog-nize that their own fragmented subconscious is the ‘other’, and that it is working, follow-ing Foucault, to internalize the external power structure. Hence, at some points, we see Scarface looking outward for the source of his torment when he says,

I’m poppin’ in the clip when the wind blowsevery twenty seconds got me peepin’ out my window.

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Investigatin’ the joint for traps,checkin’ my telephone for taps.I’m starin’ at the woman on the corner.

He looks cautiously out the window, but when he can’t find what he’s looking for, his suspicion runs wild, evident when he starts looking for ‘traps’ and ‘taps’ put in place by a vaguely defined law enforcement presence, and then, when he can’t find any, when he starts staring at the (presumably innocent) ‘woman on the corner’. However, he is not oblivious to his own role in all of this. Although he says things like ‘It’s somebody watchin’ the Ak’’,10 suggesting an externalized presence (and referring to himself in the third person to reinforce his appearance through the eyes of an ‘other’), when he goes on to describe the man who follows him, he essentially describes himself:

I can see him when I’m deep in the covers.When I awake I don’t see the motherfucker.He owns a black hat like I own,a black suit and a cane like my own.

Tellingly, he can only ‘see’ the man when he is sleeping, and what he does see is a mirror image of himself. Thus, with his final line, ‘It’s fucked up when your mind is playin’ tricks on ya’, he demonstrates an awareness that he may be delusional; however, his abil-ity to trust himself and his environment has become so eroded that he doesn’t even trust the certainty of his mental illness.

In the ensuing verses, we find similar delusions of surveillance. Willie D, for instance, tells of being followed in his car (another enclosed space), worried that he is about to get some payback for one of the many criminal acts he has committed. He rhymes:

Everybody know me. It’s like I’m a movie star.But late at night, somethin’ ain’t right.I feel I’m being tailed by the same sucker’s head lights.Is it that fool that I ran off the block?Or is it that nigga last week that I shot?

Literally haunted by his misdeeds, he experiences the downside of movie star popularity, realizing that being known by everybody makes him recognizable and therefore vulner-able. His instinct for self-preservation leads him to do what we’ve seen is typical in gangsta rap generally: he takes refuge in a familiar place within his ’hood. In this case, he says, ‘Hooked a left into Popeye’s and bailed out quick. / If it’s goin’ down, let’s get this shit over with’, and just as he’s prepared for a standoff, he too realizes that his mind is playing tricks on him. Rather than a group of revenge-thirsty gangsters, he comes face to face with ‘Three blind crippled and crazy senior citizens’, which function as represen-tations of the three Geto Boys who have also gone crazy. Their age speaks to the lost youth of the Geto Boys, forced to grow up far too fast in this environment, and their being ‘crippled’ clearly suggests the collective weakness of the rappers’ alliance, which is meaningless in this perpetual state of isolation and mistrust.

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Although all three of the rappers appear on the track, they appear in isolation, without any of the call-and-response or overlapping vocals typical in rap. It becomes clear that the source of their paranoia is not the imaginary surveilling element, but their isolation. In Bushwick Bill’s final verse, we are offered our first glimpse of the power of collectivity to keep such delusions at bay. As he and the other two Geto Boys are out on Halloween night, they find themselves followed once again, this time by an imposing man who ‘stood about six or seven feet’. However, rather than run away, the Geto Boys fight back: ‘So we triple-teamed on him, / droppin’ them motherfuckin’ Bs on him’. For a brief moment, the roles have been reversed, and it’s the Geto Boys who have tapped into their collective strength to gain the upper hand. But then the towering man disappears, and so does their allegiance:

The more I swung the more blood flew.Then he disappeared and my boys disappeared, too.….It was dark as fuck on the streets.My hands were all bloody from punching on the concrete.

We’re left with a physical depiction of the self-destructive behavior we’ve seen through-out the song. All alone and with his hands bloody, he returns to the familiar refrain of ‘My mind is playin’ tricks on me’.

The song samples heavily from Isaac Hayes’ ‘Hung up on my baby’, part of his soundtrack for the 1974 film Three Tough Guys. Ironically, the three tough guys in ‘My mind is playing tricks on me’ have been reduced to three isolated and delusional charac-ters whose toughness has been crippled by their chronic fear of their surroundings. The song depicts a universe in which profound mistrust and suspicion render interpersonal relationships untenable, leaving society in a state of nature where every individual is simultaneously a threat and a target. For this reason, Scarface says he has ‘fatal thoughts of suicide’ and cannot manage to reestablish the social bonds with the people who should be closest to him. He recalls sadly:

I had a woman down with me,but to me it seemed like she was down to get me.She helped me out in this shit,but to me she was just another bitch.

She’s gone, he says, and now he’s ‘feelin’ lonely’. In truth, everyone in ‘My mind is play-ing tricks on me’ is, too, as they have become solitary, atomized individuals, discon-nected from one another – and from themselves. In the end, the song warns us of the self-destructive consequences of turning too far inward and forsaking family, however it’s construed, in the process.

Conclusion

Rappers like the Geto Boys are by no means the first to give expression to the poten-tially isolating consequences of resistance. A generation earlier, the Black Arts poets faced a similar challenge of offering resistance to the institutions of power that were

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complicit in maintaining America’s social inequality. Using tactics that rappers eventu-ally adopted, they took highly confrontational positions against the criminal justice sys-tem in particular, but soon found that their willingness to antagonize a more powerful foe came at significant cost. We can see this in Nikki Giovanni’s ‘My poem’ (2002), a poem that depicts a speaker whose overtures to revolution have been severely compro-mised by the very institutions of power she has provoked. Trapped in her fifth floor apartment, she repeatedly insists that the revolution ‘will go on’, but throughout the poem it is clear that she has been ‘robbed’ of her facility for meaningful resistance by an encroaching police presence. Not only have her ‘two guns’ been taken (and hence her capacity for violence), but she finds herself under constant watch: ‘my phone is tapped / my mail is opened’. The result is not simply isolation, but a growing sense of mistrust of everyone around her, even those she once counted as friends. After describing her surveillance, she says, ‘they’ve caused me to turn / on all my old friends / and all my new lovers’ and suggests that she might ultimately learn to ‘hate all black / people’. In her isolation, she has lost her connections to the very people she needs to effect mean-ingful resistance; like the three Geto Boys, her mind has begun playing tricks on her, and now she too is ‘feelin’ lonely’.

Giovanni’s poem is actually quite illustrative of what happened to the Black Arts Movement, as mistrust and suspicion within the movement, often sown by law enforce-ment agencies like the FBI, eventually overshadowed the revolutionary ideals that had first given it life. It also exemplifies what has happened within rap music, in the process reminding us why it is important for scholarship to take a more nuanced view of rap as an instrument of resistance. Rap has, of course, given voice to marginalized people who are ‘trying to be seen, heard, felt’ (Powell, 2002) and it has been the core of a hip hop industry that generates over $10 billion per year in revenue, providing a kind of eco-nomic ‘voice’ to many African Americans who may not have found it otherwise. But, as I have tried to show in this article, any discussion of resistance in rap music must take into account the sophisticated networks of policing and surveillance that have not only targeted rappers themselves, but have maintained an integral role in shaping – and some-times undermining – the kinds of defiance that many within the genre have espoused. As rappers and the black artists who preceded them have long known, there’s always some-one peekin’ in the window, and so it is within the context of this omnipresent surveillance that any discussions of resistance in rap should take place.

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

1 Many scholars who originally posited rap as a vehicle for political discourse have since backed away from those claims, noting as Rose (2008: x) does that mainstream rap today is largely devoid of the socially conscious agenda that characterized the genre throughout the late 1980s and much of the 1990s. My goal here is to offer at least one reason for what Dyson calls ‘the political failure of hip hop’ (2007: 67).

2 See also Neal’s (1999: 132) discussion of surveillance in northeastern and Midwestern hous-ing projects.

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3 It is worth noting that the myriad surveillance devices that many rappers describe in their lyrics are often on full display at rap concerts, where performers and audience members alike are regularly subject to extraordinary levels of surveillance (Nielson, 2010: 1258).

4 ‘187’ is the police code for homicide. It is derived from section 187 of the California Penal Code, which defines the crime of murder.

5 As a member of NWA, Ice Cube would have had first-hand knowledge of the law enforcement spotlight. Perhaps the most famous example of law enforcement’s targeting of rap occurred in 1989, when Milt Ahlerich, Assistant Director of the FBI, took exception to NWA’s song ‘Fuck tha police’ and, in an unprecedented move, sent a letter saying so to NWA’s label, Ruthless Records, and its parent company, Priority Records. This response triggered a reaction from police departments across the country who were intent on interrupting NWA’s concerts. In Detroit, for example, police stormed the stage when the group began performing ‘Fuck tha police’. In many other cities the concerts were simply cancelled due to police pressure.

6 Watkins argues that mass media has empowered minority youth within the hip hop movement by allowing them to ‘connect people and organize collective identities despite physical dis-tance’ (2004: 568). However, as ‘Ghetto bird’ makes plain, a closer look at the mass media’s relationship to institutions that have traditionally marginalized minorities is in order. In fact, as Stuart Hall et al. argue, various media often become tools of the institutions of power that they are ostensibly independent from, so that their prevailing tendency is ‘towards the repro-duction … of the definitions of the powerful, of the dominant ideology’ (1978: 65–6). As they note, this is particularly true in crime reporting.

7 The video for the song reinforces this sense of entrapment visually by intermittently depicting the rappers through confined openings or through a constricting circle that offers little more than a ‘peep hole’ view.

8 As Nelson George put it, ‘Rap’s gone national and is in the process of going regional’, noting the proliferation of styles from acts outside of New York, especially those on the West Coast (1992: 80).

9 Some scholars have suggested that white interest in rap music is predicated on this kind of voyeurism (see, for example, Costello and Wallace, 1990; Lena, 2008; Samuels, 1991).

10 ‘The Ak’ refers to Akshen (pronounced ‘Action’), which is the name Scarface began his career with.

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Erik Nielson is Assistant Professor of Liberal Arts at the University of Richmond, School of Continuing Studies. His research explores the relationship between institutional sur-veillance and black literary and musical traditions in the United States, with a particular emphasis on rap music. His work has appeared in Journal of Black Studies, Journal of Popular Music Studies and Popular Communication.

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