Beschreibung
This book maps out a 50-year political narrative of three eras of local discourse starting in the mid-1960s, West Oakland. This book makes the case that due to local, state, and national government failures to respond to the incessant police brutality and violence, poverty, and poor social conditions in West Oakland, East Oakland, and other sections of the San Francisco Bay Area, a particular form of resistance was created, raised, and eventually exported. This narrative is told through three Bay Area underground leaders-Huey P. Newton, 2Pac (Tupac Shakur), and Mac Dre. In the mid-1960s, the socioeconomic and political setting of West and North Oakland, compounded by geographical, cultural, and educational factors, produced the dynamic that gave rise to the Black Panther Party for Self Defense, one of the most radical and militant forms of Black Nationalism. While the Party was experiencing the last signs of collapse in the early 1980s, local youth was already beginning to use rap music as a primary mode of political expression and began to draw heavily on the radical and militant elements of Panther discourse during the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s in both artwork and lyrics in a range of local rap subgenres (including a deep investment in the production of gangster rap music). By examining this evolutionary discourse in rap music through the frameworks of setting, representation, movements, discourse banks, and impact, this book not only advances our understanding of the underground rap music and black politics in Oakland, but it also creates a model for future studies of rap music and underground, grassroots subcultures.
Autorenporträt
Lavar Pope is a Clinical Assistant Professor of Political Science at the Arrupe College of Loyola University of Chicago, USA. He earned a Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts from Lehigh University and a PhD in Politics from the University of California, Santa Cruz, USA. He has worked as a DJ, Producer, and Sound Engineer in the San Francisco Bay Area and enjoys teaching courses related to the subject of this book, including a course called "Power, Rap, Music and Urban Politics."
