How Real Are You Keeping It?
Gangsta Rap’s Images and Distortions in John Singleton’s Boyz-in the Hood
In early 1987, a group of teenagers hailing from the streets of South Central Los
Angeles released their debut album entitled N.W.A. and the Posse. Hardly revolutionary,
N.W.A.’s songs seemed to be written for house parties and good times. Many of the
songs, which included “Drink it Up,” “Fat Girl,” and “Dunk the Funk,” focused on not on
heady political or social themes, but rather offered a hedonistic view of the black
adolescent’s world. With its bouncy dance beats and its relatively juvenile lyrics, there
was perhaps little to predict that in a few short years, N.W.A., or Niggaz With Attitude,
would find itself in the vanguard of the movement eventually known as gangsta rap.
By the end of the 1980’s, Eazy-E, Ice Cube, and Dr. Dre, the nucleus of N.W.A., had
become the leaders of an aural assault on America; after releasing the hardcore album
Straight Outta Compton, controversial singles like “F--- tha Police,” and receiving
warnings from the F.B.I., it was clear that N.W.A. was successfully, and profitably,
exposing an increasingly suburban, and increasingly white, audience to a world that was
foreign, violent, and sexualized. Rapping about the struggles of inner city life did not
originate with N.W.A. nor did it begin in Los Angeles (New York’s Slick Rick,
Philadelphia’s Schoolly D both predate N.W.A. by several years), but what N.W.A. did
more successfully than anyone else was simple: they made the ghetto transcend
geography. The darkest parts of the inner city were no longer just a place; they had
become an idea.
Perhaps, in retrospect, there were clues of gangsta-ism’s imminence present in
that 1987 debut. “A B--- is a B---,” though tame when compared to what followed, hints
at the misogyny alleged of the genre; “8-Ball” celebrates reckless drinking and hard
partying. Still, the songs are hardly groundbreaking. It is the lead track, however, that
seems most portentous. In a short narrative about driving around, getting drunk, and
meeting with a girl, Eazy-E’s chorus cuts to an interesting truth:
The boyz-n tha hood are always hard
You come talking that trash we'll pull your card
Knowing nothing in life but to be legit
Don't quote me boy, cuz I ain't saying s--In these short lines, Eazy-E created a new kind of credo, a vision for what it means to be
from the urban ghetto, the hood: be hard, be legit because nothing means s---. As the
song continues, Eazy recounts running into an old friend who had wronged him in the
past. Chasing him down the alley, Eazy rhymes about what happens next: “Silly cluck
head pulled out a deuce-deuce/ Little did he know I had a loaded 12 gauge/ One sucker
dead, LA Times first page.” The violence is hardly graphic, but the murder, which is
senseless and spontaneous, is told with such casual detachment. The lesson is clear:
disrespect is a matter of life and death, and death comes cheaply. If “boyz-n-the hood”
aren’t afraid to react violently to perceived disrespect, then in the next verse, Eazy
describes how to be hard with women. Drunk from malt liquor and rum, Eazy is forced
to teach his girl her place. He raps, “Dumb ho says something stupid that made me
mad/…So I grabbed the stupid b---- by her nappy ass weave/She started talkin s---,
wouldn't you know?/Reached back like a pimp and slapped the ho.” A new vernacular
had been, if not created, transmitted out of the inner cities to a surprisingly receptive
audience. Women are bitches and ho’s; friends became niggas; suckas get capped; 40
ounces get tipped and blunts got rolled. Instead of being defeated or marginalized or
even ignored, the world represented in these lyrics found itself adopted and co-opted in
the most unlikely of places. Amazingly, in the first five minutes of N.W.A. and the Posse,
Eazy-E laid down a blue print for how life in the ghetto would be seen outside the
ghetto—hyper-violent, hyper-sexual, but authentically real. The result was the archetype
of a new kind of American: the Ghetto Thug. In the next few years as popular culture
took it and cast it onto the silver screen, N.W.A.’s vision of the hood would become
mythologized and satirized, romanticized and reviled, but it certainly did not go away.
One of the strongest artistic reactions to the urban reality depicted in the
gangsta phenomenon was John Singleton’s 1991 film about a group of friends growing
up in South Central Los Angeles. No doubt inspired by N.W.A.’s raps, Singleton titled
his film Boyz-N-the Hood and even cast Ice Cube as one of his central characters, the
charismatic but troubled Doughboy. And yet, the film is in many ways a response and a
challenge to the violent themes and images raised by rappers like Eazy-E, Dr. Dre, and
Ice Cube. Singleton’s Los Angeles is the same city that features so predominantly in
Straight Outta Compton; his characters dwell in the same reality, yet Singleton makes it
clear immediately that he has his own agenda. The very beginning of the film, taking its
cues from a public service announcement, starts with an ominous declaration:
One out of every twenty-one Black American males will be murdered.
Most will die at the hands of another Black male.
The darkened screen slowly opens into the image of a stop sign. Gangsta rap was never
known for its subtlety; Singleton responds in kind. If the lyrics of N.W.A. and its
successors (and imitators) depict drive-bys, gang wars, and drug shootings, Singleton
explores those images to show the consequences. Taking on the role of a responsible
activist, Singleton explained his motives in an early interview, “I wanted to show the
lives of people we’re taught not to care about…My whole thing is if I make intelligent
street movies for a common audience about common people, my generation will learn
something…they’re actually having a thought about the process” (Little 1). Rather than a
new form of exploitation, Singleton conceived Boyz-N-the Hood as a wake-up call to
young Black youth. Unlike many of the conservative cultural critics, that is to say many
of the white critics, who demonized hip-hop in general, and gangsta rap in particular, for
glorifying violence, Singleton is able to create a filmic world that reveals the tragic scope
and the far reaching consequences of Black-on-Black violence.
It is important to consider Singleton’s film and the oft-described Ghetto-centric
films that followed as products of the time. As Reagan’s 1980’s came to a close, the
Black community found itself in the grips of perilous new crises. The crack epidemic,
which became the subject of another film, New Jack City, was taking hope; the
government’s war on drugs was greedily taking prisoners; and escalating street violence
was taking lives. Literary and social critic Michael Eric Dyson, writing for Tikkun,
appraised the bleakness of the era: “The situation for Black men, especially juvenile and
young adult males is now so fatally encrusted in chronic hopelessness that terms usually
reserved for large-scale social catastrophes--terms like ‘genocide’ and ‘endangered
species’--are now applied to Black men with troubling regularity”(Tikkun 1). It is out of
this world that the rebelliousness of both rap music and black film emerged. Both artistic
media are attempts to reaffirm identity, power, and purpose. Tracing their defiance to the
spiritual ancestor of Malcolm X, Dyson returned to rap and film in a later article where
he argues:
The politics of cultural nationalism has emerged precisely as the escalation of
racist hostility has been redirected toward poor black people. Given the crisis of
black bourgeois political leadership and a greater crisis of black liberal social
imagination about the roots of black suffering, black nationalist politics becomes
for many blacks the logical means of remedy and resistance…Viewed this way,
black film and rap music are the embodiment of a black populist aesthetic that
prevents authentic blackness from being fatally diluted. (Dyson 114)
In Dyson’s view, the raps of N.W.A., Tupac Shakur, and Snoop Dogg offer a reassertion
of poor Black identity in an indifferent, and all too often hostile, world. If the problems
of the Black inner cities are ignored by the government, are invisible to White America,
and misunderstood by bougie middle-class Blacks, then their lyrics will not only express
those problems but champion those that inhabit that forgotten world. “Male rap artists
romanticize the ghetto as the fertile root of cultural identity and racial authenticity,
asserting that knowledge of ghetto styles and sensibilities provides a Rorschach test of
legitimate masculinity” (Dyson 115). In other words, the boyz-in-the hood are always
hard and they don’t know nothing in life but to be legit.
But if rap provides the resistance, Singleton has chosen to offer the remedy. As a
filmmaker he attempts to offer the bitter taste of realism to counter balance rap’s
romanticizing of ghetto life. The result is a film that is sentimental at times and overly
didactic at others, but focused throughout. The message is clear: being hard and legit has
a heavy cost to bear and too many young Black boys are losing their lives in the attempt.
Singleton’s concern is the plight of the Black adolescents approaching manhood and as
such his narrative focuses almost exclusively on male characters. The action revolves
around the earnest Tre Styles (Cuba Gooding, Jr.), his childhood friends Ricky (Morris
Chestnut) and his half-brother Doughboy (Ice Cube), and Tre’s dedicated father Furious
(Lawrence Fishburne). There are women characters, but they are pushed to the side so
not to interfere with Singleton’s almost single-minded endeavor: to save the American
Black male from extinction. Dyson, again, accurately notes that Singleton “keeps his
film focused on the The Message: black men must raise black boys if they are to become
healthy black men”(112). Critics may rightly point out that Singleton seems dismissive
of women in this respect—he seems to not only underplay their roles as women, but
negate them entirely—but after seeing a generation of boys raised without a male
influence, Singleton is focusing on the absence of fathers.
The film’s first few scenes, set in 1984, show how ill equipped the mother is at
teaching her son how to be a man. Tre’s ambitious mother Reva, played by Angela
Bassett, has designs of improving both her life and the life of her son through education
and career advancement. Reva is a working class woman with aspirations of becoming
middle class; she wants out of the ghetto and is willing to give up her son to do so.
Acting as Reva’s foil, Furious willingly accepts the responsibility of child rearing and
thus reinforces Singleton’s conceit of Black fatherhood as the cornerstone of the Black
community.
Upon his arrival at Furious’ home, young Tre is immediately given chores,
rules, and discipline, all the things that were apparently lacking in his mother’s home.
The first night there, Furious, lifting weights, explains to his son and to the audience,
what he is doing as a father:
I am trying to teach you to be responsible. Your friends across the street, they
don’t have anybody to show them how to do that. You’re gonna see how they
end up, too.
A few seconds later, he adds:
You’re a prince, you know that? And I’m the king.
Furious, in this little bedtime talk, has established two major themes that he will
consistently fall back on: the inherent worth of the Black male, the prince, and the
absolute necessity of the Black father, the king, to offer guidance.
This is emphasized again the next day when the two go off on a father-son fishing
trip. The choice of a fishing trip is not at all accidental as it is almost an archetype of
male bonding; alone together with only nature and the rites of masculine ritual, the two
are able to talk about the facts of life. Singleton is using all the teenage-boy’s-coming-ofage tropes available to him: A father and son fishing trip. The Birds and the Bees. Man
talk. The conversation is never really about sex, though. Because of Singleton’s
commitment to his cause, their discussion about intercourse is an investigation into
responsibility. He opens by asking his son, “Are you a leader or a follower?” before
getting into it:
Furious: What do you know about sex?
Tre: I know a little bit.
Furious: Oh yeah? What little bit is that?
Tre: I know that I take a girl, I stick my thing in her, and nine months later a baby
comes out.
Furious: You think that’s it?
Tre: Basically, yeah.
Furious: Well, remember this. Any fool with a dick can make a baby, but only a
real man can raise his children.
On the drive home, The Five Stairsteps’ “O-o-h Child” plays over the radio. In lesser
hands, the scene may feel too clichéd, too hackneyed, or too preachy, but Fishburne is
able to play Furious as fatherly and not as a pedant.
The need for strong male role models to help shape the next generation is a noble
aim, but there may be a dangerous off shoot. By emphasizing Furious’ dedication,
especially when contrasted against Reva’s prolonged absence from the screen (and Tre’s
life) there is a tendency to demean the woman’s role. After all, according to Tre, you
“take a girl” and “stick [your] thing in her.” Women can give a child, but it is the man
who is necessary to raise it properly. Dyson keenly points out the trouble in such
reasoning: “Singleton’s moral premise…rests dangerously on the shoulders of a tragic
radical triage: black male salvation at the expense of black female suffering, black male
autonomy at the cost of black female subordination, black male dignity at the cost of
black female infirmity” (112-113). Nowhere is this more telling than in the character of
Doughboy, Tre’s troubled friend who is raised by a single troubled mother, Brenda.
Brenda, the “promiscuous welfare queen,” is always at home smoking cigarettes in a
bathrobe, only taking breaks to yell, smack, or threaten Doughboy. With this kind of
upbringing, it seems only natural that Doughboy would grow up with no respect for
women. When confronted on his abusive language, Doughboy admits to his misogyny.
Shalika: Why is it every time you talk about a female you gotta say bitch, ho, or
hootchie?
Doughboy: 'Cause that's what you are.
Doughboy’s language is problematic because it embodies an attitude that is allowed
without critical challenge. Singleton permits Shalika to ask why Black men demean
Black women, but the answer is unsatisfactory. Doughboy’s arrogance is not insulting;
in fact, for many in the audience, Doughboy’s final word confirms the sexist ideology of
the hood. Nowhere in the film does Singleton offer a female character to correct this
view. Singleton succeeded in communicating the necessity of the Black father’s role in
establishing a sense of worth, but the tragedy is that he did it at the expense of the Black
woman. As Matthew Henry suggests, “As a black within a racist social and political
hierarchy, he [the black male] has neither power nor privilege; yet, on the other hand, as a
male within a still patriarchal power structure, he has both” (2)
While his representation of women is clearly a fault, Singleton is able to take on a
number of other issues with more grace. Originally released on July 12, Boyz-in-the
Hood arrived in theaters four months after the Rodney King beating incensed a nation.
The unforgettable images of King splayed out on the ground as a crowd of police officers
repeatedly struck him with their batons was no doubt on the audience’s minds. In fact, in
July, just as the movie was opening “an independent commission ordered to investigate
the LAPD delivered a damning verdict. The report documented what it described as the
systematic use of excessive force and institutionalised racism” (BBC.co.uk). Police
discrimination and abuse was nothing new to the communities in the ghetto, but the
reaction to it was changing and the world was witness. Young Black males, being
incarcerated at alarmingly high rates, began moving beyond just the frustration of slight
injustices to the righteous anger of those systematically oppressed. It is no small surprise
that the track that brought N.W.A. above the underground was the song “F--- tha Police.”
Ice Cube, in a mock trial setting promises to tell the whole truth, before testifying:
“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./ F--- that s---, cuz I ain't tha one/
For a punk muthaf---a with a badge and a gun/To be beatin on, and throwin in jail
We could go toe to toe in the middle of a cell.” Doughboy, who is played by Cube,
represents the powerless Black youth caught by and caught up in the police presence in
the city.
The last image we have of the three kids, Tre, Ricky and Doughboy, before the
movie jumps seven years into the future is of a handcuffed Doughboy being led away
into the back of a patrol car. “Looks like he’s going to juvie,” one on-looker says.
Someone else corrects him, “Nah, they’re taking him to the gates.” The implication here
is that young Darin Baker, aka Doughboy, is being taken to a more severe detention
center than just simply juvenile hall. It will be Doughboy’s first, but hardly his only, run
in with the criminal justice system. Singleton may be suggesting that Doughboy’s
treatment of women may be the result of the legal system’s treatment of Doughboy.
Matthew Henry observes:
One method of compensating for a perceived loss of power, potency, or manhood
is to adopt what Jackson Katz calls the ‘tough guise,’ the pose or mask of ‘hard’
masculinity (Katz and Earp). This ‘tough guise’…is increasingly defined within
popular culture by urban life, rampant materialism, fatalistic attitudes, physical
strength, and the acquisition of respect through violence or the implicit threat of
violence.
And:
This helps to explain how men participated, however unwittingly, in the backlash
against women. (3)
When the adult Doughboy returns home after another stay in prison, he vows that he is
going to stay out this time. He then makes jokes about getting “more p---- than you get
air” before apologizing for calling a guest a ho by saying, “Sorry, b----.” The natural
juxtaposition of the two conversations, time in prison and women as objects, seems only
to draw a connection.
The law as a tool of oppression is more than just a tool of white racism.
Likewise, it does more than just warp Black males’ sense of their own worth and the
worth of women; it turns Blacks against themselves. Black police officers are implicated
in the system and, indeed, are portrayed far worse than their white counterparts. Seen as
traitors to their own kind, Black cops are the turncoats of ghetto society. White racism is
almost expected, but when a fellow Black turns his back on his community betrays the
next generation to the White authority, the attacks are quite vicious. Once again, N.W.A.
makes a damning judgment:
But don't let it be a black and a white one
Cuz they slam ya down to the street top
Black police showin out for the white cop
Ice Cube will swarm
On any muthaf----a in a blue uniform. (“F--- the Police”)
In a telling verse, Ice Cube raps that color is the source of major conflict in American
cities, but it is not Black and White. It is blue. A person’s skin color seems to disappear
once the uniform is put on and as a result, African-American police officers lose their
blackness, lose their identity, lose their authenticity, and lose any claim to legitimacy. It
is easy to understand Cube’s defiance. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, in
1991, “Of the 20.6 million black adults, about 528,000 were incarcerated, or 2,563 per
100,000 population” as compared to “roughly 36,000 [of 5.6 million adults of other
races] were incarcerated, or 643 per 100,000 population” (Racial Disparities in
Incarceration). Because Singleton’s mission is to strengthen the Black man’s connection
to his community, it makes sense that he focuses his attack on the Black cops too. White
racism and white political power are worthy targets, but Singleton’s film is directed to his
community and the line of questioning is unflinchingly confrontational: Black cop,
whose side are you on anyway?
The first appearance of the police comes in the opening section. Tre is in the
bathroom during his first night at this father’s home in Crenshaw when an intruder
invades the house. Furious, ever the protector, reaches for a gun and shoots a hole
through the door as the would-be burglar narrowly escapes. At first, the scene seems to
be Singleton’s introduction of setting: this is the ghetto, where crime, violence, and
danger are ever present. But as the scene concludes, it becomes clear that the true villains
are the police that come to investigate. Arriving almost an hour after the initial phone
call, two officers, one black and one white, arrive at Furious’ home. They seem relieved
that nothing was taken, if only because they are no longer required to fill out a full report.
As the white cop returns to the car, the Black officer lingers on to add a few more points.
Officer: You know, it’s too bad you didn’t get him. Be one less nigger out here in
the streets we have to worry about.
…
Officer: Something wrong?
Furious: Something wrong? Yeah. It's just too bad you don't know what it
is...Brother.
Furious spits out the end of his line with bitter irony. Although the officer is Black, he is
hardly a brother. He traded in his blackness for the blue of his uniform. The worst part
of it is the cop’s blindness to the incongruity. Something is wrong—him—but he is
ignorant of his own betrayal. The audience does not make the same mistake.
The officer makes another appearance, this time closer to the movie’s climax.
Ricky and Tre are driving home talking about the need to get out of the ghetto at any
cost. As police helicopters fly overhead, the two boys are reaching the same conclusion
about their future. Ricky has his dreams set on a football scholarship; Tre has his sights
fixed on a four-year college. Both boys are mentally preparing for a break with their
present lives and their present environment. But the realities of the ghetto are not so
slight that they can be transcended so easily. The lights flash. The siren wails. The boys,
obviously innocent of everything but being young, black, and in the ghetto, are taken out
of their car, thrust against the hood, and intimidated. While there is no physical brutality,
the scene echoes the King videotape with its implied threats. The Black officer, again
acting as a betrayer in blue, is the aggressor. Holding a gun to the terrified Tre, his voice
takes on the peculiar qualities of a paranoid martinet, a man with both insecurity and
megalomania:
You think you tough. You think you tough, huh? You scared now, huh? I like
that. That’s why I took this job. I hate little motherf---ers like you. Little
niggers, you ain’t s---! Think you tough, huh? I could blow you head off, and
you couldn’t do s---. How you feel now? Where you from? Look like one of
them Crenshaw Mafia motherf---ers. No, you probably one of them Rolling 60s,
huh?
Just as the tension builds to a crescendo, a moment where something is going to happen,
the police radio interrupts to give a location of a suspected car that resembles Tre’s car.
The white cop, who has been largely invisible in the background, retreats sheepishly,
telling the boys to stay out of trouble. The Black cop, smiling demonically, intones,
“You gentleman have a nice evening now, you hear.” It is not an apology, nor admission
of a mistake, nor is it a literal and sincere wish for a pleasant evening. There is
something ominous and something threatening about the line, even as they drive away.
The police may say their job is to protect and to serve, but they are not protecting the
ghetto and they surely are not serving the Black man.
As the movie builds to climax, Singleton returns to the theme that opened the
film, Black on Black violence. Like the very ghetto itself, violence seems to be more
than a mere abstraction; it is a force and a thing that inhabits a space. Even if its presence
in not always directly felt on screen, there is the sense that the characters are enveloped in
it and that something could happen at any moment. Whether it is the intruder breaking
into Furious’ home, a power-abusing police officer intimidating kids with his gun, or a
group of older toughs who bully the kids into giving up a football, tension is never far
off. The sounds of firing guns begin to coincide with the random helicopter sounds in the
background. Each time, the gunshots punctuate a scene to remind the viewer that these
characters inhabit a violent world. In one scene that casts Rob Reiner’s coming-of-age
film Stand By Me into Los Angeles, the group of young kids ventures off to see a dead
body just for the thrill of it. Unlike Reiner’s wistful and nostalgic adventure, Singleton’s
young boys don’t have to travel to far to find. Instead of a Tom Sawyer-like outing, the
discovery of the dead body is more ominous foreshadowing than boyish excitement.
For the first two thirds of the film, Singleton took careful aims to set up the
characters that propelled the narrative and the setting where it unfolds. Under Furious’
disciplined but loving guidance, Tre has matured into the diligent anchor for his peers.
Ricky, the football sensation, balances teenage fatherhood with the dreams of athletic
success. Doughboy, with his ever-present bottle of malt liquor and his posse of porch
sitting delinquents, has turned to selling drugs. Inevitably, the periphery violence
infiltrates the center of the screen. The violence that had always been around, outside,
down the block, or around the corner, could not be avoided forever. The obvious choice
for victimization would in many respects be Doughboy. A habitual petty criminal, drug
dealer, drunk, hard boy from the hood, Doughboy’s whole life was spent in and out of
jail.
He maintained a fatalistic view about his own life and seemed as equally willing to
die as he did kill. But in many ways, choosing Doughboy as the sacrificial victim of
violence would do little to further Singleton’s aims. The very fact that one could predict
a violent end for Dough mitigated our sympathy and pathos. According to Matthew
Harris, “Rather than celebrate the ‘gangsta’ persona, the film seeks to condemn both
violent masculinity and the routine killing of black men that is often a consequence”(4).
Therefore it is Ricky, the innocent, who is killed in a brutal drive-by shooting. Ricky,
who eschewed the gang life for the football field, is the blameless casualty. Immediately
following his bloody death, the audience sees an image of his tearful mother reading a
letter from the Educational Testing Service. As if to make the senseless death even more
tragic, we see that he scored ten points over the required 700, the last obstacle before his
dreams of playing for USC had been cleared. Perhaps a bit heavy handed, Singleton
knows that the death of Ricky is the emotional climax of his film. He needs the audience
to feel outrage for the waste, the unfulfilled potential, and the massacre of the innocent.
But in the hood, you’ve got to keep it real and keeping it real here means you get
revenge. You can’t allow some punks to kill your boy and get away with it. Here then
becomes the most crucial moment in the film. Tre, having been taught the lessons of
responsibility throughout the entirety of the film, must make a decision: what is the
responsible thing to do. The code of the street is clear—kill the killers, give them back
what they handed out—but the voice of his father is loud in Tre’s head. Still soaked in
his friend’s blood, he hands over his gun to his father, seemingly following his advice.
However, in the next second, the camera takes us into Tre’s room where we see out his
open window into the street where Doughboy’s car speeds off. With the pace of the
action picking up speed, guys in the car pulling on masks and loading their artillery, Tre
has a sudden change of heart: “Let me out,” he says. The car pulls over. Tre gets out.
Singleton’s message has been realized. Tre’s decision does not mark weakness or
cowardice or softness, but a new kind of strength. “The boyz-n-the hood are always
hard,” Eazy-E once rapped. And that’s why they are killing each other, Singleton
answers.
Doughboy and his crew get their revenge, but Tre gets something else: an escape.
The next morning, Doughboy acknowledges the wisdom in Tre’s decision. In one of his
most affecting moments, Doughboy makes an important realization, “I know why you got
out of the car last night. You shouldn’t have been there in the first place. You don’t
want that s--- to come back to haunt you.” When Tre asked to get out, he did more than
walk out of a car. He got out of the need for revenge; he got out of the murder of three
more Black men; he got out of the cycle of violence; he got out of the mythology of
toughness. He also, somewhat more problematically, got out of the ghetto. As
Doughboy walks away from Tre, the film’s narrative is essentially over. What we get is a
denouement in the form of a captioned epilogue. Doughboy will be dead in two weeks.
Tre moves to Atlanta, Georgia where he attends Moorehouse College; close by is his
girlfriend Brandi at neighboring Spelman. Singleton’s vision has triumphed. He has
exploded gangsta rap’s credo that being hard, being legit means taking no s--- and killing
to prove it. Violence begets violence and the Black males abandoned by their fathers
have suffered. Tre and Furious stand alone as successful survivors showing the audience
how paternal responsibility and personal character can redeem the Black race. The
problem is that Tre has to leave the ghetto to make it. Those that stay are doomed. What
hope is there in the ghetto? What hope is there for those that are left behind? Singleton
has offered an effective critique of gangsta culture, but has he offered a viable
alternative?
The final moments of the screen are a contradiction. Our eyes come to focus on
the lasting image, white words on a black screen that reduce the film to a moral: Increase
the Peace. Singleton is content to leave the audience not with complex artistic themes,
but with a reduction. This is my message, please take it, he seems to be saying. This is
edu-tainment, a parable, a lesson. Yet at the same time, the voice of Ice Cube returns, not
as Doughboy this time, but as the rapper. His song, “How to Survive South Central”
accompanies the credits and is likely the last thing audiences hear as they exit the theater
or reach for the rewind button. How then can Singleton handle the seeming contradiction
of his “Increase the Peace” with Cube’s rules of survival?
How to survive in south central (what you do?)
A place where bustin a cap is fundamental…
Rule number one: get yourself a gun
A nine in your ass’ll be fine
Keep it in your glove comparment
Cause jackers (yo) they love to start s---…
Rule number two: don’t trust nobody
Especially a b----, with a hooker’s body
Cause it ain’t nuttin but a trap
And females’ll get jacked and kidnapped
You’ll wind up dead
South central ain’t no joke.
Got to keep your gat at all times motherf---ers.
Better keep one in the chamber and nine in the clip God damnit.
You’ll sho’ get got, just like that.
If Singleton was content to reduce his film into a three-word slogan, he should have at
least allowed himself to have the final word. At the heart of his work is a serious conflict.
He wishes to be both a storyteller and filmmaker but he also has the desire to be a social
critic, to dismantle the myths of the ghetto and the temper gangsta rap’s glorification of
the hyper-violent.