Gangsta Rap Posse Reviewed by Sean Collins

Two reviews by Sean Collins in one week! Not too shabby. Sean delivers - naturally - a really insightful, intelligent, very fair review of Gangsta Rap Posse.

Here's some pieces from the review:

The idea of a Bush I-era hardcore hip-hop outfit who actually are gun-toting, ho-pimping, mass-murdering drug kingpins as outlined in their platinum-selling rap career is so fucking brilliant a high concept I'm stunned I've never seen it in action before. It's difficult to remember now, in an age when Jay-Z has more number-one album debuts than anyone but the Beatles and the President jokingly banters about Kanye West's antics, but when my generation of white kids was growing up, "rapper" was a career that took on the same sort of quasi-mystical air as "cowboy" or "ninja."

And:

The kinds of hip-hop that politicians and parents groups rent their garments over back then were tailor-made for action-hero status, and that's what Marra delivers here. Watching his N.W.A. manques roll up on a rival MC's compound and strafe his bodyguards with machine-gun fire fulfills a long deferred desire to see the larger-than-life lyrics of such groups made real, or at least as real as an action comic would make them.

It's so effective in that regard that it's tempting to overlook the obviously problematic racial territory we're in. What we have here is a white guy taking Easy, Cube, Ren, and Dre's lurid cop-killing, bitch-fucking, crack-pipe-illuminated fantasy world and drawing it, and that's a bit of a sticky wicket, innit? It's an ugly portrait, even if you're just painting by the numbers left by the subjects.

And also:

But it seems to me that what Marra's doing is simply taking vintage gangsta and treating it like any other kind of genre fiction.