Suddenly, a “real” rapper (as opposed to the “studio gangster”) was one who was willing to participate in the most pernicious aspects of street life. To be “real” no longer meant to simply talk about the realities of the ‘hood.

Unfortunately, these works also raised the stakes with respect to the assertion and validation of realness. These masterpieces, which rank among the greatest in hip-hop history, demonstrated the power and beauty of hip-hop as a window into the ghetto quotidian. Dre’s The Chronic, three classic exemplars of critical ghetto ethnography, provided listeners with access to the underside of post-industrial urban American life, foregrounding “the real” through the telling of ghetto-centric narratives. NWA’s Straight Outta Compton, Snoop Dogg’s Doggystyle, and Dr.

It is this construction of realness that has contributed to hip-hop’s greatest and most tragic moments.įrom an artistic perspective, the hip-hop generation’s preoccupation with realness has resulted in the creation of some the most powerful and influential contributions to American music in the past twenty five years. Rather, to be truly “real” in the hip-hop context requires a particular lived response to one’s music, which is also crosschecked against a narrow rubric of ghetto experience. After all, if “keepin’ it real” were merely about the existence of a one-to-one relationship between lyrical content and lived experience, we would undoubtedly consider MC Hammer or Will Smith to be among the realest MCs on the planet. To be clear, the notion of keepin’ it real extends beyond the soul and pre-soul values of honesty and artistic integrity, which have been part and parcel of African American music since its inception. This mantra has been the shibboleth of the hip-hop community since gangster rap supplanted the political rap movement of the early 1990s.

Beanie sigel the reason rar