Criminal Minded, KRS-One
this is the title track of the album that spawned east coast gangsta rap. it dropped in 1987, same year as the west coast benchmark, Ice T’s Rhyme Pays (Aimee Mann found this out personally, you may recall). Ten years later in ‘97 Biggie would get shot, a pivotal moment in the media/commercial image of gangsta rap. Ten years after that in ‘07 we get 50 Cent (vs. Kanye) as the apex (and perhaps death) of hip hop culture-as-gangsta rap meets american capitalism.
if you listen to the two ‘87 albums — mostly the lyrics from two minds who have proven their mettle (even though KRS is introduced here assimilating “Hey Jude” into hip hop, you should really soldier through like it’s an audiobook, as opposed to Beatles-like music; with just a beat and a sample it’s more ‘ipad-ready literature’ than ‘music’) — and then look at the pop cultural details along this timeline of the gangsta rap explosion we can see the evolution/devolution of an art gutted out to become a more pop/pageview friendly product (that’s probably too harsh an assessment, it’s more nuanced than that, but you get what i’m saying).
The key though is this 50Centism as the capitalist descendant of “Criminal Minded”. 50cent is/was gangsta rap meets american corporatism. And in this way, 50cent is like the hip hop version of Jezebel; their recent manifesto being interpreted here as feminist-blog-rap meets american capitalist-corporate agenda.
Maybe there should be a Jezebel hip hop album/mixtape, “Feminine Minded”? (call me!) Actually, come to think of it, maybe Exile in Guyville is the Criminal Minded for fem-bloggers. Though KRS never sacrificed for the lad magazine circuit/$ like Liz Phair did.
