Thug Life: Race, Gender, and the Meaning of Hip-Hop

by Michael P. Jeffries

Hip-hop has come a long way from its origins in the Bronx in the 1970s, when rapping and DJing were just part of a lively, decidedly local scene that also venerated b-boying and graffiti. Now hip-hop is a global phenomenon and, in the United States, a massively successful corporate enterprise predominantly controlled and consumed by whites while the most prominent performers are black. How does this shift in racial dynamics affect our understanding of contemporary hip-hop, especially when the music perpetuates stereotypes of black men? Do black listeners interpret hip-hop differently from white fans?

These questions have dogged hip-hop for decades, but unlike most pundits, Michael P. Jeffries finds answers by interviewing everyday people. Instead of turning to performers or media critics, Thug Life focuses on the music’s fans—young men, both black and white—and the resulting account avoids romanticism, offering an unbiased examination of how hip-hop works in people’s daily lives. As Jeffries weaves the fans’ voices together with his own sophisticated analysis, we are able to understand hip-hop as a tool listeners use to make sense of themselves and society as well as a rich, self-contained world containing politics and pleasure, virtue and vice.

Genres: Music, Hip Hop, Art, Race, Nonfiction, Sociology

273 pages, Paperback

First published January 15, 2011

Reviews

[Jesse · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really interesting and smart ethnography of black and white male thug/gangsta rap listeners. (Jeffries does the guilty bit about how his research doesn't cover everyone near the end, calling for similar productions concerning female, non-American, GLTBQ and younger listeners, to which, sure.) He finds some really interesting things out, including that these listeners divide along racial lines in thinking about who created rap (black listeners see it as related to and speaking about their collective identity and struggle; whites don't), but not about things like authenticity, which seems to their minds to have much more to do with commercialism (bad), femininity (bad), and talking too much about money (bad if it's not authentic, which makes Jay-Z OK). They're also, both black and white, pretty canny about the imaginative and literary dimensions of rapping rather than uncritically celebrating or receiving whoever's performance as "real.") His major analytic complaint/difference, besides that he finds a homosocial sense of "thug love" in a lot of these songs that the listeners don't, is that they don't listen like sociologists and thus don't connect problematic subject matter to white domination of the industry or larger sociocultural forces. Which, again, well yeah. (For this argument he relies on one 1997 article, which does show a correlation between major label releases of rappers and more violent lyrical content, but Charnas' book shows that the connections are more complex than that.)

[Emma · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an interesting book, I had the author as a professor in school. It does include a history of hip hop and it's origins, but the book is mainly a sociological study. Jeffries interviewed a number of men from the Boston area asking questions about hip hop music and culture. There are some really interesting conclusions regarding hip hop masculinity.

One star off because it is a relatively academic text. This shouldn't be discouraging, it is really quite well written and readable.

[Theon Hill · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jeffries offers a compelling and well-researched account of the the intersections of masculinity and hip-hop. In particular, his book interrogates the political, aesthetic, and cultural significance of rap music to the construction of masculinity within majority and minority cultures. This book complements other crucial texts on hip hop like Tricia Rose's "Black Noise" very well.

[Debbie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Too much of an academic style read for me, but overall the content concerning hip-hop was good.