Gunnar's Rap

If Ellison's novel reflects jazz tropes and Hurston's novel reflects blues tropes, then Beatty's novel reflects hip hop tropes, and explores the various stereotypes regarding hip hop artists in modern culture.

First, Gunnar has always used on-the-spot poetic or wordplay comments.  He does this both just for fun, but also often to expose social ironies, insights, or criticisms.  In Santa Monica, his seemingly MC-echoed comebacks got him the reputation of a "funny, cool, black guy."  Everyone assumes this, not only within his school, but outside of it (the doctor immediately calls him this).  Perhaps, during this period, Gunnar is seen as conforming to some of the more "Golden-Age" hip-hop styles, with its experimentalism and social commentary.

When he moves to the ghetto, the connection to hip hop culture becomes increasingly clear.  He takes a poetry class and does graffiti art...by spray-painting his poem to a wall.  He gradually begins doing more poetic work on-the-spot, starting with a poem he "composed" for Pumpkin's funeral then and there, which "signed [his] unofficial ascension to poete maudit for the Gun Totin' Hooligans and by extension the neighborhood."

But though he is living where the "Gangsta Rap"-type forms, and he has exposure to them in the streets, he is distanced from them.  When the Stoic Undertakers are filming a music video in front of Gunnar's house, the producer is very specific.  He refuses Gunnar as an extra because he is "too studious," and the producer wants" menacing or despondent," not "bookworm junior high larvae" (76).  But perhaps this is Gunnar's problem in moving from Santa Monica to the ghetto.  He had never been exposed to this idea of what people should be, before.  In his previous socialization, popular emphasis was more on humorous funk styles, whereas now he is expected to learn how to act as though people expect him to be menacing or despondent (whether or not, inwardly, people actually are).

Another aspect of hip hop that Gunnar does not yet "fit" is the dance aspect.  He claims he "couldn't dance and was deathly afraid of women" (121).  But Psycho Loco will probably fix that.  And this is the issue -- are the people in his new environment also forcing him into some image of what he should be?  I think this is clear evidence that that is so.  It is impossible for him to be part of either the Santa Monica or the ghetto social scene without somehow fitting some sort of image, or practicing some sort of behaviors.  So this is the irony -- if rap is an experimental form, how can Gunnar continue to be a rap artist and yet still experiment?  Perhaps Beatty is saying something about rap music, in general.  Not only are the producers the ones who control the tone of the music and how it is presented to the public, but the culture of the people who write the lyrics dictates much of what they can and cannot say.  Gunnar describes his poete maudit job as "immortaliz[ing] the rulers and say[ing] enough scholarly bullshit to keep from getting my head chopped off" (105).  And after the producer says "cut," Beatty describes the "sybaritic rappers and hired concubines" who are "leaning into the camera with gnarled intimidating scowls" as experiencing an effect exactly mirroring that of the minstrelsy dynamic.  The "curled lips snapped back into watermelon grins like fleshy rubber bands" and the previously-menacing despondents ask, "How was that, massa?  Menacing enough fo' ya?" (77).