Engine

This would actually be a pretty simple statistical study to conduct. Are you schooled in basic empirical research? I am so I can help if you actually wanna do that.

And .. if you're fucking with me then I know you don't live in the US (y'know .. gangstaland?), you asshole

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Kirby

I've read up on it some, but never actually been so take it with a grain of salt.

I've seen documentaries and read news and what not from the bay area (I frequent a gangster rap forum that was originated in the Bay Area, also).

I know for a fact that murder, assault, and gang related activity around the bay area are pretty high. Oakland alone has 3.5 times murder than the national average.

It's perfectly reasonable to believe that there ARE gangster rappers that ARE doing what they say they do.


Not dealing with the bay area, but for an example, two rappers "Bird" and "Black Walt" from Kansas City were arrested and charged with running one of the biggest cocaine trafficking rings in Kansas City.


Long story short, there are people that put a facade of being gang related and don't really live the life, but it's not fair to rule out that they're all fake. Plenty of rappers die/go to jail every year doing what they rap about.

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Mrd00d

Mac Dre for example was more or less famous for doing a lot of the crazy **** he rapped about, but who knows how true any of it is.

East Oakland, Richmond, parts of SF, are dicey. Richmond and Oakland were trying to outdo each other on homicides a year back in '03... It was retarded. It was some odd 120 or so homicides in one year, and they were neck and neck. Richmond finally passed Oakland in like '05 or '06 and things took a backseat. Local papers had/have been noting the decrease in violence and how they thought it would increase with the stale economy and it's really not as bad as a decade ago.

But hell, 75% is a ballpark guess. I don't live in East Oakland, or Richmond. I lived nearby, but its a different game I know. Point is, though, is rappers spice up their **** most of the time. I think 25% truth is reasonable when it comes to the gangster ****.

Now we talk about The Grouch, that's like 80-99% truth right there, in my opinion. Del, speaking truth - sittin around, getting high, thinking, stayin out of trouble - something like 80% truth level. Ballpark estimates in my opinion, that's all.

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Sparky

whatever bruh, im dodging and weaving bullets every morning on my way to cereal.

pourmeanother

79.6% of all statistics are made up.

Having been to Richmond, Oakland, and some of the dicier areas of SF- Hunter's Point, etc... much of the "Yay Area" stuff is true.

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Mrd00d

I mean, that's isolated ****. I'm glad on your pass through some of these happy places you noticed some **** go down, but you don't live here. Most people in the Bay are good. That's my underlying point. There's ****-head hoods everywhere stirring up ****. True. There's rappers claiming this and that went down. Maybe. Who knows. But it's not like it's armageddon on the streets. It's been pretty civil the last few years. Only recently has crime started to spike again.

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pourmeanother

I live 45 minutes from SF. You don't have to explain things to me.

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And you're surrounded by the ones you blah
Death shows up... anddd blah, blah, blah.

Janszoon

Just to throw in my two cents, when I lived in the Bay Area a couple years ago it seemed quite gentrified and pretty safe basically everywhere I went, including SF and Oakland. It's not that there's no crime or anything but compared to other metro areas it's pretty mild.

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pourmeanother

Most crime ridden neighborhoods are in the nicest of places. And isolated. That doesn't verify the claim that some outrageous number of gangster rappers are fake. For as delightful as the Bay Area is as a whole, there are some of the most dangerous areas in the U.S. scattered amongst it. Therefore it would not surprise me if more than a small fraction of gangster rappers who have come out of said areas have at least seen or been involved with some gangster ass shit.

I don't even like gangster rap. Why am I defending it?... What is the topic here again? I was initially laughing about the claims in this thread. 23.9% of people would agree.

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You hope for blah
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And waiting for blah
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And you're surrounded by the ones you blah
Death shows up... anddd blah, blah, blah.

GuitarBizarre

The issue wasn't that this **** doesn't happen. The thing I take issue with is that I simply don't believe the HUGE numbers of rappers that claim to have seen or done all of this crap, can possibly all be telling the truth.

Think of it this way. There is a HUGE amount of rap dealing with gangland or crime related subject matter. Hundreds, thousands of rappers.

Now, we know from it being goddamn obvious that not every person affected by gangland violence or crime is going to be a rapper.

That means that people who are affected by gang ****, as a group, contain a subset, a very, very small subset, of people who are rappers.

If we extrapolate from that, and assume every rapper is telling the truth about their gang exploits, then we necessarily assume that the proportion of people who are NOT rappers, being affected by the same stuff, increases in proportion to the number of rappers, yes?

Now, knowing how many rappers are out there rapping about this stuff, we have to judge for ourselves whether we believe that many people are actually that strongly affected by gangland violence. even if we assume 2/10 people in high-crime areas are rappers (A figure I would imagine to be an unrealistically high proportion), then for every 2000 rappers, we assume that 8000 other people are experiencing the same **** on a daily basis.

When you total up how many rappers there are, add onto their numbers the number of non-rappers who live the same sorts of lifestyles outside of that musical interest and creative outlet, in my mind, you rapidly reach strospherically high numbers of people that rappers are claiming implicitly live this sort of life. Unrealistically high numbers.

For that reason, I simply don't believe that every rapper, or even a significant minority of rappers, whose subject matter contains gang or drug references, can possibly be telling the truth, because if we were to assume that that many people live lives directly comparable to hip-hop lyrics, we would also have to assume that the areas where these people live are nigh on uninhabitable, human wastelands ruled by mobs and guns. It'd be like trying to back up a statement that said there are places in the US where life is literally like living in some kind of strange mad-max scenario.

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