City of Quartz. Mike Davis
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confrontations’.165 As Eazy-E explains it, gangster rap has become Los Angeles’s alternative press:
We’re telling the real story of what it’s like living in places like Compton. We’re giving [the fans] reality. We’re like reporters. We give them the truth. People where we come from hear so many lies that the truth stands out like a sore thumb.
But one of the most persistent ‘truths’ that NWA report is their own avarice: ‘We’re not making records for the fun of it, we’re in it to make money.’ In contrast to their New York Rap counterparts, Public Enemy (now defunct), who were tribunes of Black nationalism, Los Angeles gangster rappers disclaim all ideology except the primitive accumulation of wealth by any means necessary. In supposedly stripping bare the reality of the streets, ‘telling it like it is’, they also offer an uncritical mirror to fantasy power-trips of violence, sexism and greed. And no more than Charles Bukowski or Frank Gehry (other purveyors of L.A. ‘social realism’) have the gangster rappers managed to avoid retranslation by becoming celebrities. Surrounded by benignly smiling white record company execs and PR men, NWA brandish customized assault rifles and talk darkly about recent ‘drive-bys’ and funerals of friends – a ‘polished’ image like any other in the business.166
This apparent synergy between gangster culture and Hollywood (an old motif) raises some doubts about Lipsitz’s thesis of a counter-hegemonic convergence. Writing about another of Los Angeles’s outlaw subcultures, the punk scene of the late 1970s and early 1980s, David James expresses pessimism that any contemporary culture practice, however transitory or marginal, can escape ‘virtually overnight’ assimilation and repackaging by the ‘hegemonic media’. The experience of NWA, and less subtly of the entire burgeoning Colors genre, suggests that Hollywood is eager to mine Los Angeles’s barrios and ghettoes for every last lurid image of self-destruction and community holocaust. If the dream factories are equally as happy to manufacture nightmare as idyll, what happens to the oppositional power of documentary realism (a question, of course, that transcends the class struggle over the ideological figuration of Los Angeles)? James’s own bleak answer, informed by Los Angeles case-studies, is that ‘exemplary moments’ of negation can now only be visualized as transient skirmishes at the very margin of culture; resistance becomes permanently ‘conjectural’.167
Somewhere between Lipsitz’s Gramscian optimism and James’s Frankfurtian pessimism lies the real possibility of oppositional culture in Los Angeles. As Gramsci almost certainly would have pointed out, a radical structural analysis of the city (as represented by the ‘L.A. School’) can only acquire social force if it is embodied in an alternative experiential vision – in this case, of the huge Los Angeles Third World whose children will be the Los Angeles of the next millennium. In this emerging, poly-ethnic and poly-lingual society – with Anglos a declining minority – the structural conditions of intervention in popular culture are constantly in flux. Who can predict how the long years of struggle which lie ahead, before new Latino immigrants can hope to attain social and political equality, will affect the culture of the Spanish-speaking inner city? Will the city-within-the-city become colonized by a neo-Taiwanese work ethic of thrift and submission, disintegrate into a clockwork-orange of warring gangs, produce an oppositional subculture (like the Yiddish radicalism of ragtime New York) – or, perhaps, all three? Equally, will the boundaries between different groups become faultlines of conflict or high-voltage generators of an alternative urban culture led by poly-ethnic vanguards?
Certainly ‘interculturalism’ is an ambiguous slogan these days: defining the agenda of both ‘hegemonic’ culture institutions (touting the idea of a Pacific Rim nexus of corporate-sponsored art and performance) and their guerrilla opposition (dreaming of an unprecedented coalition of have-not street artists from different communities). While heeding the traditional warning – from Louis Adamic to David James – that intellectual and cultural oppositions in the capital of the Culture Industry are always conjunctural (if not conjectural), it remains to give something back to George Lipsitz’s observation that when Los Angeles’s street cultures rub together in the right way, they emit light of unusual warmth and clarity.
NOTES
| 1. | Los Angeles, New York 1933, p. 319. |
| 2. | See Glamor, August 1989. |
| 3. | Ibid. |
| 4. | Michael Sorkin, ‘Explaining Los Angeles’, California Counterpoint: New West Coast Architecture 1982, San Francisco Art Institute 1982, p. 8. |
| 5. | Notably Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon, West’s The Day of the Locust, and Schulberg’s What Makes Sammy Run. |
| 6. | ‘The Los Angeles Novel and the Idea of the West’, in David Fine, ed., Los Angeles in Fiction, Albuquerque 1981, p. 30. |
| 7. | Quoted in Mark Winchell, Joan Didion, Boston 1980, p. 122. |
| 8. | No one has explained better than Michael Sorkin (see above) how a ‘Los Angeles discourse’ – mystification presenting itself as understanding – has come to be organized into a series of interchangeable tropes and ‘mist-shrouded essences’, ranging from ‘the weather’ and ‘the apocalypse’, to ‘Disney’, ‘cars’ and ‘the future’. |
| 9. | Quoted in Kevin Starr, Inventing the Dream: California Through the Progressive Era, Oxford 1985, p. 85. |
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