In 1989, gangster rapper Eazy-E released his album Eazy-Duz-It featuring a song called Boyz-N-the-Hood. The lyrics are explicit,
glorifying gang violence, misogyny, and drugs. Songs like this began defining
the hood and what it meant to be gangster. It gave gangster take on the
definition of respect and power. To be gangster, you had to be hard, a killer
with no respect for others. Here’s a sample of some of the lyrics in Boyz-N-the-Hood by Eazy-E.
I Gotta Get Drunk Before
The Day Begins
Before My Mother Starts
Bitchin About Ma Friends
About To
Go And Damn Near Went Blind
Young Niggaz At The Path
Throwin Up Gang Signs
Ran In The House, And Grabbed Ma Clip
Wit The Mack 10 On The Side Of Ma Hip
Bailed Outside And Pointed Ma Weapon
Just As I Thought The Fools Kept Steppin
Not too long after Eazy-E’s album dropped,
Boyz N the Hood made its debut in
theaters in 1991. The movie was set in South Central L.A., following the lives
of three young black males growing up in the hood. Director John Singleton
intentionally gave his movie the title Boyz
N the Hood to combat this insidious rise of gangster mentality.
The opening scene is of a stop
sign. Children can be heard laughing and playing in the background. The stop
sign is supposed to signify stopping the violence. This statement is made
throughout the movie, and Singleton makes it clear right from the start. Children
are put in danger every day by the violence that takes place in the hood. Many
of them are born and raised into the gangster mentality. Violence in the hood
is cyclical. Someone gets shot and vigilante justice follows. Perpetual killing
ensues. Somewhere down the line, someone has to take a stand. Tre, one of the
main characters, is faced with this decision. When will the violence end, and
who is going to end it? Will it end at all? And who’s to blame? I believe that
the blame can be placed on two different tiers.
Halfway through the movie, Tre’s
father, Furious (Lawrence Fishburne), takes Tre and his friend Ricky to a
billboard off of Crenshaw (one of the most notorious streets in L.A. for gang
violence). It reads “Cash for Your Home”. Like we read in Sugrue’s Not Even Past, gentrification rears its
ugly head in impoverished communities. The billboard’s advertisement in Boyz N the Hood is an attempt to push
out residents of the community in order to build chain businesses. These chain
businesses will only be affordable for middle to upper class families, which
forces those who are impoverished to relocate, some losing their home. Furious
explains to them that liquor stores and gun shops are built everywhere around
the community because the city wants the residents to kill each other. The
community needs to stay strong and band together in order to fight this institutionally
repressive system. Differences must be overcome in order to stand up against
the corrupt institution.
The blame can’t be placed on the
city government alone by allowing these stores to proliferate in these areas,
however. It may provide the means for violence, but it doesn’t execute it. Both
the government and the community itself fuel it. One of the only ways out for
Ricky, Tre and his girlfriend, and others, is college. Knowledge is the true source
of power, because with knowledge comes freedom. As the oracle of his community,
this is Furious’ teaching along with the need for personal and public responsibility.
But how are kids able to obtain an education growing up in the violent,
discriminating world that is the hood, when the government itself is against
them? This movie tries to answer that question. Boyz N the Hood is a classic and should be seen by everyone. I
highly recommend it.
http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/eazye/boyznthehood.html
Boyz-N-the-Hood Lyrics
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boyz_n_the_hood
Release date for the movie
I like your post because it, as do many of the other posts, connects highly to discussions we've had in my Urban Geography class. I'm currently writing my final paper on a topic we discussed during the semester called, "gentrification with justice." This is an outreach idea implemented by a few faith based programs, and it delves deeper into the community that the soup kitchens and the Salvation Armies that we are very familiar with. Those type of outreach efforts exist on the peripherals of these blighted inner-city neighborhoods. With the "gentrification with justice" plan, strategic re-neighboring is introduced meaning that people who have access to adequate resources and information and who are diverse move into neighborhoods where there is a lack of adequate resources, information, and diversity. This is done so in an effort to break the chain on social isolation that occurs for the people in these neighborhoods who ended up there as a result of joblessness, mainly. In these concentrated areas, there is really no way out because they have access to none of the resources that lie outside of their community/their space. To carry on with this idea of space, one's space is simply not the background to their life, but one's space highly influences their well-being and the amount of growth or lack-thereof that are able to undergo. So, like you were saying, in these areas where they have stores to buy guns and alcohol, that (and the other commercial buildings (or lack thereof) which I assume are of a similar caliber) will play a large part in determining much of the lifestyle of the people in that area. But, you say, the best way out is to gain knowledge, which I completely agree with. However, as I said up above, access to the outside knowledge is incredibly hard. This is where the re-neighboring comes into play when people take it upon themselves to move into neighborhoods and create that neighborly relationship (which is the aim of the idea...it's not to move a bunch of affluent white people into the neighborhood to give them money and other goodies) with a diverse group of people that have a diverse group of resources to offer. What the people who move into these inner-city neighborhoods often find is that they receive more knowledge and gain a greater since of well-being than they feel the original residents do. Interesting thoughts about the relationship between space, poverty, and behavior. I believe that this idea of re-neighboring is at the forefront of social change. Yes, it has it drawbacks and aspects to be questioned, but I feel that the idea can't really be beat.
ReplyDelete