When rap music broke into the mainstream in the late 1980s, it was quickly hailed as a vehicle for political resistance against the blatant social and racial inequalities in the United States. However, a closer look at even the most ostensibly rebellious and confrontational songs reveals that the resistive potential within rap music was often undermined, or at least complicated, by the pervasive culture of policing and surveillance from which it emerged. Through close readings of classic tracks by Ice Cube, Goodie Mob and the Geto Boys, this article argues that traditional scholarly formulations of rap-as-resistance need rethinking, and that we must account for the aggressive strategies of social control that have been integral in shaping, and often circumscribing, the kinds of defiance that rap embraces.
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