I grew up listening to these songs, taking them very seriously (like Rock IV’ s anti-communist propaganda), only to realize eventually that a song titled “Ass, Gas or Cash” is unhealthy when taken seriously in any context. And like the cartoonish, scenery-chewing villain of a Steven Seagal movie, none of these songs were meant to be jokes, or treated as such when they were first released. But for those who write about hip-hop, these songs have been shamed into irrelevance because they’re a reminder of how gangsta rap is hip-hop’s most theatrical genre. None of the following songs were written as satire. This is written for the historians who choose to forget Ice Cube’s attempt at being taken seriously as an artist (not a gang member) on War & Peace - when the album art alone made everyone wonder if he was trying to be taken unseriously.

This is, above all, a statement to West Coast hip-hop critics who’ve decided Westside Connection wasn’t as good as N.W.A, or that N.W.A was somehow better than Snoop Dogg’s grotesquely greedy No Limit era. For them, the defining genre of West Coast hip-hop represents true stories from the ’hood as told by those who lived it, coupled with beats sampled from ’70s funk and soul music, and the occasional sound of gunshots or a sawed-off shotgun being pumped.įor me, the more twisted fanboy, gangsta rap is unintentional comedy - like Snoop Dogg’s poetry in “Lodi Dodi”: “Clean, dry, was my body and hair/I threw on my brand new Doggy underwear.” The following list, however, isn’t meant for amusement alone.

For fans and critics who intellectualize it, gangsta rap, or “reality rap,” is serious business.

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