So far we have talked about superheroes, now we are talking about another subculture and that is Mafia or gangsters. In the year 2000 there appeared an article the journal disseminated by the Council for Exceptional Children of the US entitled \u201c\u2018Gangstas\u2019 in Your Classroom: How to Recognize Them and What Teachers Should Know\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The sense of alarm in the title reads like a warning against some primal contagion, or the onset of some congenital condition. For the decorous and law-abiding teacher, the gangsta is a seen a scourge. The article clearly maps out the attributes of this particular postmodern subculture. Gangs confine themselves to their own race\u2014be it African-American, Hispanic, Southeast Asian, or white\/caucasian, and grow out of particular neighbourhoods, or barrios.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Insurance to their loyalty to one another is through the ritual of \u201863\u2019, a number devised after six sides of a star and three prong of a pitchfork, where members of the gang all take turns to beat an initiate for 63 seconds. The ritual is completed once the initiate completes some criminal act, such as snatching a bag, stealing from a store, a joy ride, or a random act of violence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
While both punks and gangstas were born of economic disenfranchisement and urban disillusion, the majority of gangstas were also subject to the multi-generational depredations of racial discrimination as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And because gangsta culture is clan related, their identifiers, from clothing, to body markings, to gestures are highly encoded, ceremonialised, and stylised. According to Tasha Lewis, rap music, also known as hip-hop, emerged as part of African American and Latino gangs in the Bronx, New York, during the 1950s and 1960s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
(Note the presence of the word \u2018hip\u2019 which is taken from \u2018hipster\u2019.) It eventually spread to Brooklyn and across the United States, and with it came its music, style diatribe, and fashion. By the 1980s, hip-hop had diversified in its style and had become a global phenomenon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At first, hip-hop style included sports labels such as Adidas, Reebok, Puma, Timberland, and Converse. It would later draw from \u2018preppy\u2019 designer label Tommy Hilfiger\u2019s collegiate garments, such as chinos and polo shirts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Baggy jeans, puffer jackets (oftentimes customised with gang names and insignia), baseball caps, sneakers, and hooded jerseys were all popular garments that blended together to form the early hip-hop style.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As hip-hop music diversified in the 1990s, brands such as Phat Farm, Sean John, and Rocawear, became allied to it. As branded clothing became popular in the \u201880s, Harlem tailor Dapper Dan reappropriated luxury European fashion brands Louis Vuitton, Gucci, and Fendi with his own trademark, what he called \u2018a macho type of ethnic ghetto clothing\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Like all subcultures, hip-hop and its subgenre, gangsta rap, entails the assemblages of body adornment, including accessories, hairstyles, and garments (as well as shared music, ideologies, and argot) to create an identifiable style.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The relation between these elements of styling practices produces a system of signs that creates meaning, what Carol Tulluch calls \u2018style narratives\u2019. Although the relationship between the objects (sign) and its meaning (signified) is arbitrary, motivated only by social convention, the meaning produced (in this case the gangsta rapper) is embedded with knowledge and power.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The style practices of the African diaspora, writes Tulloch, are a form of agency that are \u2018part of the process of self-telling, that is to expand an aspect of autobiography through the clothing choices an individual makes\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In her study of the style narratives of the African diaspora, Tulloch creates an analytical
frame that she calls \u2018style-fashion-dress\u2019 to interpret the system of concepts that signifies the meanings and frameworks that are implicit in dress studies methodologies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Tulloch uses the term \u2018style\u2019 in her matrix to denote agency. When applied to the groups of people that were formed outside of Africa (due to the effect of imperialism and colonialism), a consideration of transnational spaces needs to be accommodated in order to understand the formation of new identities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Such an approach, argues Tulloch, \u2018can lead to a more balanced understanding of the style-fashion-dress practices of black people as a comment on a sense of self in contested situations and contested spaces\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Using Tulloch\u2019s analytical framework, hip-hop extends on African and Latino precursors of stylefashion-dress by engaging in the appropriation of everyday garments and accessories (sports-wear and high end fashion brands) to produce meanings of group affiliation, visibility, and territoriality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the same vein, Chandler and Chandler-Smith argue that African idiomatic style maintains cultural continuities through the concept of bricolage and black fashion imagination, what they call \u2018things African\u2019. They argue that \u2018contemporary hip-hop recirculates its own internal ethnic traditions in a wider black fashion system\u2019 to produce continuity of memory and a sense of shared space and belonging.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Gangsta attire signals affiliation and territoriality across Afro-Latino imaginary spaces, particularly spaces of poverty and neglect, such as the ghetto, what Chandler and Chandler-Smith call \u2018the underworld womb of hip-hop\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This transgressive space of transcultural urban identities uses music, language, and dress codes to articulate social resistance by producing new meanings of style (read agency here) whilst maintaining links to African prototypes of costume and performance, what Chandler and ChandlerSmith describe as \u2018ghettocentricity\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Ghettocentricity and pachuco culture \u2018got into the dress codes of white male status and normality, playing with the images of an Anglo popular culture\u2019s own masculine outsiders\u2019 \u2013 the Southern dandy, the Western gambler, the modern urban gangster\u2026. and ruptured their structures of Otherness\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Since the establishment of cable television and MTV (music television) in the 1980s, hip-hop subculture has been co-opted by the media, fashion, and marketing industries to mass produce the violent and negative aspects of ghetto life: poverty, drugs, crime, and institutional incarceration.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Hip-hop performers such 50 Cent, Snoop Dog, Eminem, and the promotion of their dress code as \u2018players\u2019\u2014oversized white T-shirts and baseball jerseys, baggy pants, reversed baseball caps, and coloured bandannas\u2014have come to represent a visual language that is bound up with notions of \u2018street cred\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Stereotyped masculine roles including the \u2018player\u2019 or the \u2018pimp\u2019 are promoted through stylised dressing and sexualised body language, \u2018in which Armani and Gucci suits, alligator shoes and custom-designed hats and jewelry\u2019 come to signify conspicuous consumption, status, and affluence. It represents a call to leisure and lubricious hedonism that is an outward fillip to austere, white Protestant values.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Anyone with some familiarity with early film noir will know that there were no consistent determinate factors for the gangster and the criminal. He was dressed either in a different shade to distinguish him from the good guy (something more or less required in black and white films), or was more dishevelled, to reflect his dissolution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
However, at the same time as the emergence of film noir in the 1940s, there arose a particular and unmistakable fashion among Latino men in California who called themselves pachucos. Originating in Texas and Mexico, the pachuco appeared as a kind of streetwise playboy who prided himself in his careful grooming and flamboyant appearance.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
So far we have talked about superheroes, now we are talking about another subculture and that is Mafia or gangsters. In the year 2000 there appeared an article the journal disseminated by the Council for Exceptional Children of the US entitled \u201c\u2018Gangstas\u2019 in Your Classroom: How to Recognize Them and What Teachers Should Know\u201d. The … <\/p>\n