Between the Bars
How Bay Area rappers turned street knowledge into political critique, calling out systemic injustices and the war on the working class — all while rapping over a thumping beat.
A lot of folks find it easy to categorize 90s/early 00s Bay Area music as gangsta rap over a nasty beat that glamorizes the lifestyle. I mean, I get it — the songs that reach popularity are songs like Since ’84 by Mac Dre where he talks about “grinding and rhyming and pimpin’ hoes” and Not My Job where he reminds us that he’s a “pimp slash rapper” and anything else is not his job. However, in that same song he drops the line, “start a war for nothing like G.W. Bush,” and throughout his album titled Ronald Dregan: Dreganomics (2004) he says, “If you gon’ believe in something believe in Dre. It’s only civilized for us to live our lives, royal, spoiled, the American way.” Reminding his listeners of the political strains within the American government.
In 3X Krazys Stackin Chips album (1997), where you can find the hit Keep It On The Real, you can also find Tired of the Pain. The group raps about losing family members to street violence, dealing with depression that began in their childhoods, catching cases, constantly hustling and looking for a new hustle to stay financially afloat, all while genuinely being tired of the realities of life and the emotional hardships they bring.
J Stalin’s hit, Birthday, can be found in his 2014 album, Prenuptual Agreement, and this is the same album with his song, Self Made Millionaire. Though Self Made Millionaire is also a popular song on the album, the message and lyrics are deeper, more vulnerable, and touch on where the drive to make it out within working-class people in the hood stems from. Though it may sound like he’s bragging about selling drugs and killing people who wrong him, he’s also letting us know that for him, it feels like there’s no other path available to one day become a millionaire. This song depicts the flossy hustler mentality that a lot of folks in the hood feel like they have to develop in order to lift themselves up and keep their ego intact. At the same time, they face financial struggles, street violence, drug abuse, and other traumas. Throughout the song, J. Stalin raps,
“Where I live at n***** chasing pipe dreams. If you ain’t selling then you using the cream.” Ambitious goals for a lot of his peers seem unattainable. Still, they’re hustling for it, and if they’re not, they’ve fallen into drug addiction while they were. He follows that up with,
“Ask me why I floss, tell ’em cause I’m supposed to. If you was me you’d be riding round shining too. I’m on my grind and I ain’t never gettin’ off so don’t wait cause I just popped another off. Winner in the game of life but some n***** lost.” Later into the song he says,
“I’m a tell you the truth, n**** that’s my word. I could get it back cause I get it off the curb.”
Keeping your head high in the hood and being cocky or “flossy” about your hustle is mandatory. Bragging about how difficult it was for you to make something out of the little that you have is a survival mechanism working-class folks in the town have mastered. It’s a way of flipping imposter syndrome on its head. Instead of feeling like we are unworthy of success and nice things because we are poor, we change our perspectives — we believe that we deserve success and nice things more than anyone because we’ve struggled more than a lot of people. We wear our scars like a badge of honor, and we don’t care if we lose everything tomorrow because we’ve had nothing before. Meaning, we can get it all back if we need to. Though I personally didn’t have to participate in the drug trade, J Stalin’s Self Made Millionaire captures the pressures, choices, and survival strategies that so many of my family members and peers faced in Oakland. The stories resonate not because I lived all of them, but because I grew up around them, listening to and absorbing the game, and I understand the systemic forces shaping these realities.
Since its beginning, hip-hop and rap have been used by artists to amplify the voices of working-class inner-city folks. One of the first known rap songs, titled The Message, was released in 1982 by Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five. The song talks about how the hood is like a jungle that doesn’t let you think clearly or too far ahead into your future. Over a funky ass beat, Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five describe the difficulties of being Black and working class in America to anybody who’s willing to listen. They list financial issues, drug abuse, crime, interpersonal problems, the faulty education system, and pick apart the American dream facade that the media wags in working-class people’s faces to lead them down the same path and repeat the same harmful cycles. In Mac Mall’s autobiography, My Opinion, he states that if journalists had the label ‘gangsta rap’ back in the day, then The Message would have been the first gangsta rap song. Through rhythm and poetry, artists have exposed the cracks in the system for decades. Though times have changed rap into something to be sold and packaged for quick streams, it’s important to remember how this artistic medium was initially used as a tool for those who are misrepresented and silenced by the media.
“I wanted to manipulate the English language in order to inform the masses of the cruelty of the inner city areas of America. Nah, for real, I wanted to ‘Spit Game!’” - Mac Mall
This is one of the central themes in Dr. Tricia Rose’s biography, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America. Though her writing mainly focuses on New York’s early hip-hop scene, the same dynamics of resistance, identity, and structural constraints are also visible in Bay Area rap. Dr. Rose explains how rap is a Black cultural expression that prioritizes Black voices from marginalized communities in America.
“It [rap] began in the mid-1970’s in the South Bronx in New York City as a part of a hip-hop African-American and Afro-Caribbean youth culture composed of graffiti, break-dancing, and rap music. From the outset, rap music has articulated the pleasures and problems of Black urban life in contemporary America” (Rose).
With that being said, hip-hop wasn’t documented until about 1982, when Steven Hager wrote a profile about Afrika Bambaataa and the Zulu Nation on Village Voice. Hager was the first journalist to publish the term “hip-hop” in a major mainstream publication. Hager wrote,
“When he was 12, Bambaataa had already begun hanging out at the Black Panther Information Center on Boston Road. His political leanings were encouraged by the appearance of songs like ‘Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud’ by James Brown and ‘Stand’ by Sly and the Family Stone.” Meaning that in one of the earliest known print references to hip-hop, two of the three cultural influences cited are from the Bay Area. The Black Panther Party, as we know, was founded in Oakland, and Sly and the Family Stone are from Vallejo. No one can argue that hip-hop emerged from the Bronx, but the impact that the Bay Area had on hip-hop’s early sound, aesthetic, and ideology is less widely recognized. However, if you take a deep dive into the Bay’s cultural and political movements from the ‘60s and ’70s, you’ll find that history strongly suggests that the Bay was hip-hop before there was hip-hop (Arnold). I say all of this to say that hip-hop and rap in the Bay Area ain’t just some hyphy, pimping, and drug-dealing shit. At its core, it’s deep, political, and rooted in storytelling over here too. Don’t get it twisted.
One of the most prominent Bay Area rappers to voice the struggles of the hood through introspective storytelling is Dominick Newton aka Shaheed Akbar but more commonly known as “The Jacka.” Matt Werner, founder of Thizzler, told Rolling Stone in a 2015 interview,
“He was a gangsta rapper, but unlike a lot of gangsta rappers, he didn’t glamorize the criminal lifestyle. He talked about the pitfalls and the dark side of it. I think a lot of people really gravitated towards that.”
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The Jacka was born in Phoenix, Arizona, to teenage parents before moving to Richmond, CA. Then in the late ’80s, he moved to Pittsburg, CA. Pittsburg is basically the outskirts of the Bay Area, but this didn’t get in the way of how the Bay Area embraced him. While serving time at the Santa Rita Jail for a robbery conviction, the Jacka affirmed his faith in the Islamic testimony through Shahada. Though he had already studied the Nation of Islam theology under Dr. Yusuf Bey in Oakland, it wasn’t until this point in his life that he began to incorporate the practice into his mind and music. If you didn’t already know, Islam rose almost in parallel with the movement and hip-hop. The Black Panther Party was heavily influenced by the teachings of Malcom X, the former spokesman for the Nation of Islam. These revolutionary influences can be heard in the rhymes of rappers early in the rap game, such as Public Enemy, KRS-One, Tupac Shakur, and Ice Cube; more locally, Boots Riley, Souls of Mischief, Paris, and others. After The Jacka integrated himself into Islam, the contemplative and introspective rhymes with a message followed. In his album Tear Gas (2009), with his hits Glamorous Lifestyle and All Over Me is Dopest Forreal, Callin’ My Name ft. Mistah Fab, and What Happened to the World. In Callin’ My Name, The Jacka and Mistah Fab open up to the listeners about the realities of their world. They wake up to a ghetto where a lot of folks are struggling with drug addiction that began with their parents, and the internal battle of deciding whether to work a legal job that isn’t paying enough to cover the bills or make quicker money through more dangerous activities,
“[Intro: Mistah F.A.B]
This song goes out to all them hustlers out there..
Tryna leave the game man, you know
Keep callin’ em back
[Verse 1: Mistah F.A.B]
When I wake up in the morning, you know what I see?
The world is a ghetto, smokin’ on D
My little cousin 13, strung out on E
Can’t blame him, his mama on C
O-K-E, 27 but she look like a old lady
Grind grind, fuck working at Old Navy
Rather slang girl, and make the world go crazy
Who am I? Man I ain’t no better
Just a young n**** lost tryna get this chedda
Staring out the window, wishing on a shooting star
Tryna get dumb money, go and buy a stupid car
Pray to the Lord, tryna heal my flaws
Dialing to the Heavens, hope he hear my calls
Wanna leave the game but I’m stuck and I’m trapped”
The chorus of the song is sung by The Jacka,
“Tryna leave the game, but it’s callin’ my name…” Not only are Bay Area rappers talking about their struggles in their music, but they are also simultaneously telling listeners about the socioeconomic issues that exist in the hood. Cities like Oakland, LA, New York, and Chicago with a high population of working-class Black and Brown folks expose the cracks in the system. In other words, rappers who speak on their experiences are telling you, firsthand, what it is like to live within these cracks — the consequences that arise from these issues being ignored by the government, the kinds of mindsets folks develop in order to survive, the jobs and crimes they feel they need to commit, etc. Unlike folks who spend their lives reading theory to understand the struggles of the working class, real rappers are living it. The Jacka is one of many Bay Area rappers who has used the power of storytelling to pinpoint these socioeconomic and political issues in America. If you go ahead and listen to the album that a hit Bay Area song is a part of, you’ll come to find that a lot of the songs in these albums are filled with personal stories waiting to be heard. In other songs such as Sometimes I, Never Blink, and Taylor Made, The Jacka continues to take us into his personal vignettes. These consist of consequences, trauma, moral ambiguity, survival, and the juxtapositions one faces while being working class and trying to make it out of the hood; all while being under attack by a local government.
Across the bridge in the same album with the hit, Blue Bird is Herm-outro (Themessage) in which Herm Lewis from RBL Posse closes their album, Ruthless by Law by speaking directly to community members in the Bay Area,
“This is Herm Lewis being intelligent, being original
And I am communicating, cooperating, socializing and recognizing RBL Posse for the ‘94
Every Bay Area community has been affected by stupidity and gang violence
And we want to avoid this stupidity in the future
Brothers concentrate on what’s important, by any means necessary Stack some G’s and be in it to win it
Young brothers establishing positive reputation avoid negativity and stupidity, have faith in God, continue to progress, be responsible for the direction of your life and appreciate knowledge and freedomCheck this out, everyone want respect in this Bay Area communities, so realizing in self the consequences and repercussions when you disrespect the next individual
My objective is to motivate and inspire young brothers and sisters to accomplish positive expectations and meet the challenges of this corrupted society with positive communication
Black power with much love and peace for the ‘94…”
Hip-hop, rap, graffiti, and dancing in the Bay Area and all over America have always been political. It has always been Black, working-class, and has always been anti-capitalist. It has always been about the movement. In the Bay Area, we’re often distracted by the commodified version of ourselves. We’re told we’re “hyphy,” and we were, but even hyphy has political origins. The hyphy movement was a movement because the local government was attacking us and we were fighting back in one of the few ways we knew how to — infrapolitics. We’re told that we are cool cars, grillz, speaker-knocking beats, that we’re loud and chaotic, but within this chaos there is purpose. Whether we recognize it consciously or not, we are revolutionary through and through. There are messages in our music. Messages that sometimes we miss or forget due to all of the distractions thrown into our faces. Remember that the Bay Area started a lot of political movements and has a hand in them even today. The Bay Area has never been silent about shit. Keep an open ear when you’re listening to your favorite Bay Area hit and hopefully hear a little something about our realities and struggles. Behind the commodification of Bay Area music, there is a movement much bigger than me and you.
