The title of my book is a nod to William Friedkin’s 1985 film To Live and Die in L.A. For me, it’s a movie perfectly evocative of the eighties because it is a story about artifice. The plot centers on the pursuit of a counterfeiter who is both brilliant and ruthless. His forgeries are expertly crafted, fooling both those too naive to recognize the trick and those on the hunt to expose the truth. Even the film’s heroes engage in their own kind of con, deceiving colleagues, loved ones, and themselves. Indeed, the entire cast of characters is a tapestry of pretenses. Bilge Ebiri at the Village Voice put it elegantly when he described To Live and Die in L.A. as “a movie all about facades. The posturing characters, the synthesized soundtrack, the heavily art-designed frames, the gyms and the strip clubs and the avant-garde dance performances that put bodies on full display—all serve to create a world of whisper-thin surfaces, beautiful and magnetic and unreal.”1
The thing I find especially interesting about To Live and Die in L.A. is the way the filmmaker uses artistic realism so purposefully as a backdrop for this tale about illusions. The car-chase sequences in the film are relentlessly raw, devoid of the sorts of special effects and jump cuts that, in other action films, allow viewers some distance from the tension. Friedkin makes you feel every bump and swerve and near-miss. It’s nauseatingly realistic. What’s more, to portray Los Angeles, the director skips the obvious cinematic settings: there are no iconic neighborhoods or skylines and no glorified city landmarks. Only the empty, concrete channels of the LA River, beloved by locals and not tourists, make an appearance. Like film noir directors of an earlier generation, Friedkin seems intent on blunting fantasies of Los Angeles by exploiting popular fears of urban underworlds. So perhaps it should come as no surprise that the white director took his production crew to black neighborhoods in Inglewood, South Central, and the Nickerson Gardens projects in Watts.
Like the film that inspired my title, To Live and Defy in LA is a book about the relationship between artifice and authenticity. Here, it is black youths, rather than white artists, who use these creative devices to subvert mythologies about Los Angeles. They deploy both—fusing make-believe with real life—to captivate, provoke, and entertain.
To Live and Defy in LA is also, like Friedkin’s movie, about the eighties. Although I conclude with the 1992 LA riots and the music that emerged from that moment, the arc of the story is largely defined by the decade prior. This means I do not explore the generation of artists who took on the mantle of LA rap in the mid-1990s, including Snoop Dogg, Tha Dogg Pound, DJ Quik, Suga Free, MC Eiht, Cypress Hill, and Tupac Shakur.2 Nor do I examine the stylistic and ideological diversification of LA hip-hop in the 1990s following the meteoric rise of gangsta rap, an important development in the genre’s history exemplified by the growth of the Good Life Cafe arts movement. The most impassioned music fan seeking an encyclopedic survey of Los Angeles hip-hop history will not find that here. But my hope is that those expecting boilerplate coverage will be pleased with the depth and discovery in these pages focused on the genre’s origins.
I also, purposefully, avoided drawing this story forward to the present. While it is tempting to wax poetic about a genre I still love, arguments I pitch about current rap will inevitably sound dated to even casual observers of music trends. For many years I have been a devoted fan, a DJ, and a pop culture scholar, and the thing about rap that has always seduced me is the rate at which it transforms, innovating and adapting at breakneck speed. I have attempted here, by carving out this brief-yet-critical moment in the timeline, to detail some of that dynamism with respect for the fact that this music is always in flux.
At the same time, it has also become quite clear to me that as rap innovates some changes resonate longer and loom larger than others. To Live and Defy in LA is grounded in my contention that many of the themes popularly associated with rap music since the early 1990s—its uncompromising blackness, its militancy with respect to the police and other institutions of white supremacy, and its reconciliation of commercial success with rebellion—are rooted in Los Angeles gangsta rap.