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• 1 2017-07-25T16:48:00-07:00 Reaganism and Rebellion: The American Uprising of 1988-1992 142 image_header 2017-08-02T10:08:10-07:00

  Introduction

  This essay is about the massive rebellion that rocked America in the years 1988-1992.  Los Angeles reached the apogee of its power over the United States and the international world in the years of Nixon and Reagan. Not by chance, it was also, simultaneously, the site of the two most deadly and destructive social explosions of the 20th century: the Watts Rebellion of 1965 and the Los Angeles Uprising of 1992.  Explaining and understanding such massive ruptures in the social life of a nation requires multiple narratives, multiple frames of analysis at several geographic and chronological scales, and detailed accounts of separate yet interwoven dimensions of social, cultural, political, demographic, and geographic life. Ghost Metropolis as a whole offers those narratives and explanations.  This essay is a capstone and climax: tracing, along with Bloodbath and Richard 37th, Act IV, the historical turning-point during which the deepest contradictions of the Los Angeles metropolis reached the point of critical mass and exploded under the immense pressure of its own past and that of the world system that its leaders and media and military corporations had put in place.
  
  The years 1988-1992 were the confluence, the intersection, and collision of the social forces inscribed into the metropolitan landscape of Los Angeles, the social power flowing outward from the nation's first metropolis of media and military.  The origins of the 1992 Uprising lay deep in the Aztec, Spanish, Mexican, and Anglo past of the Los Angeles region.  They lie in the Mexican Revolution, in the pulp fascism of the Hollywood's racial imaginarium, in the segregated and censored streets of the immigrant metropolis, they lie in a police department dedicated to racial apartheid, they lie in Richard Nixon's militarist anti-communism and the rise of the New Right's suburban anti-urbanism in the age of Reagan.
  
  The Uprising of 1988-1992 was the endcap to the internal repression of the 1980s "Reagan Revolution" in American politics.  This essay traces only the final acts of this drama that was centuries in the making of a perfect storm.  Los Angeles played a role in its own movie.  It was both the object and the site of America's political-cultural myth-making.  At stake was the meaning of its social geography, of its immigrant diversity, of its staggering economic inequality, of its militaristic police force, of its uncensored movies and its music.  These themes are the direct subject of the present essay.  
   

  Reaganism: The Triumph of Los Angeles-Branded New Right Repression

  Ronald Reagan distilled and represented Los Angeles's regional political culture even more so than Richard Nixon had done.  While Ronald and Nancy Reagan occupied the White House, from 1981-1989, Southern California was the regional center of gravity of U.S. political power.  Both the Hollywood media business that created him as a public figure, and the Cold War aerospace industry that expanded in the Reagan escalation of advanced weaponry.
  
  Reagan's frequent horseback retreats on his ranches in Santa Barbara and Simi Valley were staged publicity productions for a movie cowboy.  His key political network was deeply rooted in Los Angeles, Southern California.  But it was also rooted across the state of California, of which he was Governor from 1967-1974. HIs own Southern Califonria locus served to anchor the northern and southern California arms of his California vanguard.
  
  His most pivotal backer, Henry Salvatori, although Born in Rome, was pure Angeleno.  Salvatori, who earned a PhD in physics from Columbia in 1930, made millions in petroleum exploration, with the company he founded in 1933, Western Geophysical.  Salvatori's company practiced "reflection seismology," a highly effective way to map the contours of rock formations beneath the surface and identify reservoirs of oil.  Salvatori sold Western Geophysical to Litton Industries in 1960, and turned nearly full-time to politics.  A founding shareholder in William F. Buckley's National Review, he was also a major patron of the free-enterprise think-tank Heritage Foundation.  He played key roles in the backing and promotion of Ronald Reagan from 1964 through.  Salvatori was Goldwater's California state campaign director, leading the key success of Goldwater's triumph in the California Primaries.  He was Ronald Reagan's campaign finance director for the 1966 run for Governor, and he managed Sam Yorty's re-campaign for LA Mayor against African-American challenger Tom Bradley in the race-charged camping of 1969.Note
  
  Edwin Meese, Governor Reagan's Chief of Staff, was a northern Californian who migrated to  Orange County and San Diego by 1976, was a key member of Reagan's kitchen cabinet, and became President Reagan's Attorney General, from 1985-1988.   Another northern California was Caspar "Cap" Weinberger, a major figure in the California Republican Party, was  deputy director (1970–1972) and director (1972–1973) of the Office of Management and Budget and then, from 1973-1975, Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare.  Weinberger was a key architect of Reaganism, from international to domestic policy.  He won the nickname "Cap the Knife " while at Office af Management and Budget.  But he was also vice-president and general counsel of one of the world's largest construction firms and building of US nuclear plants, including the largest in the United States, the controversial San Onofre on the California Coast. Returning to a political career as Ronald Reagan's Secretary of Defense, Cap Weinberger masterminded the Reagan military buildup,  the strategy of "Rollback" against the Communist Bloc.  By championing the advanced aerospace technologies in his power over the Reagan budget, Weinberger was the perfect Defense Secretary for Southern California, which dominated military contracting in the 1980s.   With spymaster William P. Casey at the helm of the CIA, Reagan's international policy was highly indebted to the Nixon-Kissinger world system, and was easily as bellicose.  Giant military-industrials, led by Lockheed and McDonnell-Douglas​, got a fresh blood transfusion to expand their production of advanced weapons systems like the Stealth bombers and fighters.   
  
  The world's media rightly associated President Reagan with Hollywood, an association of which Reagan was proud.  He was, after all, just the latest of many Hollywood Republicans: His own mentor, the former song-and dance man Senator George Murphy, was the most potent officeholder to date.  Both Cecil B. DeMille and Louis B. Mayer had chaired the California State Republican party, but Reagan represented the ultimate fusion of 20th-century mass mediated politics: an ideologue and genuine political leader, and a performance artist who rose through a literal propaganda machine (The First Motion Picture Unit, during which Reagan wore the uniform of  an Army Air Force officer).
  
  Reagan's Western White House/Rancho was also a place for him to touchdown with the New Right populism's "base" in Southern California, among the "Plain-Folk" Evangelicals, the Tax Revolters, and the rich voting from yachts in the Newport Beach Harbor.  The mass-voting base of the New Right had been built in Southern California by the Goldwater movement and by Richard Nixon's suburban mobilizations.
  
  Ronald Reagan exceeded Nixon's accomplishment by making a happy home in his administration for the Religious Right, which came of age a few years after Nixon's resignation.  Fundamentalists, Evangelicals, and pentacostals came together in 1979 under the leadership of Jerry Falwell to form the Moral Majority.  While a great base of evangelical populism had been inscribed into  Southern California since the 1930s, the movement as a whole was also very southern.  Falwell's home Thomas Road Church, his Lynchburg Christian Academy, and his Liberty University, were based in Virginia, while Past Robertson, the leading Televangelist for the Religious Right, was based in Dallas, Texas.  Reagan, himself not a regular churchgoer, effectively channeled the movement through Southern California and the White House.  Reagan genuinely embraced most of the major issues that bonded the religious right: ""He was a strident anti-Communist, he denounced the decline of the family, he praised the 'old time religion,' and he criticized the permissiveness of the sixties generation.  He questioned the validity of evolutionary theory and supported the teaching of creationism in the public schools." (Sutton 2013: 22)  A major proponent of school prayer, Reagan opposed the Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion in 1973, rounding-out his moralist credentials.
  
  Reaganism swept the U.S. political system on the framework that Nixon had built, and performer-ideologue Ronald Reagan made popular because positive and reassuring for wounded patriots.  Reagan himself may not have been a cynical racist like Nixon,. In fact, he was a remarkably fair-minded and tolerant man in his personal beliefs.  But Ronald Reagan, cheerfully fronting for the national Religious Right, tolerated, as Nixon had, the white racism that had fled the Democratic for the Republican party.  Jerry Falwell's Thomas Road Church refused to welcome non-white members until as late as 1969.   Falwell, who supported George Wallace's segregationist presidential campaign in 1968, defended the right of conservative Christian educational institutions like Bob Jone University to deny nonwhite admissions and maintain rules against interracial dating.  The magic moment for Reagan and the Moral Majority came in October 1980, where he addressed the Moral Majority conference in Dallas as candidate for the U.S. presidency: "I know this is a nonpartisan gathering--and so I know you can't endorse me--but I only brought that up because I want you to know  that I endorse you."
  
  The Reagan administration took full advantage of the mass media based in Southern California.  The 1981 Inaugural was produced by Walt Disney Corporation, his policies were tie-ins with blockbuster movies (Star Wars) and he was supported by the huge media empires of the Televangelists.   Televangelism raised millions for an emerging mass politics increasingly dependent on high-priced mass media.  

  The Contradictory Mayoralty of Tom Bradley in the Age of Reagan

  Reagan Inauguration of January 1981 encapsulates the two faces of Los Angeles: Disney and Lockheed.  Tom Bradley mirrored these two faces of LA as a ribbon-cutting figurehead for racial integration, and as a promoter, booster, and seducer of LA's corporate capitalism, which fueled a steep increase in wealth segregation just as the barriers to racial segregation in the housing market collapsed.  But Bradley, despite his impeccable credentials as a representative of LA's Black neighborhoods, was persistently in favor of aggressive crackdown policing.  He pledaged get tough on crime during his election campaign, and, and consistently supported the whtie racits Republican Chief Gates, a Mayor Yorty loyalist, throughout hi mayoralty. Bradley "aided in the engineering of aggressive anti-gang programs, and pushed for mandatory jail sentence for all violent offenders." (Viator 2012:21)
  
  Tom Bradley is a towering figure in Los Angeles and California politics: the only African American and longest-serving mayor in Los Angeles history--going back to 1781. After the Watts Rebellion a new coalition of white liberals, blacks, and latinos gathered around Bradley, a tall ex-LAPD officer with a commanding presence, who was elected to the City Council in 1962 and ran for mayor first in 1969, narrowly losing to Sam Yorty, a Nixon loyalist who ran a race-baiting campaign.  In the 1973 rematch, Bradley defeated Yorty and remained in office fully two decades until 1993.[11]  Bradley ran for Governor of California twice during the Reagan Administration: in 1982 and 1988, each time defeated by Orange County Armenian-American George Dukmeijian.  Bradley, witnessed the racist LAPD department from the inside, and learned to operate within it, as he would later navigate the shoals of a racially divided California electorate after the repeal of the Rumford Fair Housing Act by a populist groundswell of white intolerance.
  
  Bradley behaved as though he believed he had integrated Los Angeles through his support from a winning the coalition of whites, blacks, and Latinos.  Rapid increases in the flow of immigrants from Korea, China, the Philippines, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Russia and many other sending countries, created rapid changes in neighborhood geographies, changing faces behind the counters of everyday retail shops, friction at schools, and resentments about "invasions."  Despite frequent news of race tension, Bradley gutted the city's race-relations commission, called the Human Relations Commission, which had been established in 1966, in response to the Watts Rebellion.  A major purpose of race relations commissions is to monitor the state of interethnic conflict, and intervene before disputes rise to the level of civil violence.  Bradley, by reducing the Human Relations Commission to a nominal staff, without field workers or conflict resolution specialists, effectively turning a blind eye to growing inter-racial conflict. [Ethington and West 1996). 
  
  While relatively smug about the city's churning race relations, Bradley presided over the Manhattanization of Downtown LA.  During his tenure Los Angeles sprouted scores of new office and hotel towers.  Skyscrapers are widely considered both material to and symbolic of a city's global status.  Indeed, foreign investors poured billions into the city's downtown real estate, with Japan and Saudi Arabia among the top investors.  The Reagan military build-up extravagantly enriched Southern California's aerospace sector: from design to production, Los Angeles was abuzz with the workshops of warcraft. Aerospace workforce was very white, however, so these top salaries and wages typically flowed into peripheral communities, not reaching "South Central" LA: the vast area between the LA River and Baldwin Hills, from Downtown to Watts.
  
  During the Bradley years the geography wealth inequality deepened between the urban core and its peripheries.  The Bradley administration's "growth machine" generated downtown corporate wealth, which also fueled home prices in the wealthy westside communities of Bel-Air, Beverly Hills, Westwood, Santa Monica, and the beach cities.  Because these places were all mostly white thanks to prior segregation, they now become just as inaccessible to new working-class immigrants because of the price curve when traveling north, east, south, or west.
  
  [[MAP]] and [Transection]
  
  The 1984 Los Angeles Summer Olympics epitomized the contradictions of the metropolis in the age of Reagan.  Held from July 28-August 12, the 1984 Summer Olympics, were the second to held in the Coliseum, which had been purpose-built for the 1932 Olympics.  Los Angeles was in fact the only city with a bid to hold the 1984 Olympics, because most great cities feared the cost burden.  LA's bid rested on infrastructure that was already in place.  It's large nearby universities, especially USC and UCLA had superb sports facilities and housed the athletes and few venues had to be constructed. Peter Ubberroth, an entrepreneur from the travel sector, organized the first privately-financed Olympics, and in a reversal of previous city's staggering financial loses, the LA 1984 Games actually generated a surplus of $250 million. Ubberoth's key innovation was to win major corporate sponsorships, creating an advertising-branding symbiosis between the US Olympic Commission and the nation's largest, most brand-conscious corporations.
  
  The grotesque irony of fast-food corporations, led by McDonald's sponsoring the world's healthiest human beings was lost on Ubberoth, however.  The success of the corporate-sponsor strategy owed a great del to the tilted playing fields that year.  The competition was sadly lopsided toward the United States because the Soviet Union imposed a boycott on its athletes, to retaliate for President Jimmy Carter's boycott of the 1980 Moscow Summer Olympics.  The U.S "medal count" grew dramatically, and the coverage by broadcaster NBC grew increasingly patriotic.  Ronald Reagan has already spent three years in the White House cheering American patriotism.  These games, in his hometown, were a perfect spectacle that rallied support for the final battles of the Cold War.
  
  Gold medals, red, white, and blue logo, and corporate profits went hand-in-hand.  "'Without the Soviets, U.S. athletes have done very, very well,'' said Chuck Rubner, a spokesman for McDonald's in Chicago.  The Americans have done so well, in fact, that some of McDonald's 6,600 domestic outlets have reportedly run short of Big Macs."  As the major TV networks shamelessly displayed the hosting nation's growing "Medal Count," McDonald's spokesman Rubner gushed: "There's been a real gold rush at McDonald's." Note.
  
  Los Angeles in the 1980s was arguably at the height of its golden age: its fame and concentrated world power. LA in the 1980s also earned its prominence on the world stage from its world leaders (Nixon, Reagan); powerful industrial sectors (media/entertainment; military-aerospace); and effective boosters (Mayor Tom Bradley, now ironically continuing the Otis-Chandler / Chamber of Commerce legacy).  
  
  But there was a dark side to the Olympics, held within the central city: Mayor Bradley authorized the LAPD to round-up and detain hundreds of known gang members, releasing them only after the Olympics closed.
  
  The Bradley years represented a new configuration of power in the United States more generally, as Democratic mayors of African-American descent achieved a sort of Pyrrhic victory in a nation whose base of power had shifted to the white suburbs.  In Detroit, Mayor Coleman Young presided over the white de-population of the city, and Harold Washington achieved the Mayoralty of a deeply racially divided Chicago. In each city, the power of these mayors differed. In Los Angeles, the city's first black mayor had little power over the massive, repressive power of the LAPD was left undisturbed.
  
  But Bradley ironically left the segregated core of LA to the suzerainty of LAPD Chief Gates, who applied the most brutal military occupation policing to South LA, setting the standard for policing in neighboring Compton, Long Beach, Huntington Beach, and the Alameda Corridor cities of the white and latino working-class.  Bradley served nonstop until 1993, when his popularity finally sank in the aftermath of the Uprising of 1992.
  
   

  The Gates Era Police State: The LAPD's Military Occupation of Los Angeles in the 1980s-90s 

  The Nixon Administration promoted the idea that there was a 'crime wave" in America's great cities, in the late 1960s and 1970s.  But because the the biggest police departments, in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, developed paramilitary cultures of violent intimidation, they promoted violence on the streets by escalating it.  As the world has finally admitted after the numerous video-recordings of blatant, unprovoked killings by police, excessive use of deadly force on non-whites has been a very regular occurrence. Chiefs William Parker, and his protege, Daryl Gates imposed the code of silence about police killings and encouraged aggression as good policing.  Daryl Gates, who was born and raised in white suburban Glendale, joined the LAPD in 1949 at the age of 23, serving serving as Parker's chauffeur.  
  
  Parker's and Gates' racist views increased the Department's culture of hostility toward the citizens they were hired to protect.  Most notoriously, Chief Gates tried to defend the use of the deadly choke-hold, blaming recent deaths of black suspects as a racial weakness, claiming that, among blacks, “the veins or arteries do not open up as fast as they do on normal people.” Beginning his own tenure as Chief, beginning in 1978, Gates not only magnified the military aggression of his troops, but waged an aggressive war on street gangs.  Gates "became a tough-talking spokesman for fearful, tradition-bound white Americans -- a man with easy answers to complex questions battling with liberals, 'cop-haters,' the media, the mayor and critical members of the City Council."Note.
  
  Gates intentionally harassed citizens on the street, to keep the neighborhood on its heels. “I think that people believe that the only strategy is to harass people and make arrests for inconsequential types of things. Well that’s part of our strategy, no doubt about it.” Complaints of police abuse increased in the late 1980s, and less than 1 percent of the 1,400 complaints of excessive force were prosecuted. Veterans of the Black Panthers, led by Michael Zinzun, formed the Coalition Against Police Abuse in 1975, but faced a stone wall of non-cooperation from Chief Gates.  Gates then infiltrated CAPA with undercover officers from the "Public Disorder Intelligence Division."  After discovering the police spies, C.A.P.A sued the LAPD and forced the dissolution of the counterinsurgency unit.Note.
  
  Armed street gangs are sociological adaptations to the hollowing-out of urban neighborhood civil society.  Despite the addition of 70,000 jobs from the 1984 Olympics, despite the massive Reagan aerospace spending in Southern California, South Central LA had an unemployment rate of 45% in the late 1980s.  As Mike Davis bitterly observed in 1990, "Southcentral LA has been betrayed by virtually every level of government."  Social dislocation and abandonment was magnified in the aftermath of the devastating Watts Rebellion, while long stretches of South LA laid barren from fire.Note.
  
  Stanley “Tookie” Williams co-founded the Crips in 1969 as a quasi-political militia keep the gangs out of South Central.  He originally had a political agenda, continuing somehow the fearless rebellion of the Black Panthers. Tookie’s original “Cribs”, an alliance between previously unaffiliated, younger hoodlums from the East and West Sides -- of Main street.  The name quickly morphed, somehow referencing their trademark wooden canes: stylish weapons for gangsters.  The documented moment of the Crips formation was at a movie showing of the film Al Capone (Allied Artists, 1959).  By 1972 Los Angeles still boasted only 18 known street gangs.  By 1996, there were at least 270 gangs--actually “sets” of the larger confederations of African-American Crips and Bloods, not even counting latino gangs (Alonso 1999, p. 91 Figure 5.3)
  
  Gates went beyond the work of his predecessors by creating paramilitary anti-gang "CRASH" units (for "Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums."  Operating first out of the notorious 77th Division station (called "Fort Apache," CRASH units were akin to counter-insurgency teams in Vietnam, committing human rights abuses with internal immunity.  Predictably, these units became enmeshed in the underworld, as exposed in the Rampart Division scandal that ultimately led to the overhaul of the LAPD by NYPD's William Bratton.  As historian Kevin Starr succinctly observed: "CRASH ... became, in effect, the most badass gang in the city."Note.
  
  
  The Carnography of "Riots" in the 1980s (Bensonhurst) and 1990s
  
  79. Thanks to geosocial injustice and to television, urban violence became the spectacle in the 1960s.  The New Hollywood and the New Right both fed on this bloody spectacle, drinking blood in every nightly newscast. The 1965 Watts Rebellion was televised, as were all cases of civil unrest thereafter.
  
  80. Broadcast television news brought ultra-violence to the screen, from the Vietnam War to Watts, Los Angeles, in the years before the graphic machine guns of Bonnie and Clyde (1967) or The Wild Bunch (1969)?  
  
  81. "A forty-seven year old Negro['s]...legs were almost cut off by a burst of twenty rounds from a National Guard machine gun at a Watts roadblock yesterday," recites one news announcer as the Watts Uprising was in progress, in August of 1965.Note KTLA Doco
  
  
  5. Gates Era
  
  In 1988, Ice Cube (born O'Shea Jackson in 1969) was 19 years old.  His generation of LA's African American men could not remember the First phase of the contemporary Civil Rights movement, which ended after 1965.  Instead, they grew up in apartheid-policed 1970s Los Angeles and came of age in the Reagan 80s and 90s. 
  
  Choke HOlds (use Anna Deveare Smith)
  
  By 1988, the year Straight Outta Compton hit the streets, boom boxes, and in a crucial mass-market breakthrough (Boyd) the white-suburban airwaves and CD collections,
  
  the militarily-armed L.A.P.D. conducted “gang sweeps” in Operation Hammer under Chief Daryl Gates, Chief William Parker’s potent protege:  ”During the early evening hours up to 1,000 officers riding four deep in patrol cars would arrest and detain all alleged gang members congregating in public places. One weekend in April of 1988 the LAPD arrested 1,453 people in gang sweeps which they deemed “successful.” (Alonso 1999: 3)  By 1988, gang-related homicides in Los Angeles County had reached 454, according to the LA County Sheriff’s Department.  Gang-related homicides peaked at 803 dead souls across LA County in 1992, the year of the Rodney King Uprising, 
  
  6. CAPA  Case Files from 
  
  Michael Zinzun  
   

  SECTION: RAP REBELLIONS

  Start here with rap

   

   

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  OLD SECTION CUT AND GRAB ONLY BBELOW THIS LINE.
  
  
  The so-called "Reagan Revolution" of the 1980s completed the Los Angeles capture of the U.S. national political system that was begun by President Richard M. Nixon.  Both of these leaders, in very different ways, brought the signature elements of the Los Angeles regional political culture into the mainstream of American political life when they occupied the White House and re-drew the electoral map of the United States.  The elements of free market populism, anti-communist militarism, evangelical traditional moralism, ,  anti-urbanism, fed by the propaganda of racial intolerance.  It was a period comparable to the triumph of the New Deal coalition in the 1930s: a set of governing ideologies that were born and raised in a specific region, and then, through the national leadership of regional elites, became hegemonic for the nation as a whole.
  
  Although Ronald Reagan put himself forward as the apostle of the free world, against state-run economies and authoritarian police states, Reaganism as a political movement supported police states in America's great cities, mobilizing fearful suburbanites to cut social programs and to militarize urban police departments police departments is wars on drugs and street crime.   
  
  Reaganism drew powerfully from southern, southwestern, and midwestern grass-roots populist conservatism, to be sure.  It also grew in the suburbs of every major American city.  Reagan's leadership of the nationwide movement was built from his leadership of the California wing: He has strong support in the plain-folk Christian Right communities across Southern California, especially in Orange County.  
  
  The evangelical Religious Right flourished in white suburban megachurches and on the airwaves with televangelists Pat Robertson, Jimmy Falwell, and Tammy Baker, Jimmy Swaggart.  Tens of millions of viewers dialed-in to learn how immorality was dragging America into the ditch.  The movement swelled, but seems to have peaked at tehe nd of the Reagan administrion in 1988.  Membership fell off so badly that the Moral Majorityactually dissolved in 1989.  The gleam of the movement was also shattered by the sex scandals of the Bakkers and Swaggert.  In this scope, it can be seen as a reactionary movement.
  
  The grand contradictios of this period was between the fall of censorship and the rise of a futile moement agains it.  The President's Commission on Pornography, Nixon's adn Reagans. Meese Report.  1986.
  
  The attack on Gangsta Rap locked-in perfectly with the Moral Majority's telvangelizing.
  
  launched the "Culture Wars" to suppress the spread of 1960s freedom movements.  Gay rights, abortion, multicultural respect for diversity, and the increase of race-ethnic diversity in the great immigrant cities of LA, Chicago, and New York, Miami.
  
  The 
  
  
  Across all the cases of the New Right's anti-urbanism, Los Angeles was the most prominent site of both repression and rebellion.  Despite its liberal African-American mayor, Tom Bradley, Los Angeles as a territory was still governed by the militaristic Los Angeles Police Department, whose Chief, Daryl Gates, continued the racist, authoritarian approach to policing that his mentor, the legendary William Parker, had established as the national standard. 
  
  Reaganism of the 1980s continued the steady increase internal repression that began with Nixon's Law and Order policies.  That repression was both cultural and physical. 
  
  
  
  
  That uprising took many forms, but Rap music proved the most rebellious, forcibly de-segregating the airwaves from the segregated and occupied streets of Greater New York and of South Central Los Angeles.  
  
  
  
  which took many forms until the massive eruption of the Los Angeles Uprising of April 1992.  The chronologies and transnational events are all entwined throughout these revolutionary years of the late 1980s and early 1990s.  The conflagration though which Los Angeles, the United States, and the Earth passed in these years was transformative, comparable  to the transformations in European and East Asian societies since that same global upheaval.
  
  This essay shall first...
  ____-    _____   
  
  The Police State of American Cities, from Nixon to Reagan 
  
  
  
  
  
  Tom Bradley : The Contradictions of a Neo Liberal Mayoralty
  
  
  Thanks to the LA City Charter, neither the mayor nor the LA City Council had control over the LAPD and the tenure of its chief. Bradley, feeling that by being elected he had solved the race problem in the nation's second largest metropolis, and he pursued prosperity by courting businesses and promoting the 1984 Olympics.
  
  
  The year 1989, two centuries after the French Revolution's 1789, was the apogee and climax, of the Long Cold War and the denouement of the entire 20th century.Note 
   

  Drinking Blood: First Violence and Defensive Violence

  77. Drinking Blood: First Violence, Social Violence, and Media Violence from the 1965 Watts Rebellion to the 1992 Rodney King Uprising.
  
  Writers, Directors, Producers, and Actors were not the only ones using violence for a social and political statement.  Police violence was the first violence in the central city, the segregated city, the city of sin.  Containing people to a clearly-bounded territory, and then locating/concentrating the sex trade and illegal booze and drug trade to those "bad" neighborhoods requires the violence of a City police force, plus the injustice of the real estate and other economic sectors.  Ghost Metropolis documents these forms of injustice, in many essays, but here I address the question of violence as a joint production of media and state-political institutions.  As Malcolm X explained from the late 1950s through his untimely assassination in 1964, not all urban violence is the same.  The facts of the American criminal justice system are unequivocal: the abuse of power and force by uniformed police in the 20th century has been rampant.  It was the cause of nearly every civil disorder in the 20th century.  The so-called "riots" of the 1960s-1990s are best understood as geo-social explosions of counter-violence.  Their scale and complexity defy simple, one-variable explanations.
  
  
  
  82. By 1970s, more Americans lived in suburbs than in central cities or in rural areas.  By the late 1970s, the Nixon and Reagan Revolution had made fear of central city violence a stock-in-trade for campaigning, and by the 1980s, the reliance on militarized police forces to contain the "ghetto" was fully established.  By this time, thousands of youths belonged to heavily armed gangs, and the cycle of violence became self-fulfilling.  State legislatures dominated by white suburban districts rushed to increase the penalties for mere possession of drugs to felony status, leading to a lost generation in US prisons.  
  
  Police State of Nixon-Hoover-Parker
   

  The Police State of the Nixon-Reagan-Bush-Clinton Era

  
  20. The lynchpin--so to speak--of segregated society is the police.  Whether de facto or dejure, informal or formal, color lines are alwasy enforced.  The Parker-Reddin-Gates LAPD of the late 1950s through the early 1990s, was to a large extent the face of the government in South Los Angels.  Treating black and latino districts as occupied territory, using openly military tactics, the LAPD proved every day to menace American freedoms.  In the testimonies to the McCone Commission following teh Watts Rebellion, voice after voice of Black and Latino speakers attested to police brutality and failure to protect law-abiding neighborhoods of color.  McCone, a Nixon loyalist, scolded these speakers, telling George Slaff, president of the American Civil Liberties Union, that he [McCone] "resent[s] people com[ming] and making] totally irresponsible statements to this commission."
  
  21.  Dr. Christopher L. Taylor, Dentist, President of the Los Angeles branch of the NAACP and founder of the United Civil Rights Committee, Taylor alleged that there is more racial segregation of residential housing in Los Angeles than in “any major Southern city” and all of the “large northern cities, with the exception of Chicago and Cleveland."  The Commission asked him "a series of almost hostile questions about the continuance of de facto segregation and why African-Americans seem complacent with perpetuating it."  Pressing on,  Taylor alleged that “Negroes” receive unequal treatment at the hands of law enforcement officers, , and called for civilian control of the police department."Note.
  
  22. As historians of the "carceral state" experienced by American urban populations of color, an increasingly defiant political rap music arose, first in New York City, and then, with a searing vengeance, from Compton, in 1988.

  Reaganism and Reaction

  8. The ironic condition of the Bradley-era portion of the ninth Los Angeles regional regime was epitomized by the 1984 Olympics, crowning Bradley’s drive to internationalize Los Angeles. Bradley rightly foresaw that globalization, while undermining manufacturing jobs, would only benefit port cities that could attract the traffic of the Pacific Rim. He launched trade missions in 1974-5 to Japan, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Long Beach officials did likewise, floating 30 million in bonds to build facilities leased to the container shipping giants SeaLand and K-Line. The twin harbor of Los Angeles-Long Beach became China’s first U.S. port of call in 1981.[12]
  
  9. But the 1984 Olympics was also a spectacular show for that other Angeleno, President Ronald Reagan. It became his ultimate patriotic festival, in a city that was at the very height of its Cold War prosperity, armed and arming the United States to the teeth. With the Soviet Union boycotting the Los Angeles Olympics, the Cold War had reached its climactic moment, and U.S. Olympic Commissioner Peter Ubberoth made that Olympic the new model worldwide: the first actually to turn a profit, thanks to the business model of branding it with corporate sponsorships.
  
  10. Bradley was a tragic visionary. While he promoted global trade and the associated rise of a new downtown of massive skyscrapers on Bunker Hill, the spatial economy of Reagan’s Anti-Great Society policies continued the injustices felt by the city’s vast and growing non-white and immigrant working classes. In this, Reagan’s policies exacerbated globalizing forces that had begun in the 1970s, known today as “restructuring.” 
  ]**
  
  
  
  Rap Rebellions, 1982-1988
   

  Rap Rebellions: Manifestoes for the Uprising of 1988-1992

  
  23. It all begins with the  1982 hit single,  "The Message," the political rap anthem by New York City's Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five:
  “Don't push me cause I'm close to the edge
  I'm trying not to lose my head
  It's like a jungle sometimes
  It makes me wonder how I keep from goin' under”
  
  24. It also begins with with Scarface, Pacino's landmark 1983 performance as Tony Montana, a Cuban-American immigrant cocaine drug lord.   The 1930s Gangster genre seemed to be a full parallel revival, matching the protests of the Great Depression with the Nixon-Reagan-Bush era of the Great Repression.  Warner's 1931 Public Enemy, starring James Cagney and Jean Harlow set a high bar for ripped-from-the-headlines screenwriting.   Howard Hawk's pre-Code brutal portrait of the contemporary Al Capone, including the St. Valentine's Day Massacre, became a landmark in carnographic realism in American Cinema, much admired and remembered as the New Hollywood broke through the Cold War repression in the 1960s to flex its liberty of expression again.  
  
  25. ***Yo Dre DRAFT BEGIN
  
  Prologue: Dr. Dre, “The Muthafuckin’ Doctor” on stage at USC
  
  “Ah yeah, right about now Compton's in de mothafuckin' house (yeah do it do it)
  NWA's in full effect
  Hey yo yella boy, kick me that funky-ass beat
  Yeah, who's in de mothafuckin' house?
  Compton's in the mothafuckin' house!
  Yeah, Compton's definitely in the house
  Hey yo Ren, what we're gonna do?”
  “Compton’s N the House,” from Straight Outta Compton (N.W.A, Ruthless, 1988)
  
  26. These opening lines from N.W.A’s “Compton’s N the House,” the ninth track of the revolutionary 1988 album, Straight Outta Compton, declare a territorial invasion of America’s mass public sphere.  It is safe to say that, in all the long history of American folk, popular, and mass-market music, there has never been a more uncompromisingly rebellious, defiant, and antiauthoritarian entertainment product as this album.  Ice Cube, MC Ren, Dr. Dre, and Eazy-E wrote and rapped a fearless “Fuck You” to the entire legacy of white supremacy in the United States of America.  They channeled the rage of the of “post” Civil Rights generation, born in the 1960s never knowing anything but the still-unrealized promises of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of 1964-5.  
  
  27. The Watts Rebellion broke out just 14 days after President Lyndon Baines Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, taking ** lives, most killed by police gunfire, and *** of property destruction and an encirclement of South Central by U.S. Army troops around a quarantine line established long ago by the Chief Parker-militarized L.A.P.D.
  
  28. "Ice Cube will swarm
  On any motherfucker in a blue uniform"
  “Fuck Tha Police,” from Straight Outta Compton (N.W.A, Ruthless, 1988)
  
  
  
  31. By 1988, the year Straight Outta Compton hit the streets, boom boxes, and in a crucial mass-market breakthrough (Boyd) the white-suburban airwaves and CD collections, the militarily-armed L.A.P.D. conducted “gang sweeps” in Operation Hammer under Chief Daryl Gates, Chief William Parker’s potent protege:
  
  32. ”During the early evening hours up to 1,000 officers riding four deep in patrol cars would
  arrest and detain all alleged gang members congregating in public places. One weekend
  in April of 1988 the LAPD arrested 1,453 people in gang sweeps which they deemed
  “successful.” (Alonso 1999: 3)
  
  33. By 1988, gang-related homicides in Los Angeles County had reached 454, according to the LA County Sheriff’s Department.  Gang-related homicides peaked at 803 dead souls across LA County in 1992, the year of the Rodney King Uprising,
  
  
  and again in 1995, the year the Republican Party re-took both houses of Congress for the first time since 1954, with the segregationist States Rights senator from South Carolina, Strom Thurmond, at 93 years of age the President Pro Tempore of the Senate, and the uncompromising New Right insurgent from George, Newt Gingrich, Speaker of the House.   
  
  34. This was also the height of the Culture Wars, with Lynne Cheney as Culture Commandant as Bush’s appointee as head of the NEH, from 1986 to 1993.
  
  35. It should be fully documented some day, how many how many homicidal, or justifiable police-involved killings (by the L.A.P.D and the LA County Sheriffs, and other mostly-white police departments in took place during this time period.  But the movement to stop the unaccountable killing of unarmed and and armed minorities has only begun in the second decade of the 21st century.  
  
  36. The second track of Straight Outta Compton fought back at police oppression with Ice Cube’s utterly fearless Fuck The Police”:
  
  37. [Ice Cube]
  Fuck the police coming straight from the underground
  A young nigga got it bad cause I'm brown
  And not the other color so police think
  they have the authority to kill a minority
  Fuck that shit, cause I ain't the one
  for a punk motherfucker with a badge and a gun
  to be beating on, and thrown in jail
  “Fuck The Police,” from Straight Outta Compton (N.W.A, Ruthless, 1988)
  
  38. The carnographic bloodbath unleashed by the New Right in Los Angeles, produced a defiant counter-violence performed as righteous rebellion echoing in a virtual forum of a newly-occupied public Sphere.  
  
  39. Not unlike the Black Panther Party’s outrageous invasion of the California State Capitol building armed with shotguns to protest a strict concealed-weapon law directed at them, Ice Cube and NWA took the East Coast posturing of Public Enemy to a new level, threatening:
  
  40. Ice Cube will swarm
  on ANY motherfucker in a blue uniform
  Just cause I'm from, the CPT
  Punk police are afraid of me!
  HUH, a young nigga on the warpath
  And when I'm finished, it's gonna be a bloodbath
  of cops, dying in L.A.
  Yo Dre, I got something to say
  “Fuck The Police,” from Straight Outta Compton (N.W.A, Ruthless, 1988)
  
  41. Cube and Dre sure had something to say.  He and Dre said a lot more of it, timelessly brilliant, in exquisite beats and melodies, and in the most explicitly phrased lyrics ever heard in mainstream American music.  Ice Cube 1990 debut solo album, AmeriKKK’s Most wanted, and Dre’s 1992 debut (business partners now with the Original Gangster impresario Suge Knight and Death Row Records. 
  
  42. When we're on the stage, we're in a mothafuckin' rage
  So Dre (“what up?”), why don't you get the 12 guage (yeah)
  And show 'em how Eazy-Duz-It
  
  43. Insert media here: The Chronic Album Cover:
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Dr.DreTheChronic.jpg
  
  44. [Dr. Dre]
  Now my name iz Dre - de mothafuckin' doctor
  Rippin' shit up (oh yeah) and here to rock ya
  With some help from my homeboy E
  The criminal of the ruthless posse
  Fuckin' it up (word up) iz what we do
  The reputation of the NWA crew
  
  45. Insert Media here: Dre at USC Commencement 2013
  https://youtu.be/ZHJLZ_wroBk
  
  46. Gettin' busy because we're cold stampin'
  And we're born and raised
  And we're born and raised
  And we're born and raised in Compton”
  “Compton’s N the House,” from Straight Outta Compton (N.W.A, Ruthless, 1988)
  
  47. [Dre]
  Dre, the motherfuckin' doctor, bitch hopper
  The sucker-motherfucker stopper
  Back with a vocal track that's a fresh one
  so now, let's get the motherfuckin' session 
  goin', flowin'. It's time to start throwin'
  rhymes…”
  Something Like That,” from Straight Outta Compton (N.W.A, Ruthless, 1988).
   
  48. Flash to on Stage at USC Commencement, Co-Founder of Iovene Institute…Praised for his incalculable contributions to world culture, entrepreneur gut of Creativity and Business.  The entire Establishment backing him up: The Board of Trustees of USC, major Billioniares and he had joined the club… 
  
  49. The Day The Niggaz Took Over
  Dr. Dre
  Featuring Snoop Dogg, Daz Dillinger & RBX
  Produced By Dr. Dre
  Album: The Chronic
  
  50. [Verse 2: Dr. Dre]
  Sitting in my living room, calm and collected
  Feeling that gotta-get-mine perspective
  Cause what I just heard, broke me in half
  And half the niggas I know, plus the niggas on the Row is bailing
  Laugh now but cry much later
  You see when niggas get together
  They get mad cause they can't fade us
  Like my niggas from South Central, Los Angeles
  They found that they couldn't handle us
  Bloods, Crips on the same squad
  With the ese's help and, nigga, it's time to rob and mob
  (And break the white man off something lovely, biddy-bye-bye
  I don't love dem so dem can't love me)
  Yo, straight puttin' it down, gettin' my scoot on
  It's jumping off in Compton so I gots to get my loot on
  And come up on me some furniture or somethin'
  Got a VCR in the back of my car
  That I ganked from the Slausson Swap Meet
  And motherfuckers better not try to stop me
  Cause they will see that I can't be stopped
  Cause I'ma cock my Glock and pop til they all drop
  
  xxx xxx xxx
  
  51.  Section I:  Beginnings
  --Opening Quote, George Clinton:
  “Uh, what's happening, CC? They still call it the White House
  But that's a temporary condition, too, can you dig it, CC?
  To each his reach and if I don't cop, it ain't mine to have
  But I'll be reachin' for ya, 'cause I love ya, CC, right on
  
  52. There's a lot of chocolate cities all around
  We've got Newark, we've got Gary
  Somebody told me we got L.A.
  And we're workin' on Atlanta, but you're the capital, CC”
                 --Parliament, Chocolate City 
  
  
  ***Yo Dre DRAFT END

  The Territorial Reconquest of the American Public Sphere

  
  61. These opening lines from N.W.A’s “Compton’s N the House,” the ninth track of the revolutionary 1988 album, Straight Outta Compton, declare a territorial invasion of America’s mass public sphere.  It is safe to say that, in all the long history of American folk, popular, and mass-market music, there has never been a more uncompromisingly rebellious entertainment product as this album.  Ice Cube, MC Ren, Dr. Dre, and Eazy-E wrote and rapped a fearless Fuck You to the entire legacy of white supremacy in the United States of America.  They channeled the rage of the of “post” Civil Rights generation, born in the 1960s never knowing anything but the still-unrealized promises of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of 1964-5.  The Watts Rebellion broke out just 14 days after President Lyndon Baines Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, taking ** lives, most killed by police gunfire, and *** of property destruction and an encirclement of South Central by U.S. Army troops around a quarantine line established long ago by the Chief Parker-militarized L.A.P.D.
  
  62. Ice Cube will swarm
  On any motherfucker in a blue uniform
  “Fuck Tha Police,” from Straight Outta Compton (N.W.A, Ruthless, 1988)
  
  63. The Watts Rebellion is what the born-60s (later Rollin’ 60s) “G”eneration found more instructive when they came of (r)age as teen-mothaf**kas in the Reagan 80s and 90s.  Stanley “Tookie” Williams cofounded the Crips in 1969, half-thinking he was busting asses to keep the gangs out of South Central.  Reports are vaguely true that he had a political agenda, continuing somehow the fearless rebellion of the Black Panthers (Boyd, Black Enough), Williams, Blue Rage). Tookie’s original “Cribs”, an alliance between previously unaffiliated, younger (hence the original name) hoodlums from the East and West Sides -- of Main street that is.  As an original alliance, the Crips--as the name quickly morphed, somehow referencing their trademark wooden canes: stylish weapons for gangstas (Alonso p. 91).  The documented moment of the Crips formation, according to Tookie Williams’ own words in Blue Rage, Black Redemption (posthumous) was at a movie showing of the film Al Capone (Allied Artists, 1959).
  
  64. By 1972 Los Angeles still boasted only 18 known street gangs.  By 1996, according to the methodical doctoral study by USC Geography PhD Alejandro Alonso (himself a former Blood), there were 270 gangs--actually “sets” of the larger confederations of Crips, Bloods, not even counting the latino gangs (Alonso 1999 Figure 5.3)
  
  65. By 1988, the year Straight Outta Compton hit the streets, boom boxes, and in a crucial mass-market breakthrough (Boyd) the white-suburban airwaves and CD collections, the militarily-armed L.A.P.D. conducted “gang sweeps” in Operation Hammer under Chief Daryl Gates, Chief William Parker’s potent protege:
  
  66. ”During the early evening hours up to 1,000 officers riding four deep in patrol cars would arrest and detain all alleged gang members congregating in public places. One weekend in April of 1988 the LAPD arrested 1,453 people in gang sweeps which they deemed
  “successful.” (Alonso 1999: 3)
  
  67. By 1988, gang-related homicides in Los Angeles County had reached 454, according to the LA County Sheriff’s Department.  Gang-related homicides peaked at 803 dead souls across LA County in 1992, the year of the Rodney King Uprising, and again in 1995, the year the Republican Party re-took both houses of Congress for the first time since 1954, with the segregationist States Rights senator from South Carolina, Strom Thurmond, at 93 years of age the President Pro Tempore of the Senate, and the uncompromising New Right insurgent from George, Newt Gingrich, Speaker of the House.   
  
  68. This was also the height of the Culture Wars, with Lynne Cheney as Culture Commandant as Bush’s appointee as head of the NEH, from 1986 to 1993.
  
  
  69. Romance of the Gangster 
  
  Rap, born in New York in the early 1980s, and erupting in Gangsta Rap of 1988.
  
  
  70. LL Cool J, Mama Said Knock You Out 1990
  "Shotgun blasts are heard
  When I rip and kill at will
  The man of the hour, tower of power
  I'll devour
  I'm gonna tie you up and let you understand
  That I'm not your average man
  When I gotta jammy in my hand
  Damn!"
  ...
  
  71. "Don't you never, ever
  Pull my lever
  Cause I explode
  And my nine is easy to load
  I gotta thank God
  'Cause he gave me the strength to rock Hard"
  
  72. Public Enemy: Fear of a Black Planet (1990)
  
  73. Fight the Power 
  
  74. Boyz n the Hood John Singleton 1991, featuring Ice Cube
  
  75. In his brilliant study of Herman Melville, Michael Paul Rogin wrote of the year 1851 in the United States as "The American 1848," meaning a revolutionary year like and related to the year 1848 in Europe when Marx and Engels wrote The Communist Manifesto and monarchies briefly fell to republics.  In a comparable sense, the volcanic eruption of of a defiant uprising, first in Gangsta Rap, 1988, through the publication of two radical manifestoes, Mike Davis's City of Quartz and Edward Soja's Postmodern Geographies, and then on the streets in the LA Uprising of 1992.
  
  76. Post-LA Uprising
  
  Dr. Dre, The Chronic (Death Row Records)
  Fuck Wit Dre. Day
  Snoop:
  "Bow wow wow yippy yo yippy yay
  Doggy Dogg's in the motherfuckin house
  Bow wow wow yippy yo yippy yay
  Death Row's in the motherfuckin house"
  
  "[Interlude: Dr. Dre]
  
  Yeah, that's what the fuck I'm talkin about
  We have your motherfuckin record company surrounded
  Put down the candy and let the little boy go
  You knowhatI'msayin, punk motherfucker
  (We want Eazy, we want Eazy)"
  
  The Day the N****z Took Over (feat Daz, Snoop Dogg & RBX).
  
  "Ya see when niggas get together they get mad cuz they can't fade us
  Like my niggas from South Central, Los Angeles
  They find that they couldn't handle us
  Bloods, Crips on the same squad"
  
  "[Bridge:]
  
  [All] How many niggaz are ready to lose?
  [Snoop] Yeah, so what you wanna do?
  [Dre] What you wanna do?
  [All] I said how many niggas are ready to lose
  [RBX] Got myself an Uzi and my brother a 9 "
  
  Ice Cube, The Predator 1992.  
  Interviews
  "I've given so many warnings..."

  Fight the Power: Film and Rap Rebellion of 1988-1991

  
  "Welcome to the Terrordome,"  Public Enemy (1990)
  
  83. Filmmakers found the violent spectacle too valuable to miss.  One of the icons of the New Hollywood, Dennis Hopper (Easy Rider 1969), made an early foray with his 1988 Colors, about the Crips (blue) and Blood (red) rivalries.  But his cops-ye view of the violence  achieves little more than ghetto voyeurism.  Much more important were two films by African American directors:  Spike Lee's 1989 Do The Right Thing, while set in gentrifying Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, was an uncanny forecast of the 1992 Los Angeles Uprising.  John Singleton's 1991 Boyz n the Hood artfully told the story of gangs and violence in a neighborhood-eye vie, reversing the perspective of Hopper's Colors.  Singleton cast Lawrence Fishburne as Furious Styles an aged 1960s  Black Panther imposing a Malcolm X discipline on his wayward son Tre (Cuba Gooding Jr).  Tre stays out of the fray, but his friend "Doughboy," played by the rapper Ice Cube, succumbs to the deathtrap.  While Hopper had been a genuine voice of the counterculture in the 1960s, his ham-handed Colors betrays his lack of local knowledge.  Ice Cube provided that kind of voice from the experience of an America two decades beyond the bloodbath of the late 1960s.
  
  84. Just as Singleton finished editing Boyz n the Hood in the spring of 1991, the global spectacle of the videotaped gang-beating of African American motorist Rodney King at the hands LAPD officers marched across the mediascape.  LAPD's Chief Daryl Gates, a Republican, protege of Chief William Parker and a full advocate of the military suppression of "South Central" Los Angeles, exacerbated the outrage with his callous statements and televised gang sweeps.  As with the 1965 Watts Rebellion, the 1992 Uprising is massively documented and analyzed in many fine studies.  Here we need look no further than the transcripts of community hearings held in the aftermath of April 1992, by the Webster Commission.  Voice after voice from the streets of LA testified to the concentration of crime and police brutality in the quarantined zones of South LA.
  
  85. Decades of cross-feeding cinematic and televisual violence, used for political mobilization of the New Right in the escalating consumption of bodies produced a carnography of power, reached its climax in the inter-ethnic violence of 1992.  Racialized bodies, not only African American, but now Latino and Korean, were targeted as "invasion" fears spread from whites to blacks. For Korean-Americans, April 1992 was a nightmare of failed police protection and unrestrained anger at their presence in formerly majority-black neighborhoods in transition.  Latinos also suffered the wrath of misguided blacks in the 1992 melees.  And the quarantines no longer held, as urban violence became generalized across Los Angeles's many fragmented spaces.   By this time, also, the violence was literally performed for TV cameras, most notoriously as white trucker Reginald Denny was pulled from his car at Florence and Normandie and savagely beaten as television news helicopters circled overhead and the LAPD stayed safely distant.
  
  Cop Killer, 1991-1992
   

  53 Cop Killer, 1991-2

  Body Count, featuring Ice-T, recorded "Cop Killer" in 1991, following the videotaped beating of Rodney King, and released the song before the April 9th 1992 announcement of the "Not Guilty" verdicts that shocked the world and sparked the first outbreaks of violence at Florence and Normandie.  The song quotes copiously from Ice Cube's 1988 "Fuck the Police," but adds some particularly revenge-based rhymes:

  54. From "Cop Killer," Recorded 1991, released 1992:
  
  "I got my brain on hype
  Tonight'll be your night
  I got this long-assed knife
  And your neck looks just right
  My adrenaline's pumpin'
  I got my stereo bumpin'
  I'm 'bout to kill me somethin'
  A pig stopped me for nuthin'!
  
  55. Cop killer, better you than me
  Cop killer, fuck police brutality!
  Cop killer, I know your momma's grieving
  (Fuck her!)
  Cop killer, but tonight we get even, yeah!
  
  Die, die, die, pig, die! 
  
  56. Fuck the police!
  Fuck the police!
  Fuck the police!
  Fuck the police!"

  
  
  
  
  *** +++ ***
  57. From Let Me Ride, The Chronic, 1992:
  
  [Dre singing]
  "Motherfucker I'm Dre
  so listen to the play-by-play
  day-by-day
  rollin in my '4 with sixteen switches
  And got sounds for the bitches
  clockin all the riches
  Got the hollow points for the snitches
  So would you just walk on by
  Cuz I'm too hard to lift
  and no this ain't Aerosmith
  It's the motherfuckin D-R-E
  from the CPT
  on a rhymin spree
  a straight G
  Hop back as I pop my top ya trip
  I let the hollow points commence to
  POP POP POP "
  
  58. See esp "The Day The Niggaz Took Over" (feat. Snoop Doggy Dogg, RBX, Dat Nigga Daz)
  Lyrics
  
  ]]**
  
  
  59. The spark in the tinder box of U.S. urban repression, disempowerment, were two breakthrough mass-market albums of 1988: Public Enemy's It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, and N.W.A's Straight Outta Compton.  By a wide measure, the most revolutionary was NWA's debut album, so we'll start with it.
  
  60. “Ah yeah, right about now Compton's in de mothafuckin' house (yeah do it do it)
  NWA's in full effect
  Hey yo yella boy, kick me that funky-ass beat
  Yeah, who's in de mothafuckin' house?
  Compton's in the mothafuckin' house!
  Yeah, Compton's definitely in the house
  Hey yo Ren, what we're gonna do?”
  “Compton’s N the House,” from Straight Outta Compton (N.W.A, Ruthless, 1988)
  
  61. These opening lines from N.W.A’s “Compton’s N the House,” the ninth track of the revolutionary 1988 album, Straight Outta Compton, declare a territorial invasion of America’s mass public sphere.  It is safe to say that, in all the long history of American folk, popular, and mass-market music, there has never been a more uncompromisingly rebellious entertainment product as this album.  Ice Cube, MC Ren, Dr. Dre, and Eazy-E wrote and rapped a fearless Fuck You to the entire legacy of white supremacy in the United States of America.  They channeled the rage of the of “post” Civil Rights generation, born in the 1960s never knowing anything but the still-unrealized promises of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of 1964-5.  The Watts Rebellion broke out just 14 days after President Lyndon Baines Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, taking ** lives, most killed by police gunfire, and *** of property destruction and an encirclement of South Central by U.S. Army troops around a quarantine line established long ago by the Chief Parker-militarized L.A.P.D.
  
  62. Ice Cube will swarm
  On any motherfucker in a blue uniform
  “Fuck Tha Police,” from Straight Outta Compton (N.W.A, Ruthless, 1988)
  
  63. The Watts Rebellion is what the born-60s (later Rollin’ 60s) “G”eneration found more instructive when they came of (r)age as teen-mothaf**kas in the Reagan 80s and 90s.  Stanley “Tookie” Williams cofounded the Crips in 1969, half-thinking he was busting asses to keep the gangs out of South Central.  Reports are vaguely true that he had a political agenda, continuing somehow the fearless rebellion of the Black Panthers (Boyd, Black Enough), Williams, Blue Rage). Tookie’s original “Cribs”, an alliance between previously unaffiliated, younger (hence the original name) hoodlums from the East and West Sides -- of Main street that is.  As an original alliance, the Crips--as the name quickly morphed, somehow referencing their trademark wooden canes: stylish weapons for gangstas (Alonso p. 91).  The documented moment of the Crips formation, according to Tookie Williams’ own words in Blue Rage, Black Redemption (posthumous) was at a movie showing of the film Al Capone (Allied Artists, 1959).
  
  64. By 1972 Los Angeles still boasted only 18 known street gangs.  By 1996, according to the methodical doctoral study by USC Geography PhD Alejandro Alonso (himself a former Blood), there were 270 gangs--actually “sets” of the larger confederations of Crips, Bloods, not even counting the latino gangs (Alonso 1999 Figure 5.3)
  
  65. By 1988, the year Straight Outta Compton hit the streets, boom boxes, and in a crucial mass-market breakthrough (Boyd) the white-suburban airwaves and CD collections, the militarily-armed L.A.P.D. conducted “gang sweeps” in Operation Hammer under Chief Daryl Gates, Chief William Parker’s potent protege:
  
  66. ”During the early evening hours up to 1,000 officers riding four deep in patrol cars would arrest and detain all alleged gang members congregating in public places. One weekend in April of 1988 the LAPD arrested 1,453 people in gang sweeps which they deemed
  “successful.” (Alonso 1999: 3)
  
  67. By 1988, gang-related homicides in Los Angeles County had reached 454, according to the LA County Sheriff’s Department.  Gang-related homicides peaked at 803 dead souls across LA County in 1992, the year of the Rodney King Uprising, and again in 1995, the year the Republican Party re-took both houses of Congress for the first time since 1954, with the segregationist States Rights senator from South Carolina, Strom Thurmond, at 93 years of age the President Pro Tempore of the Senate, and the uncompromising New Right insurgent from George, Newt Gingrich, Speaker of the House.   
  
  68. This was also the height of the Culture Wars, with Lynne Cheney as Culture Commandant as Bush’s appointee as head of the NEH, from 1986 to 1993.
  
  
  Anti-Authoritarian Movements: 
  
  The 1983 - 1986 "People's Power Revolution"  of the Philippines began in the U.S. sphere of influence, against Ferdinand Marcos' clepto-autocracy.  Marcos was the creature of Nixon and and Henry Kissinger's Cold War strategy of favoring anti-democratic dictators, or installing them when necessary, most spectacularly in the 1973 coup and assassination by Gen. Augusto Pinochet, overthrowing Chilean President  Salvador Allende.  Ronald Reagan's pursuit of Cold War victory during the 1980s built entirely on the Nixon-Kissinger international-strategic architecture.  
  
  This wave of Late-Cold War mass, populist uprisings began not against Communist regimes, but rather against illiberal, authoritarian, and tyrannical capitalist regimes.  What was at stake in both halves of the Cold War world system was struggle for the democratic rights of humankind,  
  
  The Filipino People's Power movement of 1983-86 was the opening wave in the global uprising against the Nixonian authoritarian repression.  The decade was certainly Ronald Reagan's, even before and after his presidency of January 1981 to January 1989.  And the aftermath, under his vice President George H.W. Bush (Nixon Administration loyalist).  "The Reagan Revolution" is a gigantic misnomer.  Its supporters framed his victory in 1980 as a "revolution" for obvious reasons.  Reagan spoke and acted with the zeal of a 1780s American revolutionary, which provides an enduring inspiration.  What best characterizes the movement as neo-liberal is Reaganism's radical return to a long-lost world of weak government and strong capitalism.  While the U.S. regimes proclaiming this philosophy have also been advocates of a super-powerful National Security State, its mythology has proven very successful at mobilizing voters.
  
  2. The Tiananmen Square democracy protests and massacre, April 15 to 4 June, 1989--and the simultaneous, 4 June semi-free elections in Poland capping the long campaign by the Solidarity Movement; the epochal Fall of the Berlin Wall in November; the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, November 17 to December 29--which achieved a breakthrough in peaceful transitions; and F. W. de Klerk's meeting with Nelson Mandela in December, 1989, which led to Mandela's release from his 27-year imprisonment, on 11 February 1990... All of these uprisings and revolutions have in common is a democratic overthrow or major challenge to authoritarian regimes. 
  
  
  5. Reagan's "revolution" did seal the doom of the New Deal electoral realignment.  But most accurately, it was a populist-supported, elite-directed reaction, the same reactionary, top-driven (and mass-acclaimed) movement that Nixon and Goldwater had launched, and Nixon bequeathed to his successors leading the "New Right": Ronald Reagan (1981-1989), George H.W. Bush (1989-1993), Newt Gingrich (1995-1999), George W. Bush (2001-2009), Mitt Romney (2012) and Donald J. Trump (2015-16).  It is crucial to recognize that throughout these regimes, the nation's most intolerant populations and political organizations: those opposing civil rights for all; those opposing gender equality; xenophobes, religious extremists, and gun advocates, have consistently found a happy home in the Republican Party house that Richard M. Nixon and Ronald Reagan built. All this was based on the original Model Home in Southern California, where the New Right's two principal architects become the nation's leading suburban developers.

  6. Forgotten has been the American contribution to this global revolt against tyrannies: what should be called the Uprising of 1988-1992.  In many ways it resembles "The Great Uprising" of the United States in the 1880s: a period of ferocious mass protests and military crackdowns in America's great cities.  Those protests, like the Uprising of 1988-1992, did not immediately democratize the United States.  But they did prove a turning-point.  The social costs that had been inflicted by the rigid and destructive idea of absolute free enterprise industrialization, were thereafter seen as illegitimate, and the Progressive shifted the nation's political regimes to advance more balanced governance, ultimately leading to the New Deal reforms (essentially late-Progressive accomplishments).  Reaganism completed another cycle of that reform-counter-reform dynamic.  The rebellion against "neo-liberalism" took the form of lumpenproletariat mayhem, but the authorities and the "1%," the majority-wealth-holding, educated masters of the nation's institutions, got the message.  

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
   
• 1 2016-05-25T15:25:57-07:00 The American 1989: Los Angeles at the Climax of the 20th Century 101 Narrative Essay plain 2018-06-14T01:12:36-07:00 1. The year 1989, two centuries after the French Revolution's 1789, was the apogee and climax, of the Long Cold War and the denouement of the 20th century, both datable as 1917-1992.Note 
  
  2. The Tiananmen Square democracy protests and massacre, April 15 to 4 June, 1989--and the simultaneous, 4 June semi-free elections in Poland capping the long campaign by the Solidarity Movement; the epochal Fall of the Berlin Wall in November; the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, November 17 to December 29--which achieved a breakthrough in peaceful transitions; and F. W. de Klerk's meeting with Nelson Mandela in December, 1989, which led to Mandela's release from his 27-year imprisonment, on 11 February 1990... All of these uprisings and revolutions have in common is a democratic overthrow or major challenge to authoritarian regimes. 
  
  3. This wave of Late-Cold War mass, populist uprisings began not against Communist regimes, but rather against illiberal, authoritarian, and tyrannical capitalist regimes.  What was at stake in both halves of the Cold War world system was struggle for the democratic rights of humankind,  The 1983 - 1986 "People's Power Revolution"  of the Philippines began in the U.S. sphere of influence, against Ferdinand Marcos' clepto-autocracy.  Marcos was the creature of Nixon and and Henry Kissinger's Cold War strategy of favoring anti-democratic dictators, or installing them when necessary, most spectacularly in the 1973 coup and assassination by Gen. Augusto Pinochet, overthrowing Chilean President  Salvador Allende.  Ronald Reagan's pursuit of Cold War victory during the 1980s built entirely on the Nixon-Kissinger international-strategic architecture.  
  
  4. The Filipino People's Power movement of 1983-86 was the opening wave in the global uprising against the Nixonian authoritarian repression.  The decade was certainly Ronald Reagan's, even before and after his presidency of January 1981 to January 1989.  And the aftermath, under his vice President George H.W. Bush (Nixon Administration loyalist).  "The Reagan Revolution" is a gigantic misnomer.  Its supporters framed his victory in 1980 as a "revolution" for obvious reasons.  Reagan spoke and acted with the zeal of a 1780s American revolutionary, which provides an enduring inspiration.  What best characterizes the movement as neo-liberal is Reaganism's radical return to a long-lost world of weak government and strong capitalism.  While the U.S. regimes proclaiming this philosophy have also been advocates of a super-powerful National Security State, its mythology has proven very successful at mobilizing voters.
  
  5. Reagan's "revolution" did seal the doom of the New Deal electoral realignment.  But most accurately, it was a populist-supported, elite-directed reaction, the same reactionary, top-driven (and mass-acclaimed) movement that Nixon and Goldwater had launched, and Nixon bequeathed to his successors leading the "New Right": Ronald Reagan (1981-1989), George H.W. Bush (1989-1993), Newt Gingrich (1995-1999), George W. Bush (2001-2009), Mitt Romney (2012) and Donald J. Trump (2015-16).  It is crucial to recognize that throughout these regimes, the nation's most intolerant populations and political organizations: those opposing civil rights for all; those opposing gender equality; xenophobes, religious extremists, and gun advocates, have consistently found a happy home in the Republican Party house that Richard M. Nixon and Ronald Reagan built. All this was based on the original Model Home in Southern California, where the New Right's two principal architects become the nation's leading suburban developers.

  6. Forgotten has been the American contribution to this global revolt against tyrannies: what should be called the Uprising of 1988-1992.  In many ways it resembles "The Great Uprising" of the United States in the 1880s: a period of ferocious mass protests and military crackdowns in America's great cities.  Those protests, like the Uprising of 1988-1992, did not immediately democratize the United States.  But they did prove a turning-point.  The social costs that had been inflicted by the rigid and destructive idea of absolute free enterprise industrialization, were thereafter seen as illegitimate, and the Progressive shifted the nation's political regimes to advance more balanced governance, ultimately leading to the New Deal reforms (essentially late-Progressive accomplishments).  Reaganism completed another cycle of that reform-counter-reform dynamic.  The rebellion against "neo-liberalism" took the form of lumpenproletariat mayhem, but the authorities and the "1%," the majority-wealth-holding, educated masters of the nation's institutions, got the message.  

  7. Ironically, the Reagan (Counter-)Revolution of the 1980s had maximized internal repression and generated its own Uprising, which took many forms until the massive eruption of Los Angeles Rodney King Uprising of April 1992.  The chronologies and transnational events are all entwined throughout these revolutionary years of the late 1980s and early 1990s.  The conflagration though which Los Angeles, the United States, and the Earth underwent in these years became transformative, in a comparable sense to the transformations in European and East Asian societies since that same global upheaval.

  Reaganism, Reaction, and Repression in the 1980s

  
  [TRANSFERRED FROM REGIME 9:
  BRADLEY STUFF.  FOR AMERICAN 1989?
  
  8. The ironic condition of the Bradley-era portion of the ninth Los Angeles regional regime was epitomized by the 1984 Olympics, crowning Bradley’s drive to internationalize Los Angeles. Bradley rightly foresaw that globalization, while undermining manufacturing jobs, would only benefit port cities that could attract the traffic of the Pacific Rim. He launched trade missions in 1974-5 to Japan, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Long Beach officials did likewise, floating 30 million in bonds to build facilities leased to the container shipping giants SeaLand and K-Line. The twin harbor of Los Angeles-Long Beach became China’s first U.S. port of call in 1981.[12]
  
  9. But the 1984 Olympics was also a spectacular show for that other Angeleno, President Ronald Reagan. It became his ultimate patriotic festival, in a city that was at the very height of its Cold War prosperity, armed and arming the United States to the teeth. With the Soviet Union boycotting the Los Angeles Olympics, the Cold War had reached its climactic moment, and U.S. Olympic Commissioner Peter Ubberoth made that Olympic the new model worldwide: the first actually to turn a profit, thanks to the business model of branding it with corporate sponsorships.
  
  10. Bradley was a tragic visionary. While he promoted global trade and the associated rise of a new downtown of massive skyscrapers on Bunker Hill, the spatial economy of Reagan’s Anti-Great Society policies continued the injustices felt by the city’s vast and growing non-white and immigrant working classes. In this, Reagan’s policies exacerbated globalizing forces that had begun in the 1970s, known today as “restructuring.” 
  ]**
  
  
  11. Reaganism swept the U.S. political system on the framework that Nixon had built, and performer-ideologue Ronald Reagan made popular because positive and reassuring for wounded patriots.  Reagan himself may not have been a cynical racist like Nixon,. In fact, he was a remarkably fair-minded and tolerant man in his personal beliefs.  But Ronald Reagan cheerfully fronted for the national Religious Right, and tolerated, as Nixon had, the white racism that had fled the Democratic for the Republican South, especially in the former confederacy.  Televangelism raised millions for an emerging mass politics increasingly dependent on high-priced mass media.  Reagan was just one of many right-wing political celebrities, who get media coverage without paying for it.
  
  12. While Ronald and Nancy Reagan occupied the White House, from 1981-1989, Southern California was in effect the official residence of U.S. political power.  Reagan's frequent retreats tot his ranch in Santa Barbara, or Simi Valley, the prominence of his "base" there, among the "Plain-Folk" Evangelicals, the Howard Jarvis-led Tax Revolters, and the idle rich voting from yachts in the harbor of Newport Beach, in the quintessentially suburban, New Right, Orange County.  The world's media rightly associated President Reagan with Hollywood, an association of which Reagan was proud.  He was, after all, just the latest of many Hollywood Republicans: His own mentor, the former song-and dance man Senator George Murphy, was the most potent officeholder to date.  Both Cecil B. DeMille and Louis B. Mayer had chaired the California State Republican party, but Reagan represented the ultimate fusion of 20th-century mass mediated politics: an ideologue and genuine political leader, and a performance artist who rose through a literal propaganda machine (The First Motion Picture Unit, during which Reagan wore the uniform of  an Army Air Force officer).
  
  13. In his administration's aggressive international militarism, Ronald Reagan also presided over the dramatic US military build-up and saber-rattling of the late Cold War.  With spymaster William P. Casey at the helm of the CIA, Reagan's international policy was highly indebted to the Nixon-Kissinger world system, and was easily as bellicose.  It was not just a simple matter of corruption or favoritism, that Southern California "Defense" contractors, the giant military-industrials, led by Lockheed and McDonnell-Douglas​, got a fresh blood transfusion to expand their production of advanced weapons systems like the Stealth bombers and fighters.  Rather, it was the triumph of a militaristic ideology born and raised in Los Angeles and stamped  into the nationwide "New Right" Republican party by Richard Nixon.  The principle of "anti-communism" as a governing ideology, and the framing of the Cold War as a missile-, space-, supersonic- and counterinsurgent-based struggle for global military supremacy; the marginalization of the democratic socialist left; pandering to racism and segregationism: all of these are hallmarks of the regional political culture of the Los Angeles Basin.
  
  14. Los Angeles played host to one of the most representative political spectacles of the Reagan Era: the 1984 Summer Olympics, held at the Los Angeles Coliseum, July 28-August 12.  The Coliseum became the first venue to host the Olympics twice: the first being 1932. Los Angeles in the 1980s was arguably at the height of its golden age: its fame and concentrated world power.  It had achieved world-city status despite its weak municipal government.  While its metropolitan size of about 10 million and its immigrant diversity, its huge through-put of goods (LA/LB Harbor's ### goods imported / exported) and people (LAX alone handled 50 million passengers a year by the 1990s) earned it a place in global cities 
  
  15. LA in the 1980s also earned its prominence on the world stage from its world leaders (Nixon, Reagan); powerful industrial sectors (media/entertainment; military-aerospace); and effective boosters (Mayor Tom Bradley, now ironically continuing the Otis-Chandler / Chamber of Commerce legacy).  Ironically, while winning the U.S. bid for the 1932 and 1984 Summer Olympics seems like a conferral of recognition by the rest of the world, in these two years the US Los Angels bid happened to be the ONLY bid worldwide, so the International Olympic Committee conferred the location on LA by default each time.  In 1984, Iran withdrew its bid for Tehran at the last minute, due to the Revolution.
  
  [***END NEW END NEW ]
  
  
  16. McDonald's Big Mac Giveaway
  "ADVERTISING; BIG MAC'S OLYMPIC GIVEAWAY
  By Pamela G. Hollie
  New York Times, August 10, 1984.
  "The fast-food giant had calculated that American athletes would do well this year. ''But without the Soviets, U.S. athletes have done very, very well,'' said Chuck Rubner, a spokesman for McDonald's in Chicago. United States athletes have now won more than 120 medals.
  
  17. The Americans have done so well, in fact, that some of McDonald's 6,600 domestic outlets have reportedly run short of Big Macs. The company denies any problems with supplies, but admits ''there's been a real gold rush at McDonald's.''"
  
  18. The competition was sadly lopsided toward the United States because the Soviet Union imposed a boycott on its athletes, to retaliate for President Jimmy Carter's boycott of the 1980 Moscow Summer Olympics.  Led by Reagan's pro-west capitalist triumphalism, the U.S. produced a shamelessly patriotic red-white-and blue Olympiad, with Peter Ueberroth making history by generating a net profit on the LA games, perhaps the only Olympiad not to saddle its hosts with enormous debt and overbuilt stadiums.  The 1984 Olympics featured McDonald's and other unhealthy food producers as major sponsors, their logs visible throughout the weeks of Jluy and August.  Product placement, and most apallingly, biased coveratge of USA conteners.  Thanks to the abaent Eastern Block sSummer athlese, the USC earned an inordante numb erof medals, but teh media celebrated as though it proved America's superiority in teh world of nations.
  
  1981-1990s
  19. Reaganism was ...
  Reagan's Resurgence in the 1984 Olympics
  --Peter Ubberroth and the corporate branding of the world's first profitable Olympics.  (Foreshadowing Rebuild LA or "RLA", 1993)
  --"The Culture Wars: Lynne Cheney as culture police as Director of the National Endowment for the Humanities, 1986-1993.
  
  Failed Skyrocket Stunt with Schoolteacher Aboard: Challenger's reckless story.  This is good because it foregrounds US aerospace and was a media stunt.
   

  The Watts Rebellion and the The Police State of the Nixon-Reagan-Bush-Clinton Era

  
  20. The lynchpin--so to speak--of segregated society is the police.  Whether de facto or dejure, informal or formal, color lines are alwasy enforced.  The Parker-Reddin-Gates LAPD of the late 1950s through the early 1990s, was to a large extent the face of the government in South Los Angels.  Treating black and latino districts as occupied territory, using openly military tactics, the LAPD proved every day to menace American freedoms.  In the testimonies to the McCone Commission following teh Watts Rebellion, voice after voice of Black and Latino speakers attested to police brutality and failure to protect law-abiding neighborhoods of color.  McCone, a Nixon loyalist, scolded these speakers, telling George Slaff, president of the American Civil Liberties Union, that he [McCone] "resent[s] people com[ming] and making] totally irresponsible statements to this commission."
  
  21.  Dr. Christopher L. Taylor, Dentist, President of the Los Angeles branch of the NAACP and founder of the United Civil Rights Committee, Taylor alleged that there is more racial segregation of residential housing in Los Angeles than in “any major Southern city” and all of the “large northern cities, with the exception of Chicago and Cleveland."  The Commission asked him "a series of almost hostile questions about the continuance of de facto segregation and why African-Americans seem complacent with perpetuating it."  Pressing on,  Taylor alleged that “Negroes” receive unequal treatment at the hands of law enforcement officers, , and called for civilian control of the police department."Note.
  
  22. As historians of the "carceral state" experienced by American urban populations of color, an increasingly defiant political rap music arose, first in New York City, and then, with a searing vengeance, from Compton, in 1988.
  
  *** Watts Rebellion Section To Here: Make it free-standing and re-use. 
  
  
   

  Rap Rebellions: Manifestoes for the Uprising of 1988-1992

  
  23. It all begins with the  1982 hit single,  "The Message," the political rap anthem by New York City's Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five:
  “Don't push me cause I'm close to the edge
  I'm trying not to lose my head
  It's like a jungle sometimes
  It makes me wonder how I keep from goin' under”
  
  24. It also begins with with Scarface, Pacino's landmark 1983 performance as Tony Montana, a Cuban-American immigrant cocaine drug lord.   The 1930s Gangster genre seemed to be a full parallel revival, matching the protests of the Great Depression with the Nixon-Reagan-Bush era of the Great Repression.  Warner's 1931 Public Enemy, starring James Cagney and Jean Harlow set a high bar for ripped-from-the-headlines screenwriting.   Howard Hawk's pre-Code brutal portrait of the contemporary Al Capone, including the St. Valentine's Day Massacre, became a landmark in carnographic realism in American Cinema, much admired and remembered as the New Hollywood broke through the Cold War repression in the 1960s to flex its liberty of expression again.  
  
  25. ***Yo Dre DRAFT BEGIN
  
  Prologue: Dr. Dre, “The Muthafuckin’ Doctor” on stage at USC
  
  “Ah yeah, right about now Compton's in de mothafuckin' house (yeah do it do it)
  NWA's in full effect
  Hey yo yella boy, kick me that funky-ass beat
  Yeah, who's in de mothafuckin' house?
  Compton's in the mothafuckin' house!
  Yeah, Compton's definitely in the house
  Hey yo Ren, what we're gonna do?”
  “Compton’s N the House,” from Straight Outta Compton (N.W.A, Ruthless, 1988)
  
  26. These opening lines from N.W.A’s “Compton’s N the House,” the ninth track of the revolutionary 1988 album, Straight Outta Compton, declare a territorial invasion of America’s mass public sphere.  It is safe to say that, in all the long history of American folk, popular, and mass-market music, there has never been a more uncompromisingly rebellious, defiant, and antiauthoritarian entertainment product as this album.  Ice Cube, MC Ren, Dr. Dre, and Eazy-E wrote and rapped a fearless “Fuck You” to the entire legacy of white supremacy in the United States of America.  They channeled the rage of the of “post” Civil Rights generation, born in the 1960s never knowing anything but the still-unrealized promises of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of 1964-5.  
  
  27. The Watts Rebellion broke out just 14 days after President Lyndon Baines Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, taking ** lives, most killed by police gunfire, and *** of property destruction and an encirclement of South Central by U.S. Army troops around a quarantine line established long ago by the Chief Parker-militarized L.A.P.D.
  
  28. "Ice Cube will swarm
  On any motherfucker in a blue uniform"
  “Fuck Tha Police,” from Straight Outta Compton (N.W.A, Ruthless, 1988)
  
  29. The Watts Rebellion is what the born-60s (later Rollin’ 60s) “G”eneration found more instructive when they came of (r)age as teen-mothaf**kas in the Reagan 80s and 90s.  Stanley “Tookie” Williams cofounded the Crips in 1969, half-thinking he was busting asses to keep the gangs out of South Central.  Reports are vaguely true that he had a political agenda, continuing somehow the fearless rebellion of the Black Panthers (Boyd, Black Enough), Williams, Blue Rage). Tookie’s original “Cribs”, an alliance between previously unaffiliated, younger (hence the original name) hoodlums from the East and West Sides -- of Main street that is.  As an original alliance, the Crips--as the name quickly morphed, somehow referencing their trademark wooden canes: stylish weapons for gangstas (Alonso p. 91).  The documented moment of the Crips formation, according to Tookie Williams’ own words in Blue Rage, Black Redemption (posthumous) was at a movie showing of the film Al Capone (Allied Artists, 1959).
  
  30. By 1972 Los Angeles still boasted only 18 known street gangs.  By 1996, according to the methodical doctoral study by USC Geography PhD Alejandro Alonso (himself a former Blood), there were 270 gangs--actually “sets” of the larger confederations of Crips, Bloods, not even counting the latino gangs (Alonso 1999 Figure 5.3)
  
  31. By 1988, the year Straight Outta Compton hit the streets, boom boxes, and in a crucial mass-market breakthrough (Boyd) the white-suburban airwaves and CD collections, the militarily-armed L.A.P.D. conducted “gang sweeps” in Operation Hammer under Chief Daryl Gates, Chief William Parker’s potent protege:
  
  32. ”During the early evening hours up to 1,000 officers riding four deep in patrol cars would
  arrest and detain all alleged gang members congregating in public places. One weekend
  in April of 1988 the LAPD arrested 1,453 people in gang sweeps which they deemed
  “successful.” (Alonso 1999: 3)
  
  33. By 1988, gang-related homicides in Los Angeles County had reached 454, according to the LA County Sheriff’s Department.  Gang-related homicides peaked at 803 dead souls across LA County in 1992, the year of the Rodney King Uprising, and again in 1995, the year the Republican Party re-took both houses of Congress for the first time since 1954, with the segregationist States Rights senator from South Carolina, Strom Thurmond, at 93 years of age the President Pro Tempore of the Senate, and the uncompromising New Right insurgent from George, Newt Gingrich, Speaker of the House.   
  
  34. This was also the height of the Culture Wars, with Lynne Cheney as Culture Commandant as Bush’s appointee as head of the NEH, from 1986 to 1993.
  
  35. It should be fully documented some day, how many how many homicidal, or justifiable police-involved killings (by the L.A.P.D and the LA County Sheriffs, and other mostly-white police departments in took place during this time period.  But the movement to stop the unaccountable killing of unarmed and and armed minorities has only begun in the second decade of the 21st century.  
  
  36. The second track of Straight Outta Compton fought back at police oppression with Ice Cube’s utterly fearless Fuck The Police”:
  
  37. [Ice Cube]
  Fuck the police coming straight from the underground
  A young nigga got it bad cause I'm brown
  And not the other color so police think
  they have the authority to kill a minority
  Fuck that shit, cause I ain't the one
  for a punk motherfucker with a badge and a gun
  to be beating on, and thrown in jail
  “Fuck The Police,” from Straight Outta Compton (N.W.A, Ruthless, 1988)
  
  38. The carnographic bloodbath unleashed by the New Right in Los Angeles, produced a defiant counter-violence performed as righteous rebellion echoing in a virtual forum of a newly-occupied public Sphere.  
  
  39. Not unlike the Black Panther Party’s outrageous invasion of the California State Capitol building armed with shotguns to protest a strict concealed-weapon law directed at them, Ice Cube and NWA took the East Coast posturing of Public Enemy to a new level, threatening:
  
  40. Ice Cube will swarm
  on ANY motherfucker in a blue uniform
  Just cause I'm from, the CPT
  Punk police are afraid of me!
  HUH, a young nigga on the warpath
  And when I'm finished, it's gonna be a bloodbath
  of cops, dying in L.A.
  Yo Dre, I got something to say
  “Fuck The Police,” from Straight Outta Compton (N.W.A, Ruthless, 1988)
  
  41. Cube and Dre sure had something to say.  He and Dre said a lot more of it, timelessly brilliant, in exquisite beats and melodies, and in the most explicitly phrased lyrics ever heard in mainstream American music.  Ice Cube 1990 debut solo album, AmeriKKK’s Most wanted, and Dre’s 1992 debut (business partners now with the Original Gangster impresario Suge Knight and Death Row Records. 
  
  42. When we're on the stage, we're in a mothafuckin' rage
  So Dre (“what up?”), why don't you get the 12 guage (yeah)
  And show 'em how Eazy-Duz-It
  
  43. Insert media here: The Chronic Album Cover:
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Dr.DreTheChronic.jpg
  
  44. [Dr. Dre]
  Now my name iz Dre - de mothafuckin' doctor
  Rippin' shit up (oh yeah) and here to rock ya
  With some help from my homeboy E
  The criminal of the ruthless posse
  Fuckin' it up (word up) iz what we do
  The reputation of the NWA crew
  
  45. Insert Media here: Dre at USC Commencement 2013
  https://youtu.be/ZHJLZ_wroBk
  
  46. Gettin' busy because we're cold stampin'
  And we're born and raised
  And we're born and raised
  And we're born and raised in Compton”
  “Compton’s N the House,” from Straight Outta Compton (N.W.A, Ruthless, 1988)
  
  47. [Dre]
  Dre, the motherfuckin' doctor, bitch hopper
  The sucker-motherfucker stopper
  Back with a vocal track that's a fresh one
  so now, let's get the motherfuckin' session 
  goin', flowin'. It's time to start throwin'
  rhymes…”
  Something Like That,” from Straight Outta Compton (N.W.A, Ruthless, 1988).
   
  48. Flash to on Stage at USC Commencement, Co-Founder of Iovene Institute…Praised for his incalculable contributions to world culture, entrepreneur gut of Creativity and Business.  The entire Establishment backing him up: The Board of Trustees of USC, major Billioniares and he had joined the club… 
  
  49. The Day The Niggaz Took Over
  Dr. Dre
  Featuring Snoop Dogg, Daz Dillinger & RBX
  Produced By Dr. Dre
  Album: The Chronic
  
  50. [Verse 2: Dr. Dre]
  Sitting in my living room, calm and collected
  Feeling that gotta-get-mine perspective
  Cause what I just heard, broke me in half
  And half the niggas I know, plus the niggas on the Row is bailing
  Laugh now but cry much later
  You see when niggas get together
  They get mad cause they can't fade us
  Like my niggas from South Central, Los Angeles
  They found that they couldn't handle us
  Bloods, Crips on the same squad
  With the ese's help and, nigga, it's time to rob and mob
  (And break the white man off something lovely, biddy-bye-bye
  I don't love dem so dem can't love me)
  Yo, straight puttin' it down, gettin' my scoot on
  It's jumping off in Compton so I gots to get my loot on
  And come up on me some furniture or somethin'
  Got a VCR in the back of my car
  That I ganked from the Slausson Swap Meet
  And motherfuckers better not try to stop me
  Cause they will see that I can't be stopped
  Cause I'ma cock my Glock and pop til they all drop
  
  xxx xxx xxx
  
  51.  Section I:  Beginnings
  --Opening Quote, George Clinton:
  “Uh, what's happening, CC? They still call it the White House
  But that's a temporary condition, too, can you dig it, CC?
  To each his reach and if I don't cop, it ain't mine to have
  But I'll be reachin' for ya, 'cause I love ya, CC, right on
  
  52. There's a lot of chocolate cities all around
  We've got Newark, we've got Gary
  Somebody told me we got L.A.
  And we're workin' on Atlanta, but you're the capital, CC”
                 --Parliament, Chocolate City 
  
  
  ***Yo Dre DRAFT END
   

  53 Cop Killer, 1991-2

  Body Count, featuring Ice-T, recorded "Cop Killer" in 1991, following the videotaped beating of Rodney King, and released the song before the April 9th 1992 announcement of the "Not Guilty" verdicts that shocked the world and sparked the first outbreaks of violence at Florence and Normandie.  The song quotes copiously from Ice Cube's 1988 "Fuck the Police," but adds some particularly revenge-based rhymes:

  54. From "Cop Killer," Recorded 1991, released 1992:
  
  "I got my brain on hype
  Tonight'll be your night
  I got this long-assed knife
  And your neck looks just right
  My adrenaline's pumpin'
  I got my stereo bumpin'
  I'm 'bout to kill me somethin'
  A pig stopped me for nuthin'!
  
  55. Cop killer, better you than me
  Cop killer, fuck police brutality!
  Cop killer, I know your momma's grieving
  (Fuck her!)
  Cop killer, but tonight we get even, yeah!
  
  Die, die, die, pig, die! 
  
  56. Fuck the police!
  Fuck the police!
  Fuck the police!
  Fuck the police!"

  
  
  
  
  *** +++ ***
  57. From Let Me Ride, The Chronic, 1992:
  
  [Dre singing]
  "Motherfucker I'm Dre
  so listen to the play-by-play
  day-by-day
  rollin in my '4 with sixteen switches
  And got sounds for the bitches
  clockin all the riches
  Got the hollow points for the snitches
  So would you just walk on by
  Cuz I'm too hard to lift
  and no this ain't Aerosmith
  It's the motherfuckin D-R-E
  from the CPT
  on a rhymin spree
  a straight G
  Hop back as I pop my top ya trip
  I let the hollow points commence to
  POP POP POP "
  
  58. See esp "The Day The Niggaz Took Over" (feat. Snoop Doggy Dogg, RBX, Dat Nigga Daz)
  Lyrics
  
  ]]**
  
  
  59. The spark in the tinder box of U.S. urban repression, disempowerment, were two breakthrough mass-market albums of 1988: Public Enemy's It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, and N.W.A's Straight Outta Compton.  By a wide measure, the most revolutionary was NWA's debut album, so we'll start with it.
  
  60. “Ah yeah, right about now Compton's in de mothafuckin' house (yeah do it do it)
  NWA's in full effect
  Hey yo yella boy, kick me that funky-ass beat
  Yeah, who's in de mothafuckin' house?
  Compton's in the mothafuckin' house!
  Yeah, Compton's definitely in the house
  Hey yo Ren, what we're gonna do?”
  “Compton’s N the House,” from Straight Outta Compton (N.W.A, Ruthless, 1988)
  
  61. These opening lines from N.W.A’s “Compton’s N the House,” the ninth track of the revolutionary 1988 album, Straight Outta Compton, declare a territorial invasion of America’s mass public sphere.  It is safe to say that, in all the long history of American folk, popular, and mass-market music, there has never been a more uncompromisingly rebellious entertainment product as this album.  Ice Cube, MC Ren, Dr. Dre, and Eazy-E wrote and rapped a fearless Fuck You to the entire legacy of white supremacy in the United States of America.  They channeled the rage of the of “post” Civil Rights generation, born in the 1960s never knowing anything but the still-unrealized promises of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of 1964-5.  The Watts Rebellion broke out just 14 days after President Lyndon Baines Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, taking ** lives, most killed by police gunfire, and *** of property destruction and an encirclement of South Central by U.S. Army troops around a quarantine line established long ago by the Chief Parker-militarized L.A.P.D.
  
  62. Ice Cube will swarm
  On any motherfucker in a blue uniform
  “Fuck Tha Police,” from Straight Outta Compton (N.W.A, Ruthless, 1988)
  
  63. The Watts Rebellion is what the born-60s (later Rollin’ 60s) “G”eneration found more instructive when they came of (r)age as teen-mothaf**kas in the Reagan 80s and 90s.  Stanley “Tookie” Williams cofounded the Crips in 1969, half-thinking he was busting asses to keep the gangs out of South Central.  Reports are vaguely true that he had a political agenda, continuing somehow the fearless rebellion of the Black Panthers (Boyd, Black Enough), Williams, Blue Rage). Tookie’s original “Cribs”, an alliance between previously unaffiliated, younger (hence the original name) hoodlums from the East and West Sides -- of Main street that is.  As an original alliance, the Crips--as the name quickly morphed, somehow referencing their trademark wooden canes: stylish weapons for gangstas (Alonso p. 91).  The documented moment of the Crips formation, according to Tookie Williams’ own words in Blue Rage, Black Redemption (posthumous) was at a movie showing of the film Al Capone (Allied Artists, 1959).
  
  64. By 1972 Los Angeles still boasted only 18 known street gangs.  By 1996, according to the methodical doctoral study by USC Geography PhD Alejandro Alonso (himself a former Blood), there were 270 gangs--actually “sets” of the larger confederations of Crips, Bloods, not even counting the latino gangs (Alonso 1999 Figure 5.3)
  
  65. By 1988, the year Straight Outta Compton hit the streets, boom boxes, and in a crucial mass-market breakthrough (Boyd) the white-suburban airwaves and CD collections, the militarily-armed L.A.P.D. conducted “gang sweeps” in Operation Hammer under Chief Daryl Gates, Chief William Parker’s potent protege:
  
  66. ”During the early evening hours up to 1,000 officers riding four deep in patrol cars would arrest and detain all alleged gang members congregating in public places. One weekend in April of 1988 the LAPD arrested 1,453 people in gang sweeps which they deemed
  “successful.” (Alonso 1999: 3)
  
  67. By 1988, gang-related homicides in Los Angeles County had reached 454, according to the LA County Sheriff’s Department.  Gang-related homicides peaked at 803 dead souls across LA County in 1992, the year of the Rodney King Uprising, and again in 1995, the year the Republican Party re-took both houses of Congress for the first time since 1954, with the segregationist States Rights senator from South Carolina, Strom Thurmond, at 93 years of age the President Pro Tempore of the Senate, and the uncompromising New Right insurgent from George, Newt Gingrich, Speaker of the House.   
  
  68. This was also the height of the Culture Wars, with Lynne Cheney as Culture Commandant as Bush’s appointee as head of the NEH, from 1986 to 1993.
  
  
  69. Romance of the Gangster 
  
  Rap, born in New York in the early 1980s, and erupting in Gangsta Rap of 1988.
  
  
  70. LL Cool J, Mama Said Knock You Out 1990
  "Shotgun blasts are heard
  When I rip and kill at will
  The man of the hour, tower of power
  I'll devour
  I'm gonna tie you up and let you understand
  That I'm not your average man
  When I gotta jammy in my hand
  Damn!"
  ...
  
  71. "Don't you never, ever
  Pull my lever
  Cause I explode
  And my nine is easy to load
  I gotta thank God
  'Cause he gave me the strength to rock Hard"
  
  
  
  72. Public Enemy: Fear of a Black Planet (1990)
  
  73. Fight the Power 
  
  74. Boyz n the Hood John Singleton 1991, featuring Ice Cube
  
  75. In his brilliant study of Herman Melville, Michael Paul Rogin wrote of the year 1851 in the United States as "The American 1848," meaning a revolutionary year like and related to the year 1848 in Europe when Marx and Engels wrote The Communist Manifesto and monarchies briefly fell to republics.  In a comparable sense, the volcanic eruption of of a defiant uprising, first in Gangsta Rap, 1988, through the publication of two radical manifestoes, Mike Davis's City of Quartz and Edward Soja's Postmodern Geographies, and then on the streets in the LA Uprising of 1992.
  
  76. Post-LA Uprising
  
  Dr. Dre, The Chronic (Death Row Records)
  Fuck Wit Dre. Day
  Snoop:
  "Bow wow wow yippy yo yippy yay
  Doggy Dogg's in the motherfuckin house
  Bow wow wow yippy yo yippy yay
  Death Row's in the motherfuckin house"
  
  "[Interlude: Dr. Dre]
  
  Yeah, that's what the fuck I'm talkin about
  We have your motherfuckin record company surrounded
  Put down the candy and let the little boy go
  You knowhatI'msayin, punk motherfucker
  (We want Eazy, we want Eazy)"
  
  The Day the N****z Took Over (feat Daz, Snoop Dogg & RBX).
  
  "Ya see when niggas get together they get mad cuz they can't fade us
  Like my niggas from South Central, Los Angeles
  They find that they couldn't handle us
  Bloods, Crips on the same squad"
  
  "[Bridge:]
  
  [All] How many niggaz are ready to lose?
  [Snoop] Yeah, so what you wanna do?
  [Dre] What you wanna do?
  [All] I said how many niggas are ready to lose
  [RBX] Got myself an Uzi and my brother a 9 "
  
  Ice Cube, The Predator 1992.  
  Interviews
  "I've given so many warnings..."
  
  
  TRANSFERRED FROM BLOODBATH
  
  MOVE TO AMERICAN 1989???
  
  77. Drinking Blood: First Violence, Social Violence, and Media Violence from the 1965 Watts Rebellion to the 1992 Rodney King Uprising.
  Writers, Directors, Producers, and Actors were not the only ones using violence for a social and political statement.  Police violence was the first violence in the central city, the segregated city, the city of sin.  Containing people to a clearly-bounded territory, and then locating/concentrating the sex trade and illegal booze and drug trade to those "bad" neighborhoods requires the violence of a City police force, plus the injustice of the real estate and other economic sectors.  Ghost Metropolis documents these forms of injustice, in many essays, but here I address the question of violence as a joint production of media and state-political institutions.  As Malcolm X explained from the late 1950s through his untimely assassination in 1964, not all urban violence is the same.  The facts of the American criminal justice system are unequivocal: the abuse of power and force by uniformed police in the 20th century has been rampant.  It was the cause of nearly every civil disorder in the 20th century.  The so-called "riots" of the 1960s-1990s are best understood as geo-social explosions of counter-violence.  Their scale and complexity defy simple, one-variable explanations.
  
  78. The August 1965 Watts Rebellion is well known and full documented by many major studies.  This is not the place for a full review of those days of collective and state violence.  We can encapsulate the macro pattern of this rebellion however, by visualizing the race-ethnic demographic geography of 1960 and 1970 in relation to the "Quarantine Area" established first by the LAPD and then by the U.S. Army, from to August 1965.  This containment are almost perfectly circumscribes the African-American population, of all socioeconomic levels, throughout the 1960s.  That line was much older than 1965, however.  Chief William Parker had enforced racial apartheid and policed this same approximate boundaries in the 1950s, and before that, the HOLC "Redlining" maps also targeted these same spaces.  An area subjected to many decades and generations of discrimination and police harassment, and containment of sex and drug trades, exploded with rebellious counter-violence after the provocation of the California Highway Patrol's treatment of Marquette Frye and his mother.
  
  Ed Herlihy Watts Newsreel
  
  79. Thanks to geosocial injustice and to television, urban violence became the spectacle in the 1960s.  The New Hollywood and the New Right both fed on this bloody spectacle, drinking blood in every nightly newscast. The 1965 Watts Rebellion was televised, as were all cases of civil unrest thereafter.
  
  80. Broadcast television news brought ultra-violence to the screen, from the Vietnam War to Watts, Los Angeles, in the years before the graphic machine guns of Bonnie and Clyde (1967) or The Wild Bunch (1969)?  
  
  81. "A forty-seven year old Negro['s]...legs were almost cut off by a burst of twenty rounds from a National Guard machine gun at a Watts roadblock yesterday," recites one news announcer as the Watts Uprising was in progress, in August of 1965.Note KTLA Doco
  
  82. By 1970s, more Americans lived in suburbs than in central cities or in rural areas.  By the late 1970s, the Nixon and Reagan Revolution had made fear of central city violence a stock-in-trade for campaigning, and by the 1980s, the reliance on militarized police forces to contain the "ghetto" was fully established.  By this time, thousands of youths belonged to heavily armed gangs, and the cycle of violence became self-fulfilling.  State legislatures dominated by white suburban districts rushed to increase the penalties for mere possession of drugs to felony status, leading to a lost generation in US prisons.  
  
  83. Filmmakers found the violent spectacle too valuable to miss.  One of the icons of the New Hollywood, Dennis Hopper (Easy Rider 1969), made an early foray with his 1988 Colors, about the Crips (blue) and Blood (red) rivalries.  But his cops-ye view of the violence  achieves little more than ghetto voyeurism.  Much more important were two films by African American directors:  Spike Lee's 1989 Do The Right Thing, while set in gentrifying Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, was an uncanny forecast of the 1992 Los Angeles Uprising.  John Singleton's 1991 Boyz n the Hood artfully told the story of gangs and violence in a neighborhood-eye vie, reversing the perspective of Hopper's Colors.  Singleton cast Lawrence Fishburne as Furious Styles an aged 1960s  Black Panther imposing a Malcolm X discipline on his wayward son Tre (Cuba Gooding Jr).  Tre stays out of the fray, but his friend "Doughboy," played by the rapper Ice Cube, succumbs to the deathtrap.  While Hopper had been a genuine voice of the counterculture in the 1960s, his ham-handed Colors betrays his lack of local knowledge.  Ice Cube provided that kind of voice from the experience of an America two decades beyond the bloodbath of the late 1960s.
  
  84. Just as Singleton finished editing Boyz n the Hood in the spring of 1991, the global spectacle of the videotaped gang-beating of African American motorist Rodney King at the hands LAPD officers marched across the mediascape.  LAPD's Chief Daryl Gates, a Republican, protege of Chief William Parker and a full advocate of the military suppression of "South Central" Los Angeles, exacerbated the outrage with his callous statements and televised gang sweeps.  As with the 1965 Watts Rebellion, the 1992 Uprising is massively documented and analyzed in many fine studies.  Here we need look no further than the transcripts of community hearings held in the aftermath of April 1992, by the Webster Commission.  Voice after voice from the streets of LA testified to the concentration of crime and police brutality in the quarantined zones of South LA.
  
  85. Decades of cross-feeding cinematic and televisual violence, used for political mobilization of the New Right in the escalating consumption of bodies produced a carnography of power, reached its climax in the inter-ethnic violence of 1992.  Racialized bodies, not only African American, but now Latino and Korean, were targeted as "invasion" fears spread from whites to blacks. For Korean-Americans, April 1992 was a nightmare of failed police protection and unrestrained anger at their presence in formerly majority-black neighborhoods in transition.  Latinos also suffered the wrath of misguided blacks in the 1992 melees.  And the quarantines no longer held, as urban violence became generalized across Los Angeles's many fragmented spaces.   By this time, also, the violence was literally performed for TV cameras, most notoriously as white trucker Reginald Denny was pulled from his car at Florence and Normandie and savagely beaten as television news helicopters circled overhead and the LAPD stayed safely distant.
  
  
  *** LAST SECTION: THE LA UPRISING OF 1992