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, and its problematic celebration of gangster life and style drove many away from the genre. Yet for a diagnostic critique, rap violence replicates the exorbitant competitiveness of contemporary capitalism, while its ferocity is part and parcel of a society that places sex and violence at the center of its media culture, and is not hesitant to use extreme force to defend the interests of its ruling elites, whether in the form of police brutality against the underclass or military intervention against declared enemies of the state. Moreover, the excesses of rap are explained by Henry Louis Gates Jr. who acknowledges violence in rap is extreme, but argues: "When you're faced with a stereotype, you can disavow it or you can embrace it and exaggerate it to the nth degree. The rappers take the white Western culture's worst fear of black men and make a game out of it" (cited in Howe and Strauss 1993: 14). There is indeed an element of extreme parody, of constantly going over the edge, of hyperbolic exaggeration in rap, creating the need to constantly up the ante, making the next performance more extreme than the last. Rappers often defend themselves by arguing that they are only describing black experience and sounding warnings about "black rage." Thomas Kockman suggests that the purpose of black verbal aggression "is to gain, without actually having to become violent, the respect and fear from others that is often won through physical combat" and that rap, therefore, might actually help to reduce physical violence (cited in Fiske 1994: 187). None of these apologies are very convincing. Indeed, the misogynistic, hedonistic, and violent outlook of gangsta rappers has involved many of them in real-life trouble: Flavor Flav, Dr. Dre, and others have been arrested on drug and alcohol charges; Snoop was charged with conspiracy in the murder of another black man that he claimed was in self-defense, although he was cleared in 1996; Tupac has been arrested on rape and sodomy charges, and was himself the victim of violence when shot and seriously wounded outside his recording studio, and then later shot to death; Easy E, who celebrated thug life, began a victim of its excesses himself dying of AIDS (though he made safe sex and anti-drug commercials during his last days); a member of Da Lench Mob was sentenced to 29 years to life for the murder of a male friend of his girlfriend, while another member of the same group was charged with murder in an altercation at a L.A. bowling alley; the founder of Death Row Records, Suge Knight, is back in jail after a parole violation and is reportedly the subject of a grand jury investigation for his possible role in the execution of Biggie Small; rapper and mogul Sean "Puffy Daddy" Combs is accused of assaulting an executive of Interscope Records, while other stories of violence within the rap music industry continue to circulate. [12] Rap is thus a highly ambivalent cultural phenomenon with contradictory effects. At its best, rap is a powerful indictment of racism, oppression, and violence that calls our attention to the crisis of the inner cities and vividly describes the plight of African-Americans. Rap provides a positive valorization of blackness, celebrating black culture, pride, intelligence, strength, style, and creativity. It supplies a voice for a social group excluded from mainstream communication and enables members of other social groups to better understand the experiences, anger, and positions