Have you seen Get Rich? If that movie's a recruitment tool for gangs, then Goodfellas is a recruitment tool for the Mob and Liveleak is a recruitment tool for the Army. This thinly veiled biopic shows Curtis Jackson going through the roughest years of his life, making shit to live off while selling drugs for the biggest psychopathic Five Percenter New York's ever seen. Somehow I don't think kids are itching to get nine bullets pumped into them. And ultimately, Marcus runs away from the streets and turns snitch. Not exactly ghetto fabulous.TithonusSyndrome wrote:Assuming that's true, it wouldn't surprise me at all. It doesn't take much digging to find my distaste for gangsta culture.
And then it's only a matter of time before thoughts begin floating in my head about whether or not there are feasible legal responses to the glorification of gangsta culture in the media. Unlike a mob movie which focuses on a long-dead era and a narrow ethnic group, a movie like "Get Rich or Die Tryin'" is damn near a recruitment tool for insecure and violence-prone youth seeking an medium to vent their rage through.
When Godfather first came out, the first federal glimpses of Cosa Nostra were barely ten years old. The major cases that took down most of the dons wouldn't come for another decade. Goodfellas came out only ten years after Henry Hill snitched and twelve after the Lufthansa Heist. The mob's definitely weaker than it's hey dey in the 1960s, but it still has a strong presence in the Tristate.
Good. If "gangsta media" is such a problem, then why isn't it impacting the suburban white kids who consume most of it?I can't make an actual argument, though; I can't see where this line of thought leads other than "outlaw gangsta media", which is obviously a shitty no-fly proposal.