Gangsta rap is in decline on the charts, but Freddie Gibbs could keep it alive single-handedly.
by Miles Raymer
The pop charts have been a dangerous place for much of the past two decades. When N.W.A's Efil4zaggin hit number one on the Billboard 200 in 1991, it established gangsta rap as a viable commercial product—and in the music's majority white and middle-class audience, it ignited a seemingly insatiable appetite for vivid lyrical portrayals of black men working in the violence-wracked crack trade.…[ Read more ]