William Shaw is in the wrong place at the right time. The white, middle-aged, middleclass journalist, dressed in an incongruous suit, is strolling along the frontline of urban American despair and decay. He has just arrived in the South Central area of Los Angeles, a place where crack cocaine and Uzis come in under the category of "recreation" and a place where an average of 800 young men die each year as a result of internecine gang warfare, mainly due to rivalries between the two biggest gangs - the Crips and the Bloods. He's here for a year, working on a Margaret Mead gets funky book: a live-in account of an urban American nightmare.
Knocking on doors, ringing numbers in the local papers and hanging around bars and diners, he's putting together a freeform, open-ended social representation of life as it is grimly lived in an area where the average life expectancy for a young male is none better than in the developing world. Trailing along after eight young South Central residents, he stays up-close-and-personal, all the time peeling away the cliches, preconceptions and urban myths that have turned this area into a benighted barrio, somewhere that only hits the news whenever a riot or guns are involved.
Meet some of the gang: Rah is your archetypal angry young man, with an ever-lengthening criminal record and ever-dwindling dreams; Mr Tibu is a school dropout, drug dealer and leading gang member; Big Al is "three hundred pounds of funk" with talent to spare but doesn't know what to do with it; Blue Diamond is a member of the Crips gang but the trouble is he lives in a Bloods neighbourhood. He doesn't get out much.
What they all have in common is a desire to make it as rap musicians. This particular area of Los Angeles is famous for being the birthplace of gangsta rap - the hard-hitting music that is characterised by its explicit lyrics and its grimly accurate representation of ghetto urban life. Rapping is a big deal in these parts: artists like Snoop Doggy Dogg, Dr Dre and Ice Cube are multi-million sellers, routinely outselling the likes of Madonna and Oasis. They're frequently criticised for the content of their lyrics, but as Shaw begins to discover, their lyrics are tame compared to the reality of life in South Central.
What's most fascinating about Shaw's progress in documenting these young lives is how he slowly moves from "outsider" to near "insider". Initially distrusted, he builds up his credibility by hanging around rap talent-seeking competitions and involving himself in every area of the local music scene as he details how his eight characters make demos, do auditions and try to emulate their heroes.
He understands that in rap music, context is nearly all: "Rarely is music as explicit about its sense of place as rap. Hip-hop is about where you're from, it's about what where you're from says about you and what you say about where you're from. Since its beginning, Los Angeles hip-hop has revelled in listing specific locations - housing projects, gang turfs and `hoods'. The only other genre which is as needily specific about place-names is emigrant music - to my ears, hip-hop can sometimes sound just as woebegone," he writes.
This, though, is no music book per se. And it's certainly no liberal apologia for the much-criticised rap music genre. The music, for Shaw, is only important in that the songs these people sing detail their lives - where they are now, where they want to be and all points in between. It's pure drama documentary.
Brian Boyd is an Irish Times journalist
