Name: Who Got the Camera?: A History of Rap and Reality
Brand: Eric Harvey

Bonus disc

Bonus disc: No

Catalogue number

9781477321348

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Colour

Discs

Download code

Download code: No

Rough Trade Exclusive

Rough Trade Exclusive: No

Extended format

Extended format: No

Format Books US

Hardback

Format detail

Limited edition

Release date

2021-10-05

Signed copies

Signed copies: No

Supplier US

Ingram

Tax rate US

Sales:8.875

UPC / Barcode

1 / Extended format: No / Hardback / Rough Trade Exclusive: No / Signed copies: No

Artist

Eric Harvey

Genre US

Hip Hop

Label US

University of Texas Press

Reality first appeared in the late 1980s―in the sense not of real life but rather of the TV entertainment genre inaugurated by shows such as Cops and America’s Most Wanted; the daytime gabfests of Geraldo, Oprah, and Donahue; and the tabloid news of A Current Affair. In a bracing work of cultural criticism, Eric Harvey argues that reality TV emerged in dialog with another kind of entertainment that served as its foil while borrowing its techniques: gangsta rap. Or, as legendary performers Ice Cube and Ice-T called it, “reality rap.”

Reality rap and reality TV were components of a cultural revolution that redefined popular entertainment as a truth-telling medium. Reality entertainment borrowed journalistic tropes but was undiluted by the caveats and context that journalism demanded. While N.W.A.’s “Fuck tha Police” countered Cops’ vision of Black lives in America, the reality rappers who emerged in that group’s wake, such as Snoop Doggy Dogg and Tupac Shakur, embraced reality’s visceral tabloid sensationalism, using the media's obsession with Black criminality to collapse the distinction between image and truth. Reality TV and reality rap nurtured the world we live in now, where politics and basic facts don’t feel real until they have been translated into mass-mediated entertainment.

Who Got the Camera?: A History of Rap and Reality

Books US