[mediawatch] Gangsta NZ

[EDIT: added link to the article in question]
In 1992 I scribbled some notes on my pad about a story to write. The name I wrote down was “Gangsta NZ” and it would be about the adoption of US gangsta culture in New Zealand, about how teenage guys who were fascinated by the ghetto lifestyle depicted in hip-hop would claim its vocabulary and behaviours, with tragic consequences down the line.
I never wrote that book. (That note, in fact, was the starting point for what became ‘in move’, which I did write and may let you read if you ask nicely.) Even so, it was a response to a trend I saw playing out around me, where hip-hop music seemed to have potential as structure for violence. Many of the young Polynesian kids in state housing found a something inspirational in gang stories. Boyz n the Hood and Chicano gangsta epic Blood In, Blood Out were the must-see films. But it was all pretty harmless at the time. Indeed, a much bigger force in youth culture then was derisive dismissal of wiggers, white middle class kids who adopted hip-hop culture in an attempt to be cool. You were allowed to listen to and like the music, but unless you had at least some claim to an authentic hard-scrabble life, the NZ version at least, then the youth parliament would round on you fast.
Things seem to have changed. The Sunday Star Times yesterday had a big feature called “Little Boys Lost” which claimed that gang emulation among the youth of Auckland has reached a tipping point in the last few years, and is now a genuine problem. Since October 2005’s murder of Iulio Naea, another nine deaths have been associated by police with the gang culture.
Article writer Tim Hume obviously has some sympathy for the kids he’s interviewing, and the complex mix of pose and sincerity at work in their lives, and makes a good fist of engaging with what’s driving this subculture.
The SST subeditor isn’t as sensitive – the article’s lede calls it “an increasingly entrenched subculture of random violence which has middle class New Zealand very afraid.” (The article doesn’t actually have much to say about middle class New Zealand; occasionally gang violence catches some nice, ordinary SST-reading middle class types in its path but mostly it’s low-decile gangs being violent against each other.) The reliably Tabloid Police Association head Greg O’Connor is quoted with similar apocalyptic nonsense: the “biggest threat to New Zealand society is LA-isation of our mostly Polynesian youth.”
Inspector Jason Hewett, charged with addressing South Auckland’s gang problem, comes across extremely well as someone who has really thought about this stuff. He has seen the shift from Crips-and-Bloods aping kids who were just a silly nuisance, into something much more serious. After Naea’s killing, the problem escalated dramatically, and the article says he “blames extensive media reporting of the issue for inspiring the formation of a slew of copy-cat gangs.” (A case of middle-class fear creating its own nightmares?) He acknowledges a large number of posturing wannabes, but feels the actual problem has calmed a lot over the last year – 2006 was the bad year. The numbers seem to point at a fad-culture now in decline. However, featured gangster ‘Gucks’ thinks differently: he sees “gangsterism” a a subculture that is now so deeply entrenched that it can’t now be shifted. He thinks it’s Bloods and Crips for life from now on.
The heart of any such story as this is disaffected youth in poor circumstances. New Zealand’s poverty and deprivation are in a whole different league to hip-hop’s US exemplars, but they are real and crippling nonetheless. The article does pay heed to that fact with a boxout devoted to the poverty in South Auckland. The story’s key paragraph, though, is buried in its middle:

The adoption of foreign, music-oriented youth cultures by local teenagers is nothing new, with each successive pop cultural movement importing antisocial aspects to greater or lesser extents: hippydom’s drug culture, punk’s nihilism, Goth’s morbidity [sic]. But none, save perhaps the virtually extinct youth tribe of racist skinheads, has proven anywhere near as pathological, atavistic and violently antisocial as gangsta culture. While gangs, too, have long been part of New Zealand’s social landscape, never has their lifestyle been promoted through such an influential mass culture medium.

This is a lot more nuanced a claim than the traditional “pop culture is training our kids to be evil” that we’ve heard since Elvis. (Actually, since earlier than that, but y’know.) It’s an interesting point and one I find I can’t easily dismiss. Certainly, much of mainstream hip-hop depicts an aspirational lifestyle and one in which violence is normal or even celebrated. Certainly, NZ youth have always looked to foreign trends to copy and embrace. Certainly, NZ society has always had gangs filling in the social gaps in its poor quarters. The article seems to argue that these three trends come together in an incendiary way to make this problem; and if this equation is true, then Gucks will be right and the Crips and Bloods will be around for some time to come.
What do I make of it? I don’t know. I hope this is a spike that will soon resolve itself. The level of violence that is recounted in this article wasn’t part of my youth, and I would be very sad indeed if that was where NZ was headed.
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I’m going to see David Lynch’s Inland Empire tomorrow night at the Paramount in Welly. Contact me if you want to come along.