Professor Viator's New Book Explores Impact of 'Gangsta Rap' on America

FLORIDA COURIER -- In “To Live and Defy in LA,’’ Felicia Angeja Viator, an assistant professor of History at San Francisco State University (and a former DJ), tells the story of the emergence of a musical genre that became “an incomparable cultural and commercial force.”

Steeped “in an ethos of self-reliance, egotism, and insubordination,” Viator argues, gangsta rap was a creative response to oppression and exploitation that engaged (and incited) people on the fringes, even as it “provoked, and elicited animus from those with the power.”