“Jerome Ellis says he was a good student in school, but when it came to reading fiction for homework he “just couldn’t deal with it.” “I would zone right out,” said the 23-year-old Morristown, N.J., resident. “You know when you start reading a page and find yourself staring? That was me.” Ellis, who grew up in New York’s Harlem, said the books assigned in school were “always about some life or time that I wasn’t a part of — things that had nothing to do with me. It just wasn’t interesting.” Now, a new genre in publishing is all about serving the appetites of a certain segment of young black urban America — those, like Ellis, 18 to 35 and interested in rap music and street life. Hip-hop literature is also known as gangsta-lit, ghetto fiction, street-lit, hip-hop novels, street-life novels, hip-hop lit, blaxploitation novels and urban pulp fiction.
“But by any name, these stories about pimps, prostitutes, street crime, drugs, violence and illicit sex are creating a new breed of reader and a new profit niche.”
“Other artists are picking up on the momentum. Hip-hop kingpin 50 Cent has teamed with MTV/Pocket Books to create a series of novellas and graphic novels for a G-Unit Books street fiction series to debut next year.”
TheStateOf . . . Hip Hop Lit. So, in other words, black youngsters are so depraved and ingorant that the only literature they can relate to depicts sex, drugs and violence? Large publishing houses are now getting into the act of publishing this filth–that is, unless we stop it.
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