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Gangsta Rap Music Video

Paypaboy – Got work

The was a straight Gangsta Rap video about getting paper. Paper or paypa means money. Paypaboy if the money boy. For this gangsta rap video we traveled to our nation’s capitol, Washington DC. There we met up with Paypaboy and the crew.  We shot this in 2008 with the RED 18-50 lens. Robert Poswall was the DP and Christian Strickland was the director. We rented our RED One Ultra HD Cinematic Camera package and Justin McAleece from San Diego Video Production was the 1st AC.

Gangsta rap or gangster rap is a subgenre of hip hop music with themes and lyrics that emphasize the “thug” or “gangsta” lifestyle. The genre evolved from hardcore hip hop into a distinct form, pioneered in the mid-1980s by rappers such as Schoolly D and Ice-T, and was popularized in the later part of the 1980s by groups like N.W.A. After the national attention that Ice-T and N.W.A attracted in the late 1980s and early 1990s, this rap style became the most commercially lucrative subgenre of hip hop.
Many (if not most) gangsta rap artists openly boast of their associations with various active street gangs as part of their artistic image, with the Bloods and Crips being the most commonly represented. And like in this video they also boast about making money (paypa) this music closely related to other indigenous gang and crime-oriented forms of music, such as the narcocorrido genre of northern Mexico.