If you live in Northern America, you may have seen the following documentary already , we here in Europe are not blessed with the availabilty of HBO – nevertheless, I wanted to point to “Bastards Of The Party”, which I recently discovered. We all love fronting imaginary gang-sings with our mates when posing for digital cameras. However, almost nothing do we people outside of the US know about the emergence and social history of the LA gangs. Did you for example know that one of the major LA gangs, the Crips, actually started with a constitution and that the gang name initially stood for “Community Revolutionary Innerparty Service” and was conceived as a communal social service? Or that the so-called LA “gang problem” of the 1980s and 1990s and all the gangster culture so heavily promoted throughout 90s and 00s rap is all rooted in the vacuum that emerged when the 1960s community self-organisation and -defense group named the Black Panther Party was infiltrated by the FBI, its leaders murdered and the party eventually disbanded? If you want to get a bigger picture of LA gang life and its roots, have a look at this insightful documentary by Blood member Cle “Bone” Slon, now an inactive member of the notorious gang. It´s 1.5 hrs in length, but take your time, it´s definitely one of the best documentaries on gang life ever made.