The adversarial forces of governmental censorship, freedom of expression, and capitalistic appropriation are engaged in an acrimonious debate over "Gangsta' Rap" that is being played out in the public spaces of popular culture. However, as a literacy of lived experience, Gangsta' Rap warrants critical investigation. Many postmodern theorists have articulated the limitations of literacy as it has been traditionally practiced in the composition classroom. They speak, as Patricia Bizzell does, of the growing gap between the classroom and the community of the students, between their home dialects and standard English. A rap-oriented radical pedagogy seeks first of all to reconstitute as subjects those who have been treated as objects. Non-school and academic literacies are thus not viewed as incompatible discourses at the extremes of a binary opposition, but as the mutually nourishing elements of a continuum in which traffic flows both ways between the public and the private sector. Specific classroom experiences would include: (1) asking students to take a position on some of the public debates over Gangsta' rap; (2) asking students to collect Gangsta' Rap lyrics for distribution to the class as a stimulus for discussion; and (3) asking students to write their own rap lyrics. Rap lyrics can also be an effect domain from which to mount a critical investigation of the mainstream culture. (Contains 27 references.) (TB)