Unfortunately, I have a case of terminal whiteness (Things Ozy Has Literally Said: “That 99 Problems is a nice song!”), so I haven’t talked much about rap music here, what with the not knowing anything about it or anything. However, recently, a couple of interesting anti-kyriarchy and rap music things have shown up on my desk.
First, this is a very interesting analysis at Racialicious by a hip-hop fan about sexism in rap music. In particular, I really like her avoiding a simplistic “gangsta rap is misogynistic!” argument (which, of course, it all too often is)* and instead looking at the reasons that gangsta rap is misogynistic. Within an environment of anti-black racism and without positive male role models, all too many black men and boys fall prey to femmephobia and oppositional sexism: to be feminine or female, to have emotions and nurture others and respect women and avoid violence, is lesser. All of that, of course, combines with already existent problems: racialized misogyny against black women, the appetite of some white boys for endless amounts of angry misogynistic music, and the tendency of kyriarchy to recommend as the solution to every problem shitting on the head of someone more oppressed than you. Read it. It’s good.
Second, the rapper Murs has talked about homophobia in one of his songs. (Transcript available at link; trigger warning for a murder-suicide at the end of the song.) It’s… not exactly subtle, but sometimes that’s exactly what we need.
Third, a friend showed me this mashup of Beethoven’s Fifth and Golddigger, and I am pretty sure it is the most brilliant thing on the entire planet.
*Does anyone else find it amusing that a bunch of white people are always like “holy shit, gangsta rap is misogynistic, WE CAN CRITICIZE BLACK PEOPLE NOW WITHOUT BEING RACIST!” As if gangsta rap is more misogynistic than, you know, metal. Take out the beam in your own eye, white people.
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Another interesting article on homophobic lyrics in hip hop, this one by Twin Cities artist Brother Ali: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/brother-ali/hip-hop-homophobia-_b_1864676.html?utm_hp_ref=arts&ncid=edlinkusaolp00000008
Way to infantalize rappers and African-American men, Ozy! Just how oppressed to you have to be before well-meaning social justice types start looking for ways to justify clearly bad behaviors and statements?
Some theoretical cases:
“Ann Coulter is flagrantly racist and has some crazy ideas about politics, but she’s a woman, and woman are sometimes gaslighted (gaslit?), so we can’t call her crazy rantings crazy.”
“Clarence Thomas made a bad decision in Citizens United, but we certainly can’t call him out for it, because his background of growing up in rural poverty during Jim Crow made him fall prey to the self-loathing notion that money=good, in much the same way that rappers flaunt their wealth.”
“Charles Krauthhammer is virulently anti-Muslim, but it’s ableism to call him out on it because he’s uses a wheelchair to get around. Therefore, he spent decades watching able-bodied Muslims (and others) jaywalk while he could only cross the street at curb cuts.”
Sorry, rappers (Lil Bow-Wow excepted) are adults and oppression doesn’t excuse them from acting like it. Remember that famous photo of the March on Washington in which a man holds up a sign that says “I am a man”? It didn’t say “I am a man, but have experienced certain oppressions that render me incapable of not being sexist.”
Less excuses, more empowerment, please.
Personally, I think that understanding the reasons behind someone’s behavior and excusing that behavior are two completely different things. For instance, if I say that one of the reasons that rapists commit rape is that we live in a culture that systematically disrespects consent and bodily autonomy, that does not mean that I’m saying that rape is excusable. It means that people do not do things For The Evulz, but for reasons that make sense to them.
My opinion is that all men, all people, grow up in an environment of sexism, misogyny, and femmephobia, and this leads to a lot of terrible behavior on the part of everyone.
It begs the question of why you didn’t explain how those reasons differ from that of metal. Is metal worse (reading your sarcasm) because the content is worse, or because it’s white people committing the same (or lesser) lyrical offenses? If so, how isn’t that excusing bad behavior?
One thing is that rap seems to be more popular at least to me. Also, rap has the interesting race element that metal deos not.
Actually, i’d say that gangsta rap [i]is[/i] more misogynistic than metal – at least in terms of the topics covered, lyrics and videos. I don’t feel qualified in comparing attitudes in the actual communities, as i’m rather outside both of them. Otherwise, that is a very good point – it does seem that there’s a certain set of white people who jump onto any opportunity to ‘legitimately” criticize black culture rather… gleefully.
““gangsta rape is misogynistic!”
Um, that’s quite the typo…
Wait, metal is misogynistic? Maybe I am just incredibly mainstream in my tastes, but most metal I’ve listened to is either about body parts, vaguely breaking the law, testosterone-powered perseverance, or history and religion. Apart from the conspicuously self-aware Mindless Self Indulgence most of them don’t even venture into the same zip code as gender issues. Have I completely missed something or is my taste in metal just incredibly PC?
No, you’re right; I’m a big metalhead and I don’t really understand the dig at metal either.
Now, granted, I have definitely seen misogynistic metal before, but then again I’ve also seen this song, so I don’t think that shit is generalizable.
There IS a problem with 99% of metal musicians being dudes (and, if one of them ISN’T it’s always the singer), but that seems like a different problem.
Female metalhead here also bewildered. The closest I can come is some of the more recent Marilyn Manson albumns where he’s still cut up over his divorce and it kinda come out, and even then it’s pretty vague.
Yeah, a bit lost.
To comment on one small part of this excellent and illuminating article (the first link of which was very interesting and led me to more interesting reading), I feel your footnote is an interesting invitation for me to look at the music community I am part of (metal) with regards to sexism. I have to say that I have listened to metal of various sub-genres for a while, and the majority of songs that are overtly misogynist can be found in the glam rock and hair metal sub-genre, which are not genres that are particularly strong these days. (Steel Panther are a major exception.) A female metalhead like me can listen to metal, old and new, from the other sub-genres and not feel excluded at all, because most of it does not touch upon gender issues. If it does, it mostly it doesn’t get much stronger than ‘I love this woman’ (Black Sabbath’s Sabbra Cadabra), or ‘I need to escape from this woman who broke my heart’ (UFO’s Doctor Doctor) or the occasional old fashioned plea to stop that whorin’ (Iron Maiden’s 22 Acacia Avenue). Metal has a lower concentration of love songs than genres like mainstream pop, so it also reinforces unrealistic ideas about love far less than other genres. Steel Panther, however, are one example of a band that make music that I do feel excluded from because it is misogynistic. My brother was listening to them so out of curiosity I asked him why he liked their music, and he said something like ‘it’s funny’ (they are trying to be a parody of an old school hair metal band) and I thought, this is humour that is SO not aimed at me, so no wonder I don’t like it. They know that their audience is mostly male and they aren’t interested in any section that isn’t, with their sexist lyrics and pornified album covers. It would be possible to laugh along anyway, and be the ‘cool chick’, but I feel that if I were to directly criticize this sexism I would open myself up to the usual ‘oh it’s just a joke! You don’t get it! You’re taking it too seriously!’ remarks. This is one indicator that the metal community is sexist in some ways.
Let’s look at the community. It is mostly made up of white males. The proportion of female to male fans is bigger than the proportion of female to male band members, interestingly. (As for artists and fans of colour, we’re talking a tiny fraction.) This doesn’t necessarily mean it is a sexist community, any more than the lack of people of colour in the community necessarily means it is a racist community. (I don’t doubt that there are bands out there that do write racist lyrics, but they are underground and obscure, hopefully for that exact reason). I do, however, feel like this is a community that likes its women to dress revealingly, but also practises slut-shaming. Regarding the first point, in the most popular metal magazine in the UK, where I’m from, female band members are judged on their looks first, and are photographed as such, with various references to how gorgeous they are in the articles. They have far higher standards placed on their looks than men, and I feel that while a lot of the band members look like ordinary guys, there is no place for a less-than-gorgeous woman on stage with a metal band. As for the slut-shaming, I have to say that I, personally, would not view the community as a safe place to look for casual sex. I have never tried but I don’t want to because I don’t think I would like the way I would find myself treated. I recently got together some friends, and one of my metalhead friends was talking about a metal festival he went to recently where there was apparently a girl in their camp who he didn’t know, who had a lot of sex all weekend with various different guys. He said this in the context of how it was annoying because they were being loud and keeping him awake, but he was slut shaming her too, saying how gross it was and how she was ugly as if he saw this as a reason for her casual sex. (Two of my friends who are sex positive feminists immediately called him on this and he took it well.) Also, the same metal magazine I mentioned above posted a link in their facebook feed to a documentary about middle aged groupies talking about their experiences with rock musicians when they were younger- that’s not the part I consider slut-shaming as I see no problem with people having consensual sex with their favourite rock stars- but most of the comments on the post from fans of the magazine were EXTREMELY judgmental and the word whore was used entirely too much.
So there you go- I have ‘taken out the beam’ and looked at my own community. I cannot say that it is not in some ways sexist. As gangsta rap is not my community, I do not feel qualified to evaluate it and to do so, especially in a overridingly negative way, would be wrong and misguided, as you have said Ozy. I have in the past fallen into the bullshit ‘all rap is bad’ cliche that white people do a lot and I have since realised the problem with this, and am aiming to sort out that attitude and explore more music in a non-judgemental fashion. If I see misogyny I will identify it as such, but I will not make it a judgement about black people or the rap community. To other metalheads- what do you think of my observations about the metal community?