Guest Blogging Goodness
by Latoya Peterson
I am over at Feministe for the next two weeks, guest blogging. I would love if some of y’all came through every now and then to show some anti-racist love over on the boards.
I plan to blog a lot about hip-hop feminism, and also find the time to cover all the stuff I outlined in my intro piece:
I’m still planning to write some things on comic and video game heroines, manga-style feminism, the Pussycat Dolls, Tila Tequila, music videos and messaging, paranormal smut fiction and reggaeton. But I will also be outlining my understanding and application of hip-hop feminism, dissecting musical lyrics and ingrained misogyny, issues with discussing feminism and class, the perils of religious bias, capitalism, colonialist bias in the feminist gaze, why feminism is a battleground, and understanding the limitations of both lived experience and theory.
My first real post is up now, called “Before I discovered feminism…”
A short sample…
[...] Bryan was also bored, alternately ignoring me and fighting with me, generally over whose turn it was to play their CD on the one stereo in the basement with a temperamental attitude. We both knew that at any moment, the CD player could decide to stop reading CDs so the battle quickly took on epic proportions.
After I lost the most recent round of slapboxing over the stereo, I settled onto a couch with a book to read while Bryan queued up a brand new CD that was just released.
“Stupid,” he taunted me from across the room. “You need to stop looking all dumb and learn to start acting like a girl. You need to look like this!”
He walked over, and shoved the CD cover in my face.
Read the rest. I am not sure how I am going to handle these posts – depending on the quality of the conversation, I will either post them in full here or just provide links out. We’ll see how it goes.
-LDP
Carmen Van Kerckhove is co-founder and president of
Eric Daniels wrote:
Good god the death of beauty in Black Music started with Dre and the West Coast crew, who represented all the worst ghetto black male sterotypes, that’s been my argument of how hip-hop and by extension black music with a few expections. Before 1992 even Hip- Hop had some beauty and art when it came to representing females but after 1993 and albums like ‘The Chronic”, “Doggystyle” and other albums the left coast of hip- hop ushered in a Bloods/Crips street gang war-type narrative into mainstream black music and we as listeners and consumers have never even recovered or even thought about it’s potential damage to future generations of musicans.
Now what you have is sexual obession and male dominance in a music that is driven by the most base and carnal desires of what men and women should be, Black Music has always had that dynamic going back to the Delta Blues(which is more a direct descendent of west coast rap) but it was always balanced by a Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday and the musical beauty and suites of Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn and that balance had continued from from our musical evoultions to R&B, Rock-n-Roll, Soul, Funk , Disco, Black Pop, and Hip- Hop.
But in the early 90’s maybe as a response to gender wars of the 70’s and 80’s and the sensitive falsetto voices of Eldra De Barge, Luther Vandross, Micheal Jackson and Prince, some Black Men who rose to prominance in hip- hop and became power brokers on major labels felt MJ and Prince were “fags and soft” wanted a return to the Domiant Black Male voice that was male and unreconstructed like a Robert Johnson, Otis Redding and other Black Male singer sfrom different eras who articulated a strong black male persona .
So they signed and promoted the most raw black comedians, rappers,shows and movies all in the name of “keeping it real” and the esscence of beauty that kept Black Music vital and growing, ended up being replaced by video hoes, sexist, violent rappers and has feed into a stagger-lee, mammy, jezebel parade of racial sterotypes that has damaged Black Music for the forseeable future and has made Male- Female relations even worse and Black America culturally drifting while the Brits, Africans, and others have taken our musical innovations and moved the music forward. The Klan and Conservatives couldn’t have done a better job than what Dre, Snoop, Pac and Biggie have done in destroying Black Music’s balance.
But that’s part of my book in the last chapter and take on sexism in modern black music. I could be wrong but I am looking forward to hearing from you folks.
Posted 26 Aug 2008 at 6:12 pm ¶
Danny wrote:
As we all know for the most part music is a medium through which someone tells their story. In the early days of gangsta rap it seemed to be genuine. People like NWA really did have those hard lives and they saw rap as a way to get their story out to everyone. The problem is once it caught on it was no longer about people telling their stories but it because about image.
You had people that wanted to get money and make a name for themselves and you have greedy corporations trying to figure out what the next hot ticket is going to be. In essence gangsta rap became pop music in the sense that the new acts that were coming out didn’t live the hard lives of their predecessors but instead knew nothing about that life but with the help of the music industry were able to take on the same image as Dre and Ice Cube.
Why do you think when BET was bought by Viacom most of its informative news programs were taken away and basically became a Black MTV? Record companies now that whether or not their artist is the real deal people out there will buy into that image anyway.
Im not trying to justify it, I’m just trying to explain why the hard gangsta rap image has endured for so long.
Posted 29 Aug 2008 at 2:11 pm ¶