Hip-hop and rap music are commonly criticized for its anti-feminist lyrics and degrading exploitation of women in music and music videos. (Sharpley-Whiting ) Many feminists have taken action against the music industry, which produces these messages in the music they release. However, in the hip-hop genre there are plenty of successful female rappers promoting feminist views, artist such as Queen Latifah and Mary J. Blige have made the choice to condemn the derogatory culture towards women. (Oliver, 382–384) However others female hip-hop artist, such as Lil Kim or Rihanna, have decided to provide no resistance towards the deleterious depictions of women in their music and in turn sometimes exploit themselves. Due to her extreme fame, success, …show more content…
'Til the vocal cords don't work in her throat no more? Shut up slut, you're causin' too much chaos.” (Eminem, Kill You) However, these pejorative lyrics are not unique to male rappers. Nicki Minaj could be considered just as obscene, if not more, than any of the top male rappers. Her songs are littered with explicit sexual themes and threats violent threats against women, including other female rappers. The reasoning behind presenting the misogynist and antifeminist standards of hip-hop music and culture is to juxtapose it against Minaj. Minaj can be criticized for her seeming lack of resistance towards feminism, especially in her music. However, she could also be praised for the opposite, encouraging feminist ideologies through her music. She seems to be in full control of her identity, her image, and her music. It appears as though her actions and created self-image is of her own volition, with little influence from others. Because of this independence she isn’t subservient to patriarchy, but infect she uses the patriarchal philosophies of femininity, commonly accepted and projected in hip-hop music, and reclaims them for her own. This reclaiming allows her to become a model of female empowerment, reversing the standard of female inferiority commonly found in hip-hop and more widely Western culture. She is providing a voice for women and queer culture, in a male-dominated and overwhelmingly sexist and homophobic …show more content…
Prior to the release of her debut studio album Pink Friday, MTV produced a documentary of the rapper outlining her life and achievement. In the documentary, My Time Now Minaj discussed how her incentive to succeed is bigger than herself. “I don’t have anything else to fall back on. […] I’ve been told forever that you’re not gonna sell. No one’s gonna get you. Don’t sound too smart. You can only be a part of a crew. And I just know there are so many women who get told these things every day. I used to think this was all about me. But I’m not doing this for me, I’m doing it for them” (Minaj, My Time Now) By relating herself and her own personal struggle to be accepted into her genre to other women who share similar struggles, she is positioning herself has role model. Her aspiration seems to be for women to look to her as an example, showing them that she was told she couldn’t succeed and doing so despite. Her example transcends the world of hip-hop and is relatable to all women seeking success in professional fields dominated by
In his most recent album, Kanye West raps, “Now if I fuck this model/ And she just bleached her asshole/ And I get bleach on my T-shirt/ I 'mma feel like an asshole.” He suggests that it is the girl’s fault for getting bleach on his tee shirt, which she only did to make herself more sexually appealing. This misogyny in hip-hop culture is recognized to bring about problems. For instance, the women around these rappers believe they can only do well in life if they submit themselves to the men and allow themselves to be cared for in exchange for physical pleasure. In her essay, “From Fly-Girls to Bitches and Hoes”, Joan Morgan argues that the same rap music that dehumanizes women can be a powerful platform for gender equality if implemented correctly.
In The Venus Hip Hop and the Pink Ghetto, Imani Perry argues that the over-sexualized, unattainable bodies of black women in popular culture will lead to the breakdown of feminism and the positive body image of the everyday black women. As hip hop music continues to become more popular, the sexist messages presented in lyrics and music videos are becoming more common to the everyday public, including young black girls developing a self-image. Instead of these girls being exposed to healthy, positive role models who encourage individuality and that there is more to a woman than her body they are given hip hop video models whose only purpose is to look sensual on screen. The strong women that do exist in the hip hop genre are pushed to sexualize themselves or their lyrics to sell records or stay relatively unknown. Although Perry’s arguments are logical, I believe that she is creating a slippery slope of logic. A genre of music cannot destroy the self-image of black women that has existed for generations.
Trina’s intent was to create a song that liberated women from the double standards and stereotypical views placed upon them. Her song however can cause harm to young women that listen to take this song to heart. Instead of liberation, we are moved further down into the hole of degrading and devaluing women. Trina should’ve sent the message that these things were wrong. Instead she endorsed and encouraged them.
Hip hop is a form of art that African Americans have been using to get away from oppressions in their lives and allowed their voices to be heard in some type of way. As soon as big corporations seen the attention hip hop brought to the scene, they wanted to capitalize on it. These corporations picked specific types of attributes that some hip hop artists had and allowed it to flourish. The attributes that these artists carried were hypermasculinity, homophobia, violence and sexism. In the book, Hip Hop Wars by Tricia Rose discusses some of these specific attributes. One of the most damaging attribute is when hip hop is used to sexualize and demean everything about being a woman. Tricia Rose writes about this issue in chapter 5 of her book
In the article “ From Fly to Bitches and Hoes” by Joan Morgan, she often speaks about the positive and negative ideas associated with hip-hop music. Black men display their manhood with full on violence, crime, hidden guilt, and secret escapes through drugs and alcohol. Joan Morgan’s article views the root causes of the advantage of misogyny in rap music lyrics. In the beginning of the incitement her desires shift to focus on from rap culture condemnation to a deeper analysis of the root causes. She shows the hidden causes of unpleasant sexism in rap music and argues that we need to look deeper into understanding misogyny. I agree with Joan Morgan with the stance that black men show their emotions in a different way that is seen a different perspective.
Since young girls today spend more time surfing the web, they are exposed to more mainstream advertisements that boast sexual content, and as a result, many girls want to do the things they are seeing young girls just like Winifred do. In addition to exposure to sexual content on the internet, the music of popular culture leaves very little to the imagination. Women in these music videos are more often shown as provocative and wearing revealing clothing. Many girls look up to these women and want to emulate them because they are their favorite artist. For instance, Beyoncé’s album “Beyoncé” features the song “Partition”, where Beyoncé says “He Monica Lewinski all on my gown”. The sexual reference to Monica Lewinski is hypersexu...
210). These sexist messages become ingrained in the minds of their listeners, which in regards to rock music, is predominantly male (Kimmel, M.S., & Holler J. p. 243). From this, it would not be unreasonable to suggest that music plays a role in contemporary gender inequality. In addition, the hard and heavy sound of rock music reinforces the Give Em Hell: aura of aggression, violence and daring masculinity norm. Meanwhile music directed towards women reinforces today’s femininity ideals. “According to prominent scholar and theorist Martha Nussbaum (1995), seven key features are involved in the act of objectification; these include: instrumentality, denial of autonomy, inertness, fungibility, violability, ownership, and denial of subjectivity. Of particular relevance to the sexual objectification phenomenon, and thus of this study, scholar Rea Langton (2009) adds three more features to Nussbaum’s list: reduction to body, reduction to appearance, and silencing.” (Jamie Glantz, p. 23). An example of how contemporary music is objectifying women can be seen in the lyrical discourse of I’m A Slave For You by Britney Spears. In just the first stanza is a representation of the female ideal to be young; “I
There’s a certain reinforcement of binary misconceptions about gender common to hip-hop that doesn’t even exist in the distinctions between the biological sexes, let alone any kind of social concept about gender. To these rappers sex and gender seem to be pure categories. The roles of man and woman
Britney Spears' prevalence as a pre-teen pop culture icon cannot be denied or ignored. Spears, along with her colleagues Christina Aguilera, Jessica Simpson, Mandy Moore and many others, are ever present on the "Top 40," make frequent appearances on MTV, and can often be found on magazine covers and in photo spreads. Spears is especially popular among pre-teen girls, who buy her records, singing and dancing along to the lyrics. These lyrics often deal with love, lust, and sex-topics some consider too mature for the young girls targeted by Spears' marketing. Young women today are maturing at increasingly earlier ages, and the sexual messages in Spears' songs may simply be satisfying an existing demand for these types of songs. On the other hand, her sexy image and provocative lyrics may be creating the demand in young women, sending harmful messages about what it means to be a young woman within American culture. Is Britney Spears the newest manifestation of "girl power," and does this make her a feminist role model? Or does she perpetuate stereotypes of thin women as sex symbols? Does she provide a healthy outlet for girls to examine their sexuality? Or does she force sexuality upon young girls, before they are ready? These are the questions that I am in interested in exploring.
Rappers that have taken over today’s teens have begun to also venture out into the singing world. The artist that rose into the celebrity world like Iggy Azalea and Nicki Minaj made the billboards. Nicki Minaj started off in the music industry with hits like “Your Love” that hit number one back in 2010. However as she strived for fame, this once talented rapper got consumed by society. In the past five years since she started her career this once natural rapper has become a plastic auto-tuned rapper. With seven plastic surgeries and music that is manipulated by robots, Nicki no longer proves to be worth of her celebrity
genre of music. Nicki Minaj leaves a mark on you that many female rappers on this generation
N.W.A, Ice T, and 2 Live Crew changed the fabric of hip-hop by commercializing suggestive themes and portraying women as objects. Joan Smith defines misogyny as a hatred or disdain towards women. It is the belief that diminishes women to objects for men’s ownership, use, or abuse. (Smith, 1991) According to Joan, misogyny assumes many characteristics, it reveals itself in forms that are dictated by race, education, social class, religion and wealth. The primal characteristic of misogyny is its pervasiveness. In the article Women, Pop Music, and Pornography Meredith Levande, identifies how misogyny became pervasive, she tells us that “paper-view-television and the internet removed the final barriers between consumer and product” (Levande, 296) As soon as these obstacles were removed, images of women in popular media became increasingly suggestive and mirrored pornographic behaviors, attitudes and body language. Another issue was cross-ownership. There was a time when the government didn’t allow one company to own several TV stations, local newspapers, or radio stations, but after 2003 the law was revised, the power was put back in the hands of large corporations. This allowed cross-ownership of new & old media to become limitless. Fast forward to 2015 and we can see the affects of cross-ownership, large
Powerful men in the music industry always seem to be intimidated by beautiful women. They try to bash and disrespect us in front of other people to make our self-esteem low. Because, once a person loses their self-respect, then you can control them. And that what most male rapper do in the hip-hop industry. I think once a woman knows what she want in life, then nobody can break her self-esteem. She don’t have to worry about what people are saying about her. Rapper try to degrade women by calling us out of our name, calling women sluts and prostitute just to make them fill better about themselves. They think by them degrading women then people will look at them at as being strong and powerful. Rapper try to brag about how sexy there girls look or what she let him do to her. But then turn around and tell his friends that she be sleeping around. I did notice that most of the women in the video always have some type of sexual piercing. The most popular ones are tongue ring, Lip ring and Genital
Nicki Minaj has written many songs with vulgar lyrics. One of her songs with the most offensive lyrics is Stupid Hoe. The name itself is enough to show Minaj should stop writing music, but her lyrics within the song are worse. “Ice my wrist-es then I piss on bitches, You could suck my diznick, if you take these jizzes, You don't like them disses,
Feminism is defined clinically as the advocacy of women's rights on the basis of the equality of the sexes. By a less medical definition, feminism is a philosophy in which women and their contributions are respected. It is based on political, social, and economical equality for women ,and men in a few instances. Feminists can be anyone in the population regardless of sex, gender, or ethnicity.