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Document on Sexist and Misogynistic

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Added on  2019-10-09

Document on Sexist and Misogynistic

   Added on 2019-10-09

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Part IV I’ll Be Nina Simone Defecating on Your Microphone: Hip-Hop and Gender Mark Anthony Neal I could do what you do, EASY! Believe me / frontin’ niggaz gives me heebee-geebees so while you imitatin’ Al Capone / I be Nina Simone and defecating on your microphone Lauryn Hill, “Ready Or Not” (The Score, 1996) Rap music and hip-hop culture have often been singularly cited for the transmission and reproduction of sexism and misogyny in American society. With tracks like Akinelye’s “Six-Foot Blow Job Machine” and 2 Live Crew’s “Me So Horny,” hip-hop is perhaps too easy a target. As sexism and misogyny are largely extensions of normative patriarchal privilege, their reproduction in the music of male hip-hop artists speaks more powerfully to the extent that these young men (particularly young black men) are invested in that privilege than it does to any evidence that they are solely responsible for its reproduction. As journalist Kevin Powell eloquently cautions in the introduction to Ernie Paniccioli’s collection of classic hip-hop photographs, Who Shot Ya? (2002), “it is wrong to categorically dismiss hip-hop without taking into serious consideration the socioeconomic conditions (and the many record labels that eagerly exploit and benefit from the ignorance of many of these young artists) that have led to the current state of affairs. Or, to paraphrase the late Tupac Shakur, we were given this world, we did not make it.” But there is also no denying the fact that hip-hop’s grip on American youth allows for the circulation of sexist and misogynistic narratives in a decidedly uncritical fashion. The embrace of patriarchal privilege by some male hip-hop artists partly explains the margin- alization of women among hip-hop artists, particularly when those women don’t conform to the normative roles assigned to women within hip-hop (the chicken-head groupie, oversexualized rhyme-spitter, baggy clothed desexualized mic-fiend are prime examples). Thus, many female raps artists are less concerned with challenging the circulation of sexism and misogyny (Sarah Jones’s “Your Revolution” notwithstanding) than they are with simply being recognized as peers alongside male rappers. This is in part what Lauryn Hill asks us to consider in her verse from The Fugees’s “Ready or Not.” Extolling the legacy of the legendary jazz vocalist and activist Nina Simone, Hill champions a notion of hard-corehip-hop that is not rooted in the Mafioso fantasy of the day, but that goes back to the risky aesthetic and political choices made by a woman who, at the height of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, spoke “truth to power” in songs like “Mississippi Goddam” and “Four Women.” Hill’s lyrical phrase represents a legitimate critique of the hypermasculinity and phallocentrism that pervades hip-hop—a critique that is clearly gendered in its intent. 247 248 • MARK ANTHONY NEAL What Hill and many other female rap artists, including Salt-N-Pepa, Eve, MC Lyte, Queen Latifah, Bahamadia, and Missy Elliot, are really asking for is a respect for woman-centered narratives that existalongside, and not necessarily in competition with, those of their male peers. As Hill attests, however, these women are ready and more than willing to battle. Accord- ingly, each of the five women whose
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essays are collected in this section speak to a complex and multifaceted notion of gender and femininity in hip-hop. While the chapters are clearly in dialogue with one another—Tricia Rose’s “NeverTrust a Big Butt and a Smile” being the now- legendary opening salvo in scholarly criticism of hip-hop—these chapters are not simply echoing the party line from some mythical center of feminist thought. These are works that complicate our sense of the obvious gender problems within hip-hop. UCLA ethnomusicologist Cheryl Keyes charts the formation of “four distinct categories of women rappers” within the hip-hop performance tradition. Drawing on Jacqueline Bobo’s concept of “interpretive community,” Keyes examines the observations of female performers and audiences, identifying the “Queen Mother,” “Fly Girl,” “Sista with Attitude,” and “Lesbian” as the dominant figureswithin female hip-hop performance, adding that “each category mirrors certain images, voices, and lifestyles.” The most provocative of these figures is the “Fly Girl.” According to Keyes, “Rap’s fly girl image ... highlights aspects of black women’s bodies consid- ered undesirable by American mainstream standards of beauty.” Citing the example of Salt-N- Pepa, hip-hop’s quintessential “Fly Girls,” Keyes asserts, “they portray via performance the fly girl as a party-goer, and independent woman, but additionally, an erotic subject rather than an objectified one.” Journalist Joan Morgan also finds value in the identity of hip-hop’s “Fly Girl” and the asso- ciated erotic power she possesses. In the opening pages of her book, When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost: MyLife as a Hip-Hop Feminist, Morgan relishes the opportunity to replicate the “proper Bronx Girl Switch” that she watched “project girls” employ when she was a young girl growing up in the Bronx. As she notes, these were woman-girls who could “transform into Black Moseses capable of parting seas of otherwise idle Negroes.” Given the reverence for the South Bronx in hip-hop lore, it is not a stretch to suggest that the prototype for the hip-hop “Fly Girl” may have been born on the streets of New York’s uptown borough. It is in the context of black female sexuality that Morgan posits a hip-hop feminism that champions both a critical discourse around gender in hip-hop and the pleasures associated with flaunting the veryfemale sexuality that is regularly objectified by some hip-hop artists. As Morgan queries in one passage: Is it foul to say that imagining a world where you could paint your big brown lips in the most decadent of shades, pile your phat ass into your fave micromini, slip your freshly manicured toes into four-inch fuck-me sandals and have not one single solitary man objectify—I mean roam his eyes longingly over all intended places—is, like, a total drag to you? Morgan, in fact, uses the power of female eroticism to flip hip-hop sexual politics on it’s head as she brazenly asks, “how come no one ever admits that part of the reason women love hip-hop—as sexist as it is—is ’cuz all that in-yo-face testosterone makes our nipples hard.” Morgan opens When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost reminiscing about being a young girl, disappointed that she couldn’t accompany her mother to a performance of Ntozake Shange’s drama for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf. Here, Morgan is the ten-year-old girl dreaming of black feminist possibilities. Treading similar ground within the context of hip-hop, Kyra Gaunt finds these possibilities in the very “girl” games that Morgan herself likely played as a child. Exploring the concept of “play” in black expressive culture, Gaunt writes, “Black girls’ musical games promote the skillful development of musical authority that reflects blackness, gender, individual expressive PART IV: I’LL BE NINA SIMONE DEFECATING ON YOUR MICROPHONE • 249 ability, and the very musical styles and approaches that later contribute to adult African- American musical activity.” Challenging the pervasive notion that women exist in hip-hop solely as “chickenhead” groupies, Gaunt posits female hip-hop fans as “nurturing a ‘real’ appreciation or understanding of the creativity and
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