Barbelith Underground > Radio & Music > Hip-pop 2: Misogyny, politics, the 'underground' and the bling bling

Flyboy I have been thinking.

My long post was extreme in what was missing from it: woman. The only women I have any real contact with right now are my mother and my sister, who I live with, and we do not get along. I haven’t been with a woman in a long time, since I got sick. I am not well. I was in England for treatment. And this name I chose, Ladies Love, I thought it was kind of silly but now it seems sad. My life right now is marked by the painful absence of woman.

So to talk a little bit about women in hip-hop.
Roxanne Shante had some raw shit going on back in the day, so did MC Lyte, Yo-Yo, Queen Latifah. Jean Gray, her songs with Herbaliser are really good (she was called What What then). Bahamadia I never got into. Yarah Bravo and Sarah Jones, some Heather B. Lauryn Hill when she was in the Fugees (she kicks Wyclef’s ass). Sister Souljah was ok.
I do not feel them in the same way I feel male MCs, I guess there is some identification of maleness going on when I listen to an MC. I really like Tekitha’s verses on Mantis (off Bobby Digital) and Pump Your Fist (off Capadonna’s The Pillage). I like Blue Raspberry and the more Soul style of singing on the Wu tracks, I even like Meth’s song with Mary J Blige, I like Beth Gibbons, a lot of classic soul and so on, but I’m getting off topic…

I don’t think the absence of females from hip-hop (especially scratching and producing) is due to any reason other than that of socialization; how women are not encouraged to do these things, they are not allowed to experience music in the same way; it is true for many genres of music (in jazz or funk etc where the women are restricted to the role of singers). Hip-hop is even more extreme, it’s a kind of battle-culture, Mcing is, up to a point, a ritualised martial art, and women are generally excluded from that sort of thing.
And I condemn very strongly the misogyny in hip-hop lyrics, both underground and non. There is a lot of ignorance still being perpetuated in that department!
Sometimes of course the misogyny is more open – see the commonplace dismissal of a pop artist’s music via the accusation that they are only liked by “little girls”. This kind of snobbery, so insidious that even Chuck D basically said it, is "if girls like it, it sucks".
This is an interesting point. Now I have to admit I agree with Chuck D to a large extent! From my (obviously limited) experience of women, women tend to like mostly shitty music.
How many DJs I know who play some SFP in their hip-hop sets ‘to get the girls dancing’. And believe me it is difficult to get girls dancing without playing commercial music. How many guys I know who go to the shitty clubs because there aren’t enough women at the underground events! Women are socialized into this, they are not made to feel at home in many forms of music in any role except that of the groupie. Especially in hip-hop!

Of course there is also the opposite going on, I really like the way the female MCs are big in grime, you have some hardcore women in London man. I saw a 16 year old girl punch the fuck out of a guy who called her a little girl when i was in London, in a bus going up to willesden, she was yelling at him and I was thinking, 'shit she should be rhyming'. The world would shake a lot right now if a hardcore woman mc came out about now, a woman with a good flow, with the Voice and good skills, over heavy beats, martial arts roughness, dropping some voodoo anticapitalist science, hahaha I would give her all my beats in a second man, that is what the world needs right now. Something to bring back the balance. Or a group of them, like public enemy.

Flyboy, I do not care what Missy Eliot looks like. This fixation of the visual aspect of hip-hop artists is a distraction from the music (the ‘video rhymers’ KRS used to diss). Your way of thinking reminds me very much of the professional spectators of the music press. The issues you tried to engage with are just indicative of the larger issues:
Body-image in visual media; an important issue for both men and women. The culture industry’s primary function right now is creating insecurity, and then selling temporary gratifications for these insecurities. This is not limited to hip-hop but extends to a large part of the economy. Show-business is like drug dealing; consumption is addiction; junk is still junk even if it is spiked with MDMA.

As for make-up, perfume, etc –I am with Talib Kweli and Jeru on that one. Reminds me of an insert in one of the dead kennedys albums that says ‘if every woman in America woke up tomorrow looked in the mirror and said to herself ‘I look fine just the way I am’ the whole economy would collapse’. The emphasis modern society gives to clothes and cosmetics is fetishistic; it objectifies the body for the most part.

One favourite technique is for the critic to assume that he can speak for the female artist, usually in a way that devalues her: she’s stupid; she’s ‘fake’; she’s being manipulated (by men) and doesn’t realise it; her sexuality and creativity are not her own… Often these assumptions are presented without comment, as self-evident. “How do you know she’s not making her own decisions about how she presents herself?” “Well just look at what she’s WEARING!” I’d say this falls pretty squarely into the category of “misogynist feminism”, or more accurately misogyny wearing the doctrinal disguise of feminism
Obviously women and men can dress how they like. “Making your own decisions” is very relative and hard to pin down, as you know I like the Marxist way of looking at things and ascribe a lot of this to false consciousness, the Spectacle, etc.
As I said, the MC today is primarily a marketter rather than an artist. The use of woman's sexuality is a marketting technique; female hip-hop artists are simply among the most extreme marketters. It is a form of prostitution; sensuality invoked in service to the dollar. Girls should be taught that they have other sources of strength than their body. Black women especially have been hypersexualised.

Wherever you turn, popular culture is in a state of tension between Traditionalist Puritan Absolutism and ‘Progressive’ Relativism. The first is easy to identify, the second is trickier - it poses as liberation. In terms of sexuality the second one supposedly challenges the Traditionalist repression of women, by objectifying men and women equally. The ‘sexual revolution’; ‘free love’, sexual openness or whatever you want to call them, have become co-opted by the roles of exchange and power.
Very little popular music convinces me that it contains anything of essence when referring to respect; to me still the essence of sexuality. The love song once was a very powerful and revolutionary thing (in the days of arranged marriages and so on), but its time is at an end I think; today love only remains in praxis and in silence, not in words. The word love died.

Am I writing from bitterness or from clarity, I cannot tell. I had decided not to write in the forum about my illness but, I interpreted an omen that I should. On Tuesday I am having a major operation. Doctors are not too optimistic, I can tell. I feel free from illusions, I do not know how else to explain it. My dreams have become sharper and more real.

-bruno

Bruno

20:21 / 20.06.05

Flyboy I liked engaging with your posts, they made me think. I was asking for it. I think you missed a lot of the point. This conversation reminds me of Dune where the Mentat is talking to the Fremen and they can't make sense of each other. I am the Fremen.

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But to make this basic controversial point clear, I orginally said: From my (obviously limited) experience of women, women tend to like mostly shitty music. And by obviously limited I mean as obviously limited as about anyone here, we know max a few hundred women each? and there are a few billion (or so I have heard). I have known women who do not fall into the shitty music category. I am confident that there are social circles where most if not all of the girls have a profoud feeling for good music. In London I have been to dub parties where there were lots of women dancing and enjoying what I also consider to be very good music.

My point was: that women are not encouraged to appreciate certain aspects of music. Subsequently, fewer of them like [what I consider] good music, and this is very evident in certain genres, especially 'black' genres, where their role is 99% of the time only the singer, and not a musician or behind the mixing boards. This applies especially to more militant or battle-oriented forms of music. Now you can agree or disagree but I do not think this falls into the category of misogyny.

(Haus you know nothing about my life before i got sick. Also, your posts are usually stupid.)

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I believe very much in certain semi-objective criteria in music quality. This is where we seem to disagree, Flyboy. Yes, I do think that I can speak with more authority about the Quality of the Manifestation of Hip-hop than the average fashion addict. No, I do not think I can be the Supreme Judge of what is ok for someone to listen to. There is a line between the 2. I am bored of trying to indicate this line. Absolute definition is impossible.

I think in both this and the original thread I talked about Machine taking over too much power from Soul. It is ok for musicians to experiment with Machine, but in present conditions it has achieved a level of imbalance. Rhythm, dance and sexuality are closely linked. The mechanization/digitization of sexuality is rarely stated openly but it is dominant in most SFP music.

We have (a) the fetishization of digital cleanness in production (very similar to the fetish of chemical hygiene) and (b)the inorganic, unsyncopated, overly quantized drumming style, made popular by disco:

(from a private message I wrote to gypsy lantern a while ago: My understanding of disco is that it is a watered down funk, semi-funky music played over a very boring beat. I remember when I was studying in the US I went to see a band called Project Logic, not a great band or anything but they were alright, and they played kind of groovy/kind of funky/hip-hopish jams. And then on one song they played pretty much the same kind of thing they had been playing up till then, except the drum beat was that standard "electronic dance" music beat, the very boring one that is just a kick on the one and a snare on the two, again and again and again. And all the college kids in the audience found this very dancable and they acted like it was the best song, dancing up and down and going whooooo at the end. Why???? I think it is because a lot of people who are not really 'into' music have a hard time even following a slightly more complex beat, in the same way that I have a hard time following some free-jazz drumming. Do you see what I mean? To me 'disco' as i understand it, is that same simplification of rhythm applied to funk... Not that i think being more complex is necessarily better.... maybe what I mean is that funk is organic, erotic, earthy - disco is uptight, robotic, alienated, dumbed-down. I have no problem with music exploring the robotic or the alienated, but not for dance, for me dancing is sacred and life-affirming. Of course the word disco means many things (etymologically from discotheque which means a club or a place for storing discs I think...))

Most 'black' music seems to go through stages of rawness and then a watered down commodified stage where it is made more attractive to 'white' audiences. We are now in the commodified stage of Hip-hop.

(The terms black and white are losing a lot of their associated meanings; many blacks are more white than some whites, and many whites are more black than some blacks, in the archetypal sense.
Archetypically:
Black is sexual, physical, strong, primal, organic, intuitivelly rhythmical, soulful, (and also primitive, unrefined, slow, non inventive)
White is knowledgable, industrious, noble, conquering, inventive (but also uptight, bad at dancing, soulless (devil)), Fallen, out of touch.)

(very rough outlines, yes you can argue with them, I hope some people can understand what I am trying to point at here. It is suggestive of certain trends.)
These archetypes can also be seen in class terms, white being ruling and black being working. Right now what is happening in the US is a big idenitity crisis where many blacks try and act 'white' and many whites try and act 'black'.
eg african american cultural dominance in music and sports has had an incredibly strong affect on white masculinity, the young white male trying to act black.
Then the older black male trying to act white.... universal otherness and alienation, universal objectification. [This model is too simplistic obviously, but it seems like one of the central myths]

(I am not black and I am not white.)

Hip-hop and SFB... so closely tied to 'blackness'... but the spiritual and organic where have they gone? I have nothing against booty shaking but not to these proaudio marching bands.... A march is the construction of an inhibition against will, in the service of an objectifying interest. Sublimation of sexual energy where the individual loses the Self not to a Unity or Communal-Consciousness, but to what? to what? to what?

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I could reply to each of your points but it would take way way too long:

I see no value whatsover in adopting a form of puritanism or adopting the patriachal mode of telling women what not to wear.

I expressly condemned puritanism. I said Obviously women and men can dress how they like. Flyboy you cant lock me into these categories where i do not belong.

My point is this: don't assume everyone shares the same worldview, in which musicians can be nearly divided into those who are true artists and those who are shallow and doing it for the money etc, and you can the difference by looking (very superficially)...

No I never said anything about neat divides. Most hip-hop artists i like are all into the money... eric b and rakim are all bling bling... understand maybe flyboy that hip-hop is not like other forms of music it has other dimensions unique to it... where is rakim coming from? or rather where is he at? how rakim how can you take me through the mental in this way?... and why jay-z can you not take me anywhere close?... there is a power of manifestation which has become watered down... (what do I mean by watered down? I mean Intent has been given heroin... I mean someone has pissed in my well)...i am sick of endless discourse... it is the nature of language that we can argue forever and just arrive at the conclusion 'maybe'....

to say it again very rigidly objectively to 2 decimel points. To me the essence of Hip-hop is manifestation of Word (as Flow, Rhythm, Battle-style, Uplifting Righteousness, I-ness, Godliness, Uniqueness, tribal consciousness) and the Creation of Sacred Time via the Breakbeat (breakbeat used in the broadest sense of the word, the time machine). Anything deviating from this is not necessarily good or bad but is deviating from hip-hop. Some elements however are 'bad', and by bad I mean working against the evolution of the human species. And within this category I would include the overdependence on Machine.

Finally, the problem I have with your understanding of ideas such as false consciousness and the Spectacle is that they're things that fool other people. You don't seem very aware of the possibility that you may have picked up preconceptions, fallacies etc through conditioning. On the contrary, you think that you have a deeper understanding than anybody else, and that you know what is "objectively historical". And like pretty much everybody else I ever heard talk about the big bad Spectacle, you make allowances for the art you yourself enjoy, confusing politics and aesthetics. Now, I've not problem with people confusing politics and aesthetics, necessarily. You just need a bit of self-awareness and humility when you're doing it.

I am not perfect therefore I have preconceptions fallacies etc. One of the purposes of discussing here is for them to be exposed. Check out how delacroix showed me a big one on the marxists thread. I accepted it.
'Objectively historical' was just a silly joke after you started playing korzybski with my first post on the wu tang thread.
Some others understand with more depth than me, some others do not but can still help me find more depth. I am not afraid of my depth. This is Hip-hop! The kind of humility you ask is contrary to Hip-hop. Inhibition is dropped and Will is free. This is why such a large percentage of NYC big time MCs were 5percenters, because they thought they were God and therefore removed inhibitions and focused on their goal.

Hip-hop belongs to Spectacle for the most part but it is one of the few forces potentially stronger than it. A good MC and a good DJ are always chanelling something infinitely more powerful than Spectacle. Wait for Hip-hop to become aware of itself and its slave relation to Capital.

Can you compare me with a christian fundamentalist?..... god is not an accurate term, means many things. Hip-Hop is a Path, it is a way of life, it is living, it is alive, it is a zeitgeist, it is an egregore, it is crate digging karma, it is the noise in the south bronx, it is international, it is a culture, it is grown men talking about how big their dicks are over disco records, it is breath control, it is a shift in the assemblage point, it is complete isolation, it is the crew, it is the crowd, it is the moment of battle, it is the moment of peace, bla bla bla, it is big, more big than we can talk about, call it polytheistic if you want; I will think about that one. I am the Fremen.

-bruno