Critical Noir: Hip Hop’s Gender Problem

Recently there’s been a lot of talk about the
problems with how women are represented in hip hop,
but very little about where the influences for
these images and ideas come from. Perhaps we should
be looking at the influences instead of the
performers themselves.

By Mark Anthony Neal
http://www.africana.com/articles/daily/mu20040526hipgender.asp

The recent controversy over Nelly’s music video "Tip-
Drill" has highlighted what we’ve all known for some
time: hip hop has a gender problem. And for most of hip
hop’s 30-something years, folk have been compelled to
point out the sexism, misogyny and homophobia that finds
a forum in the lyrics of the young black and brown men
who have primarily influenced the genre, and the lack of
a womanist perspective that could directly counter those
lyrics.

In this regard, the recent decision of the Spelman
College Student Government Association and others at the
Atlanta University Center to try to hold Nelly
accountable, was part of a larger tradition, one honed
by journalists like Joan Morgan, Raquel Cepeda, Karen
Good and Elizabeth Mendez-Berry and scholars such as
Tricia Rose, Cheryl Keyes and Gwendolyn Pough, whose new
book Check It While I Wreck: Black Womanhood, Hip-Hop
Culture and the Public Sphere drops in June. But in
recognizing this larger tradition, we should also
acknowledge that we may be asking hip hop to do
something that it’s fundamentally incapable of.

By asking hip hop to reform, we are essentially
demanding hip hop’s primary consumer base to consume
music that is anti-sexist, anti-misogynistic and
possibly feminist.

Let me be clear - I’m on the front lines of any effort
to get the men in hip hop to rethink their pornographic
uses of women’s bodies and performance of lyrics that
more often than not express, at best, a deep ambivalence
about and fear of women (perfectly captured 14 years ago
with the Bell Biv Devoe quip "never trust a big butt and
a smile") and, at worst, outright hatred. But as we make
demands of these artists, it’s important that we
understand the demands of the peculiar space they occupy
within pop culture. Without doubt, the performance of
black masculinity continues to be hip hop’s dominant
creative force. Yet over the last decade or so sales
figures have consistently shown that young white men are
the primary consumers of the various performances of
black masculinity and the pornographic images of black
and brown women found in mainstream hip hop.

By asking hip hop to reform, we are essentially
demanding hip hop’s primary consumer base to consume
music that is anti-sexist, anti-misogynistic and
possibly feminist. And in what context have young white
men (or black men for that matter) ever been interested
in consuming large amounts of black feminist thought?
Clearly these young whites are consuming hip hop for
other reasons. In the case of young white males, hip hop
represents a space where they work through the idea of
how their masculinity can be lived - what they literally
take from the hypermasculine "black buck" (think about
50 Cent’s influence in the killing fields of Iraq) and
indeed it is an integral part of the cash and carry
exchange.

In a society that remains largely ignorant of the
scholarly, political and cultural contributions of women
like Anna Julia Cooper, Audre Lorde, Angela Davis ("oh
yeah, the chick with the afro, right?"), June Jordan,
bell hooks, Michele Wallace, Patricia Hill-Collins,
Jewell Gomez, Joy James, Beverley Guy-Sheftall and
Masani Alexis De Veaux, how can we expect hip hop to do
the heavy-lifting that hasn’t been done in the larger
culture? Despite popular belief, hip hop is not the most
prominent site of sexism and misogyny in American
society but a reflection of the misogyny and sexism that
more powerfully circulates within American culture. In
many ways the images and lyrics used to objectify women
of color in hip hop videos serve as metaphors for the
ways that American society actually treats those women.
As Pough notes, "rappers become grunt workers for the
patriarchy: they sow the field of misogyny for the
patriarchy and provide the labor necessary to keep it in
operation, much as Black men and women provided the free
and exploited labor that built the United States."
Remember, the black men on the screen are "performing"-
performing their notions of how American masculinity
embodies power through force, violence and exploitation.
(50 ain’t the only thug or pimp in the room - there are
more than a few in the White House and at the Pentagon.)

In many ways, our discussions about hip hop culture are
the product of a very myopic view of contemporary black
expressive culture. Yes, hip hop needs to be reformed,
but it’s not as if hip hop is the only place where young
black men and women are discussing the very reasons why
hip hop remains so problematic to some of us. For
example, Princeton University scholar Daphne Brooks
asserts that few critics have paid attention to the
significance of narratives by black female R&B artists.
She argues that "Black Women’s popular desire is thus
depoliticized and disregarded for its reflections on
domestic and socioeconomic politics and sexual
fulfillment." But she adds that what "critics have
failed to fully interrogate are the ways in which this
subgenre also operates as an extension of hip hop
culture itself." A good example of this is an artist
like Syleena Johnson, who has circulated within hip hop
via remixes with the Flip-Mode Squad and most recently
singing the hook on Kanye West’s "All Falls Down" (no,
that’s not Lauryn Hill you’re hearing). On her disc
Chapter One: Love, Pain and Forgiveness (2001), Johnson,
recorded the track "Hit on Me," which explicitly
addressed the issue of domestic abuse.

If we think about contemporary black popular culture
more broadly than what urban radio and BET tells us,
then we are likely to find the work of artists like
Ursula Rucker and Sarah Jones. Rucker first came to
prominence, performing spoken word poetry on The Roots’
recordings Do You Want More?!!!??! (1995), Illadelph
Halflife (1996) and Things Fall Apart (1999). In 2001
she released her own disc Supa Sista, which included the
track "What???", which challenged mainstream rappers to
a battle. But Rucker sets up the rules for the battle
stating "no krissy, no thongs, no baby-boos or baby-
daddies/no tricks no whips no weight pushing/and
absolutely no platinum or ice/no guns no lies about your
ghetto rep…" essentially challenging her male colleagues
to rely simply on their wit and creativity, instead of
the standard tropes of ghetto authenticity. In a more
celebrated example, performance artist Sarah Jones
stepped to the mic to hold mainstream hip hop
accountable with her track "Your Revolution" (on DJ
Vadim’s USSR: Life from the Other Side). "Your
Revolution" is a riff off of Gil Scot-Heron’s "The
Revolution Will Not Be Televised," and on the track
Jones takes shots at the sexist lyrics of artists like
Biggie ("Big Poppa"), LL ("Doin’ It"), and Shaggy
("Boombastic"). But in an ironic twist, that perfectly
captures the struggles of those who try to hold hip hop
accountable, Jones’ lyrics were cited as "vulgar" by the
FCC and a complaint was filed after the song was played
on Portland, Oregon’s WBOO in 1999.

For all those, who like me, are interested in holding
hip hop up to serious scrutiny, maybe we should also get
serious about challenging the pervasiveness of sexism,
misogyny and homophobia in the larger society. Perhaps
only then will the images that circulate within hip hop
be exposed for the absurdities that they are.

First published: May 26, 2004
About the Author

Mark Anthony Neal is the author of three books including
the recent Songs in the Key of Black Life: A Rhythm and
Blues Nation (Routledge, 2003) and co-editor (with
Murray Forman) of the forthcoming That’s the Joint!: The
Hip-Hop Studies Reader (June 2004). Neal’s next book
NewBlackman will be published in the Spring of 2005. He
teaches in the Department of American Studies and the
Center for African and African-American Studies (CAAAS)
at the University of Texas at Austin.