MISOGYNY IS NOT UNIQUE TO RAP MUSIC An Essay by Lexi Norvet What I wish to discuss today is not whether or not sexism exists and is rampant in contemporary hip-hop and rap lyrics. This is inarguable. Women are most commonly discussed in terms of their (hetero)sexuality and relationships with the men rapping about them. A woman is as (if not more) likely to be referred to as a “bitch” or “hoe” before, you know, as a person. I am not interested in arguing about that. What I am interested in discussing (as a woman who listens to music, including rap) is how our hyper-focus on the misogyny in rap music - and hiphop culture more generally - both reveals how racist we all are and simultaneously blinds us to the misogyny spouted by artists in other genres, and (not so) incidentally of other races. How is paying particular attention to misogyny in rap music racist? Well, my handy-dandy straw man, I’ll tell you. Like most genres of music, rap and hip-hop were created and developed by black people and black culture in the United States. Unlike rock and roll, R&B, jazz, and punk, though, white people have yet to infiltrate and completely dominate rap music (Macklemore, Eminem, and Itchy Australia notwithstanding). Because rap music remains a dominantly black medium, it is up to the white supremacist hegemony to do what it can to devalue it as an art form. That is what pointing out sexism in the lyrics of Kanye or 50 Cent or Waka Flocka is about – devaluing black art forms and asserting white supremacy. It has absolutely nothing to do with promoting the rights of women or denouncing violence against women. By always focusing on rappers’ liberal usage of perjorative terms for women, white culture is able to reassert its superiority and also dismiss everything else rappers are saying. We do not have to take it seriously when they discuss the evils of the prison-industrial complex or the inescapablility and racialization of poverty, all because they used the b-word. This pattern falls right in line with how America and white Americans have framed black Americans since our country’s founding. While black women have been summarily ignored and utterly dehumanized by dominant white society, black men have al14
Content Warning: Sexual Violence & Misogyny ways always always been villains and sexual fiends. Black men – as a tool of white supremacy – have been framed in the popular consciousness as hypersexual beings who cannot help but degrade women. This worry, of course, did not usually extend to black women but was concerned mostly with the relations between black men and white women. One of the many things that Jim Crow laws prohibited was interactions between the two groups. And while Jim Crow may be gone, the ways of thinking about black people that it promoted are not. So, as a fan of Kanye, when I listen to him say “Fuck you and your Hampton house / I fuck your Hampton spouse / Came on her Hampton blouse / and in her Hampton mouth” on his seminal track “New Slaves,” I read it as less about degrading this one particular wealthy white woman because she is a woman and more as a statement of rejecting, outright, the restrictions that have historically limited the actions of black men, and more importantly as a declaration of war on white supremacy and its vestiges. (Yes women’s bodies are routinely viewed as the battlegrounds upon which wars are fought and won by men but that is a conversation for another article in a not music zine.)
“Because rap music remains a dominantly black medium, it is up to the white supremacist hegemony to do what it can to devalue it as an art form”
Another clue that criticizing the misogyny in rap has fuck all to do with helping women is that our society has very little to say about the misogyny prevalent in other places in the music industry. Other male music legends like the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, and Bob Dylan get little to no accusa-
