A Village Voice blog recently published “How Not to Write About Female Musicians: A Handy Guide“. Using some recent, unfortunate examples of misogynistic so-called critical writing about female musicians, they listed four questions any writer should ask themselves prior to submitting a piece on female musicians. They were as follows:
- Go through your piece and flip the gender of your descriptive phrases’ subjects. Are there any that sound ludicrous as a result?
- Are you essentially making shit up about the artist in order to sexualise her?
- Are you comparing the artist you’re writing about to other female artists only? If so, why?
- Are you writing about a moment where your subject flirts with you and you respond in kind?
Looking for an article discussing female emcees to try these questions out on, I came across a Complex profile on Iggy Azalea, an up-and-coming underground (what is underground in the Youtube era? Another question for another time.) female emcee. It failed fairly quickly.
A number of things stuck out about Iggy right away. For one, she’s gorgeous—the girl’s got the looks of a supermodel. Two, she spits raunchy raps like a young Foxy, but her flow is like a cross between Yelawolf going doubletime and one of Nicki Minaj’s British alter-egos. Oh, and she’s also a white girl—just like Complex covergirl Kreayshawn!
I wonder if the question set could be amended to add “Are you mentioning the artist’s looks before mentioning anything about her actual talent?”, because I feel like that should be in there. This test and the as proposed amendment bring to light a larger problem that an Iggy Azalea poses: The female artists who typically begin to make it to the top of the heap of pop culture offerings will have already gone through multiple sexist ringers and will be there, in part, because of their ability to be marketed as a sexual object. What we as the consumer are then presented with is an artist that is a package: their ability and their image. This, of course, is a simplified equation for any successful popular musician, but it weighs even more heavily on female artists. So when the image is a driving force behind creating buzz for this artist, how does one discuss the artistic merits without mentioning the image?
For example, if I were to ask whether anybody would have heard her “Two Times freestyle” if it were not accompanied by a video of her sitting, legs spread in a skirt, exposing her underwear as stop motion, child-like drawings jump back and forth down her legs and crotch, would that fail the Village Voice test? Absolutely. Rather than stating that the beat she raps over is Gucci Mane’s “Gucci 2 Times”, that she has more range in her delivery than Gucci Mane and her raps seem more lucid but her subject matter only differs in that she talks about her vagina at a point in the song, I am discussing her image. But when the line between the artist’s image and work are blurred, where the sexual subject matter is an extension of the image and the two share a symbiotic relationship, it makes failing that test all too easy.
Rather than talking about the beat or mentioning her range of delivery, I am discussing her image.
All genres of music come with varying degrees of importance placed on the accompanying image, and of course, hip hop has its own. Men wear too much clothing, women wear too little, and I’m sure an equation could be devised in which popularity and buzz is equal to artistic merit multiplied by (body type +/- wardrobe) among the female artists, but I’m probably just not good at math. The problem with discussing the female artist as a sexual image is that this is a sexism which has a large market and as a result forced upon us by the entertainment industry and our society. This presents us with the purgatory of discussing the sexism in popular music through the products of said sexism. So why discuss the end-product? That it’s popular, for one. In hip hop, it typically portrays sexuality as empowerment which is of course problematic when the sexuality it presents typically is presented as the female narrative in the male depictions of sexuality. The cliche “sex sells” is even more-so cliche in hip hop.
Of course, we can and should spend more time focusing on female artists who present a more positive image like Eternia or Jean Grae, but while they are not outwardly presenting a sexualised image, one cannot deny that neither are hard on the eyes, and one wonders whether we would have them as counter-balances to the overtly-sexualised popular artists if it were not for in part for their looks. This problem, of course, is not unique to hip hop, but hip hop’s boys club culture amplifies it. So discussing female emcees typically results in presenting the artists who present a more positive image tends to fall into the trap of presenting them as the “anti-(insert popular female sex symbol emcee here)” which in turn gives rise to another form of subtle sexism of comparing images as if they are equal to artistic merit, not to mentioning failing the third question, comparing female emcees to female emcees because they’re female emcees.
In a world where Jay-Z denouncing his usage of the word “bitch” in songs is a topic of conversation, I realise that I am not breaking new ground in the discussion of sexism in hip hop and popular culture. Hip hop seems to be forever behind the times in progressive attitudes, and while there are countless examples of positive viewpoints being expressed, they are not coming from representatives of the so-called special interest group. Instead we have straight men having to be the self-appointed spokespersons for anti-homophobic, anti-misogynistic viewpoints and the drive for equality. The irony is that in the popular realm of music, hip hop specifically, the spokesperson whose pronouncements make the news are the ones who were previously among the worst offenders. That those who never expressed bigoted views in the first place are typically dwarfed in popularity by those who do is another problem in hip hop, which is now the problem of popular culture as hip hop’s reach and influence grows exponentially. In that all of these factors weigh on the relatively small piece of the hip hop market share comprised of female artists, we are left with a unique set of challenges when writing critically about female emcees, and we should see this as troubling.
This post was written by Canadian rap-artist Kwes, who every week shares his spleen with Lesson Six. Why not learn more about Rifle Eyes & Kwes while you’re at it?
