Hip-Hop and Me: A Stormy Love Affair

Hip-Hop and Me: A Stormy Love Affair
By. E.N. Jackson
Copyright 2009 E.N. Jackson
Frost Illustrated Inc., Vol. 41, Issue 27

When I first met Hip-Hop, it was love at first sight. Hip-Hop was the musical embodiment of the strong Black male presence my life had always lacked. The head-spinning rhymes of early MCs like Curtis Blow, Afrika Bambaataa, and Melle Mel, and later KRS-One, Erik B. and Rahim, and Public Enemy, made a poor, Black girl growing up in the projects feel safe and secure, protected and proud, powerful and strong. While many of my friends found these artists to be too “preachy” and self-important for their tastes, I felt they were freedom fighters attempting to liberate the hearts, souls, and minds, of my generation of Black youth and anyone else brave enough to hear their message. Regardless of what my friends thought, I loved these artists with a passion and remained steadfast in my devotion to them.

However, as time wore on, things began to change. The specter of capitalistic greed began to rear its ugly head and Hip-Hop started to see that there was money to be made on the ferocious back of a newer and even angrier form of rap rising out of the West Coast, “Gansta rap.” Suddenly rap music with a message that also let you get your jam on began to lose its power in favor of rap that reflected the harsh realities of life in the hoods of Compton and Watts. At that moment, the mirror that Hip-Hop had always held up to me began to morph. What I started to see reflected there was no longer the image of myself as the strong, proud, beautiful, intelligent young Black woman I knew myself to be, but something ugly and worthless, completely lacking in dignity and self-respect and having no value other than being the object of and target for a man’s lust, anger, and feelings of inadequacy. This was an image of myself that I simply could not and would not accept, no matter how “cool” the music that disguised it was and no matter how legitimate and timely the Gansta rap ideology was. Although the hyper-masculinity we see in rap today was always present to some extent, the misogyny and feminine degradation we see was not. So when I began to hear myself and other women referred to in this music as b******* and h**, it felt like Hip-Hop had raised its big Black fist to me and punched me right in my face. I thought rappers had lost their minds; something somewhere had gone seriously wrong to make them turn on me in this way.

At first I reacted in the same way that any abused woman reacts after the first punch: with shock and stunned surprise. Then I went into denial, saying things like, “Well, they’re not talking about me so it doesn’t really matter.” I began to engage in victim-blaming, declaring that the women these rappers (they do not deserve to be called MCs) were rapping about must be acting like b****** and h** and therefore must deserve to be called out as such. But I could not keep up this pretense and self-betrayal for long. I soon saw my defense of rap for what it was: a ridiculous cop out and excuse for disgustingly bad male supremacist behavior. The undeniable truth of the matter was that whether or not a rapper was hurling those ugly invectives at me personally, the fact remained that he was aiming them at somebody who was a woman, a member of a group I belonged to; a group whose entire character was being impugned because of a powerless, insecure, man-child’s need to feel powerful and secure in his manhood. When I took the blinders off and saw this truth, I became outraged; outraged on behalf of women and outraged on behalf of my love of Hip-Hop.

When women slowly but surely began to break through the glass ceiling of the rap game, female MCs like Queen Latifah, MC Lyte, and Sister Souljah came along and yelled, “Hold up! Wait a minute!” These women spoke with the fierce voice of a warrior Goddess, and I thought that my rightful place as the woman in Hip-Hop’s life had been restored. I fell in-love with Hip-Hop all over again and gave it the proverbial “One Mo’ Chance.” But it was not long before the voices of my warrior Goddesses, strong, sexy, and powerful as they were, started to be drowned out and nearly silenced by the porn kitty purrings of female rappers like Lil’ Kim and Foxy Brown, who, instead of taking the message of the Black warrior Goddess to a whole new level, played right into the basest, most testosterone driven instincts of rap.

Though they are no longer major players in the world of rap, the inescapable irony of these women’s participation in the dark side of Hip-Hop, the side ruled by images of violence, self-preservation, and sexism, left its legacy on rap music by providing men with a justification for their misogyny. When women are willing to turn sadistic male fantasies into raps, contort themselves to fit some impossible male standard of beauty, and portray themselves as low class call girls in rap videos, they make it all too easy for men to say, “See? That’s what we want and that’s what they want too!” We as women let men off the hook when we continue to allow them to tell us that our value and worth is based on their fantasized versions of what they think a woman should be rather than the reality of a what a woman is. We only help to perpetuate the myth of male dominance and feminine submissiveness when we allow men to tell us that what is beautiful and sexy about us comes from the outside in, rather than the inside out; that we are putty to be molded and shaped into a man’s concept of femininity rather than our own conception of femininity.

And so once again I began to turn away from Hip-Hop and more toward another passionate love of mine – rock and alternative music – as an outlet for my anger, pain, and frustration and my need for a strong male presence. This was not always an easy relationship either, because in many ways the “Big Hair Bands” of the 80s and later the garage bands of the 90’s and early 2000s were just as hyper-masculine and almost as misogynistic as the rappers I had left, so at times it was like jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire. But the music and the message of bands like Living Colour, Rage Against The Machine, Soundgarden, and Pearl Jam spoke to me in the way that Hip-Hop once had. Plus I did not have to endure the degradation of being called a b**** or a h* by the very men I looked to for mutual understanding and respect.

Eventually I found my way back to Hip-Hop thanks to MCs like The Roots, Common, and Mos Def and female MCs like Lauren Hill and MIA. However, like a woman who has been jilted by a man she loves but cannot seem to let go of, I have become wary and suspicious of Hip-Hop, yet reluctant to give up on it completely. I remain guarded and selective about the kind of Hip-Hop I allow into my life. One source of solace throughout the years has been the knowledge that I am not alone in my pain over the ways in which rap music has hurt and betrayed me. I know that I am not the only woman who has “issues” in her relationship with Hip-Hop. In fact, any self-respecting woman of color with an ounce of raised consciousness feels at the very least conflicted in her love for rap music. I take further comfort in the fact that men of consciousness like Michael Eric Dyson, Cornell West, and Toure, also feel, and even struggle with, this pain. They and others have spoken with brutal honesty about their support of Hip-Hop as a powerful force of resistance to racism and oppression but their anger and disgust with the prevalence of sexism and misogyny within rap music.

My relationship with Hip-Hop remains rocky and tumultuous at best. But I have always believed that the primary role of any art form is to function as social and political critique, and I believe that rap still has the ability to both entertain and at the same time fulfill that role. It still has the ability to challenge the constructs and mindsets of those within and outside of the Black cultural experience. In fact, there are rap and Hip-Hop artists out there today proving that “intellectual” rap or “message” rap may be down but is definitely not out. In fact, this genre of Hip-Hop has been staging a major comeback. And so, as with any relationship worth holding on to, I will continue to give Hip-Hop “One Mo’ Chance.”