Women in Hip Hop

I didn't listen to a lot of hip hop as a kid. It just wasn't immediately available in my house. I was a little too young to realize that my mother's objections to it stemmed from something a bit more serious than just matters of taste. Her disdain for the artists became evident over the years. I'm pretty sure if she knew her beloved Willie Nelson (of all people) collaborated with Snoop Dogg (and really, it's not all that surprising a pairing), she might just think the apocalypse is coming. It sounds extreme, but it made for a good portion of my life that was lamentably hip hop-free. Still, eventually I managed to find it anyway, and Raising Hell (for example...) became one of my favorite albums of all time.

Anyway, the reason I started this post by talking about my mother and her problematic commentary on hip hop and rap is that one of the major criticisms she always leveled at hip-hop was its treatment of women. And I've grown skeptical of that critique over the years, doubly so after reading the sections on misogyny in the genre in Tricia Rose's Hip Hop Wars. Rose rather deftly connected the dots between white condemnation of hip hop through its internal misogyny problems, pseudo-feminist activism, and an American culture at large that seems to have a big problem respecting women to begin with. The problem of women in hip hop is there, and it is complicated. But just saying that hip hop is disrespectful towards women and leaving it at that is not an acceptable answer, mostly because misogyny in popular music across the board is a problem. There's a lot of neo-con country music out there right now that is especially bad for women, but the issues with it are largely dismissed as just being part of Southern culture (some weird output of Southern chivalry). This is the music people are talking about when they say they like everything "except country." "Tractor country" as a friend of mine labeled it once. But I'm getting side-tracked.

So what IS the problem with women in hip hop, anyway? There are two ways of looking at this problem, and they're both equally important. The first is looking at hip hop's treatment of its female audience, and the second is looking at hip hop's treatment of its female artists. This video is a few years old, but I think it is still fairly relevant, and raises issues of corporate accountability within the marketing of hip as part of the problem with the way women get treated. Also, this clip, where we see Il Millione talking about all this is from a discussion with Tricia Rose herself.
It's a truncated answer to a complicated question, but Millione's answer actually subtly introduces the multifaceted cultural problem with misogyny in general. In the time that she addressed the question she touched upon an number of things: corporatism in hip hop that benefits from the mistreatment of women, the long history and cultural recognition of the exploitation of black women (these are images and narratives that have become so common in American consciousness that no one seems to really notice when it happens anymore), and the issues of black male identity, faced with all kinds of other pressures, being forced into making the exploitation of black women a requirement for success. This woman kind of says it all without saying it, but a few verbal markers in her answer indicate a very complex situation for women in hip hop.

So what about female hip hop artists? Salon recently wrote an article called "Where Are the Women in Today's Hip Hop?" It talks about artists like Salt-N-Pepa and Queen Latifah who addressed both issues facing women hoping to break into hip hop, and issues facing black women and communities in general. Interestingly enough, the author also attributes the problem of female hip hop artists to rampant corporatism. These paragraphs say it pretty well I think:
Women have become almost completely invisible in popular hip-hop today, a consequence of the current state of hip-hop culture. Over the years, hip-hop has been bought, sold and mass-produced by people with little authentic connection to the culture’s birth and development. Because of its global appeal, hip-hop became one of America’s most profitable exports. This changed the way hip-hop manifested itself artistically, as money became more of a motivation for many performers than the counterculture rebellion and free expression of the past. No longer are graffiti and break-dancing the popular art forms they once were, and DJs who once spun vinyl and scratched records have become producers who download electronic samples and piece them together on their computers. MCs rarely freestyle or battle anymore, and even their penned lyrics tend to be simplistic. The more commercial hip-hop becomes, the more image plays a role in whether an artist is deemed marketable. In the entertainment industry, women especially are expected to maintain certain images, and hip-hop music is no different. There was a time when lyrical skills mattered more than physical appearance, but that has changed drastically over the years, especially for women. Men continue to dominate the recording industry, as executives and producers, so women are subject to their decisions, and they go with who and what is “hot” at the moment. In a time when record sales are falling across the board, executives are focusing on people they can bet on being financially successful and, unfortunately, there is little faith in the profitability of female solo artists.

I guess now the question is: how might the music industry encourage the presence of women, and how might we make the role of women and hip hop more positive? Without a doubt, writers and speakers are making great strides in deconstructing these problems, but how do we translate their conclusions beyond the confines of academia? It's not that people aren't acknowledging that the problem is there--they are, but somehow it's not quite reaching the industry in the way that it could.