Sexuall Degredation Of Gender Within Rap Music

Whilst Rap music has been around for some time now, it has become a vital part of our popular culture. The music charts are filled with rap songs every week, making it almost inevitable to not listen to rap whilst using the major music outlets such as radio stations or streaming services. Within the age of #meetoo and other anti sexual harassment movements, their placement within the charts could almost be unthinkable regarding the language that is often expressed in rap music. This paper tries to further explore this drift towards sexuall degredation of gender within a community that had been educated to be a cultural force called Hip Hop that was built upon their creativity, unitedness and social protest.

To understand where this drift towards obscene language against their own members and its acceptance of it comes from, one must first look at the origin of rap within the hip hop culture and afro American society. According to Dixon and Linz (1997) the oral traditions of the african continent can be seen as the foundation of rap, as it had been passed on to the slaves that were taken from Africa, and passed on to their future generations. The oral game of playing the dozens, in which many rappers participate, is a game that evolves around dueling another person verbally with exaggerations, ‘put-downs’ or so called disses, usually before a audience, only for the mere gain of more respect within their peer-group. This practice is ofcourse not only exclusive to the afro American rap music or culture, but can be witnessed in all youth culture. Besides this game another important part within the culture of rap is signifying, a method of encoding various messages behind different signs, that make them not a direct insult but rather a ‘if the shoe fits, wear it’ argument, making it simple to offend someone without any sort of consequence, as someone who does not fit the description, should not be worried. These elements, together with Toasting, a ryhmfull poet portraying the battle of a protagonist from the street, and obvious masochism are what make up rap music and explain the drift towards ‘obscene’ language, but not the sexual degradation of their own community.

To understand the drift from a conscious community towards an oversexualiazed commercial consumer industry, we have to look at the origins of the culture related to the concept of postmodernism as Hip Hop is a “resistance against the economic and philosophical bulwarks of slavery and colonialism. ” According to Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2015), postmodernism is a concept that revolves around the idea that we have arrived in a new phase in society, after modernism, where there are vital differences between the two when it comes to the realms of economy, science, history and the production of culture. The suggestion made in Postmodernism is, that the world we live in has changed, making the foundation of thought and practice modernism made us believe was true, insecure. Hip hop is just that, it is a reaction to the white oppression in a system that fueled inequality, educating their people about of who they are and what is worth striving for, instead of accepting the existing ruling truth. For example the mere principle of signifying can be applied to music production, using samples (small parts of music recorded from old vinyl records), arranging them in such a way that they give you a new track, are at the core of postmodernist thinking in overcoming and challenging the culture of mass consumption by making use of that culture.

The problem for the community begins when the cultural practice, hip hop, shifted towards becoming a commodity which was finalized by the rise of the so called gangsta rap genre in the early 1990’s. Her content analysis of several rap music videos from various male artists illustrates the rise of heavy reliance on images of black criminality and hypersexuality within this genre, starting a wave of commercialization that is still going on today. From conscious rap about culture and struggle within society, the genre shifted towards a sellable lifestyle that is now a product. The problem of this so called Strip-club culture, where women are seen as objects and sex as an transaction, is however not only persistent within the male group of artist but also can be found in songs recorded by female artists which is shown in the research of Matthew Oware (2009) on 44 songs taken from the Billboard charts between 1992 and 2000. Many of these studied songs entail some form of female agency, however these same artists can be found producing objectified and exploiting texts about other female members within the hiphop community, using derogatory lyrics when referring to others, slowly ‘destroying’ the foundation of black feminism built by their predecessor’s during the 80’s.

The concept of semiology, introduced by Ferdinand Saussure & Charles Sanders Peirce, concerned about the different signs, signifiers and signified that make meaning within a message, lends itself perfectly for the study of these images and texts, as rap is nowadays a multimedia culture present in almost all media formats we can think of. It provides us with the much needed means of understanding the correct meaning entailed as well as the meaning that is left out intentionally. The research represented looked into the emergence of rap within an african oral tradition, the struggle for equality and the verbal choices by rap artists, all bringing their own explanation forward to why a former culture of knowledge and respect ended in objectifying their own people, and all call for more in depth research into the deeper meaning of such messages for the receiver as well as the intentions of their creators.