Popular Culture Review Vol. 11, No. 1, February 2000 | Page 86

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Popular Culture Review
...the feature newscast is splashed to tell the news like Katy Chung
How the bullet collapsed his lung
His father watched the horror as he swallowed his tongue
Another youth dead, before the age of 21
Left his son to grow, in the ghettos of the slums...
...the lone gunner, who took revenge for his brother
Who got slain last summer by a cocaine runner
A new year is dawnin’, new crews is formin’
Rival gangs warrin’ blood steadily pourin’...
(“Hellz Wind Staff’, 1997)

An additional way in which hip-hop identifies itself with a macho form of
masculinity is through a display of misogynist values. Incidents such as the beating
o f television host Dee Barnes by Dr Dre of NWA, and the arrest of Public Enemy’s
Flavor Flav for assaulting his girlfriend and failing to pay child support, provide
further confirmation of the affiliation of hip-hop with machismo (Swedenburg,
1992, 63). The differentiation of genders is also evident musically in the division
o f labour in tracks. In Wu Tang Forever the female voice is only ever present as
song (in contrast with the rap of the males), and as an individual providing soulderived backing vocals rather than as a featured soloist or as part of the group
dialogues of the male crew members. This appears to be an instance of a more
general practice within dance music in which women are equated with sexuality,
the body, emotion and nature, while men are assigned to technology and language
(rap) (Bradby, 1993).4
The importance of machismo to black, male youth may be understood as a
response to the threat to masculinity imposed by social and economic deprivation:
the male experience (particularly that of the black, working class male) is one of
subordination despite the requirem ent o f m asculinity to be powerful and
independent. Assertion of a macho identity is therefore a way of sustaining dominant
notions of masculinity. John Fiske draws a similar conclusion in his study of
masculine television shows such as the TheA-Team (1983-7):
...our society denies most males adequate means of exercising the power
upon which their masculinity apparently depends. Masculinity is thus
socially and psychological insecure; and its insecurity produces the
need for its constant reachievement (Fiske, 1987, 202).
Fiske also uses this notion of the re-achievement of masculinity in his explanation
o f the role of video games (Fiske, 1989, 77-94). Fiske suggests that video arcades
offer power, in this case to white subordinate males, by inverting the human-machine