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Popular Culture Review
about the negative influence of Gangsta Rap suggests this point: they declared that
“[w]e condemn the words, lyrics and images that degrade, disrespect and denigrate
African-American women with obscenities and vulgarities of the vilest nature” in
mentioning the feminist achievement of the co-founder of the organization, Ida B.
Wells (“NAACP”). Indeed, as Michael Dyson argues, the misogynistic and
homophobic rhetoric used by some Gangsta Rappers can be equated with the
patriarchal premise of the Republican policy (184): the conservative media and
politicians have deliberately utilized controversial descriptions of existing violence
in rap’s discourse to both exclude and discipline the African-American community.
According to the July 10, 1995 issue of Fortune, a series of criticisms of
rap music, as exemplified by Bob Dole’s, caused the decline of the genre’s sales in
1994. To demonstrate “misogynist rap” musicians’ own response to the decline of
their market share, the author of the article, Faye Rice, continues: “Hard-core rappers
are now rhyming kinder and gentler. Bad boy Tupac Shakur’s tender ‘Dear Mama’
lyrics might even give Republicans pause: ‘Mama, I finally understand for a woman
it ain’t easy trying to raise a man/ You always was committed/ A poor single mother
on welfare’.” This article clearly exemplifies the misrepresentation of the problem
of power that rap’s politics of expression signifies. Rice’s citation of this particular
fragment uncannily highlights the figure of the black man blaming himself for
causing his mother’s impoverishment. Moreover, when she names this tone a
“Republican pause,” the writer presents her own Republican misinterpretation of
the song: Tupac Shakur would be apologizing to the “moral majority” for his
delinquency in wasting the federal budget as well as disgracing the hegemonic
“family value.” The concept of the “welfare mother,” doubly metaphorized as the
“welfare queen” by Ronald Reagan, designates black single women who have
children; the discourse gains its cultural efficacy from the hyper-sexualization of
those women, while signifying the image of spoiled black men, without introducing
any policy for dismantling the racial factor of their unemployment.
In this way, the hegemonic interpretation of rap music has normalized the
socio-political argument on this cultural art form that begins with displacing the
source of exploitation from the racist social structure to the black man. It is also
true that several female rappers have critiqued male rappers’ frequent use of
misogynistic words such as “bitches” and “hoes” to designate women: for instance.
Queen Latifah — called the “Angela Davis” of hip-hop due to the feminist point of
view in her works — sings in her “U.N.l.T.Y.” that “[ijnstinct leads me to anotha
flow/ Eveiytime 1hear a brother call a girl a bitch or ho.” Yet as Latifah’s paradoxical
feminist thesis, “unity,” signifies, rap’s erotics is not subsumed into the simplistic
formula of gender conflict. Thus, the question becomes: who are more seriously
victimized, black men or women?
The case of gender relationship in the dominant representation of hip-