Rap music as a window onto race, class, and gender

Rap Music: A Wide Range of Ideas and Voices

Rap music is a genre that is full of perspectives on issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality, presented moreover in a variety of ways -- whether through the use of irony, sensationalistic imagery, humor, savagery, or rhythmic/melodic samplings that raise the music to a higher level of listening pleasure. The purpose of this paper is to explore how rap music/hip hop can serve as a window onto contemporary perspectives in race, class, gender and sexuality in today\'s world where all of these issues can emerge as simultaneously controversial yet very important.

While rap and hip hop originated primarily in black communities as an expression of black, low-income urban angst and frustration against a white elitist system -- a musical extenuation of the Black Power movement led by men like MLK, Jr., Malcolm X and the Black Panthers -- rap and hip hop are not actually racially driven -- as Eminem\'s rise to fame has shown. As Dr. Dre -- a famous gangster rapper turned producer remarked about the white Eminem: \"I don\'t care if he\'s purple, as long as he can rap\" (Hahn). The meaning here of course is that while the genre comes from the black streets and the experience of black struggle, it has been elevated through the musical art form above the issue of race to be embraced by a multi-cultural audience and multi-cultural performers. The Beastie Boys are another Caucasian example of artists who have long won the respect of the rap/hip hop world by taking the musical genre and using it as microphone for urban/suburban white angst and humor -- youthful potshots at authority, artfully constructed with rhymes and rhythm that have won them fans from all over the musical audience spectrum.

This is not to say that race is no longer an issue in rap. It is -- and artists like Tupac Shakur, according to Marco Rubio, are not just musicians but also \"reporters\": Rubio asserts that in the 1990s on the West Coast of the U.S., when racial tension was high, gangster rappers like Shakur \"were reporting on\" the \"gang wars, racial tension\" and violence erupting in their regions -- bringing light, focus, a generation of awareness to the issue of race through their music (Hughes). Today, race issues continue, with the resurrection of N.W.A. (Niggas With Attitude) in a film biopic depicting their rise to film in this past year. The film showed how they battled with racism, police oppression and poverty, drugs and violence in the streets of Compton. Their hit song \"Straight Outta Compton\" reported, to use the words of Rubio, what it was like to be young, black on alive in Compton. The lyrics struck home with audiences who both read about police oppression, had opinions on drugs, and were interested in the issues of street life and the ghetto. It was dramatic, full of vigor and very aggressive.

At its core, this is really the essence of rap: it is about energy and taking that energy and channeling it in a rhythmic and musical way that often uses fast-paced, rhyming lyrics and sampling to express ideas about youth, youth culture, black culture, white culture, any culture, etc., in a way that is hypnotic and attractive to audiences. It is like musical poetry set to beats.

When it comes to gender, however, rap may have some serious issues -- particularly, that it is sexist and homophobic. Eminem has been accused of being both. And in many rap videos, artists are seen throwing money at scantily-clad women twerking around the set. Women are called bitches, hos and worse in many rap songs -- yet the artists themselves feel that this is an authentic expression of life on the streets and that the reflection of women in these videos represents an ideal, and whether it is shallow, superficial or misogynist is beside the point (Neal). While researchers like Wright and Craske find a correlation between risky sexual behavior and the participant race/ethnicity groups who listen to sexually explicit lyrics in sexually aggressive rap music, the correlation does not mean causation.

Divergent viewpoints however indicate that the sexuality and gender issue swings both ways, because there are female rappers and hip hop artists who also use sexuality and gender to express themes of dominance and aggression. The artist CL, for instance, a K-Pop star, mirrors that angsty expressions of Western female hip hop artists like Missy E., Nicki Minaj and others -- using sexuality as an aggressive way to take command over men -- and the way that men flaunt women and money in their videos is inverted in the videos of these female rappers: they flaunt themselves and use lyrics that indicate that they are beholden to no man. This is interpreted as a post-feminist evolution that embraces female sexuality in a show of force, and uses it over the opposite sex as part of a power struggle for equality (Unger 25). Thus, as far as the issues of sex and gender are concerned, there are two ways to look at it: one can say that rap music is inherently sexist, misogynistic and homophobic -- or one can accept that sex and aggression towards other genders is part of the urban, street life and that the ethic that is worked out in this genre is one of a battle for equality through displays of dominance, using whatever powers the performer has at hand: for men, it is money; for women, it is sex.

The issue of class is another interesting one when it comes to rap music. Having had its origins in a black class and race struggle against white elitist culture or WASP culture (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) culture, rap music has grown and evolved to now include the white, middle class as participants in the genre. In other words, it has moved from a political/racial art form for oppressed blacks to a more encompassing art form that now includes all manner of oppressed persons, who seek liberation through music -- and this includes the middle class, now (Skinner). This is especially interesting because the middle class is oppressed for different reasons that the black urban youths who really set rap music and hip hop music on its course in the 80s. In fact, Skinner asserts that the urban street myth legend of many young prominent rappers like Tupac has been exaggerated: while Tupac was born to \"a Black Panther mother one month out of jail who later became a crack addict,\" his own life was not as street-heavy and filled with the \"thug-life\" as he presented it (Skinner). This portrayal of oneself as a particular persona is part of the charm of the genre, however; it allows the artist to re-create himself or herself under the guise of a persona or identity that portrays the feelings of a particular climate, time, place and culture. For many blacks in the 80s and 90s, this was the street persona that they popularized. For teens in the 2000s and today, the culture has seeped into the suburbs -- thanks in no small part to the Beastie Boys and Eminem -- where drugs, violence and broken families have risen dramatically -- resembling in this sense the street life of urban areas, where black rappers originated.

In this sense, the class issue in rap is really indicative of a larger social class issue and rappers are simply reporting on what is happening -- confirming Rubio\'s take on the issue. The lower class in ghettos, oppressed by elitist systems, reached out through rap to make their voices heard -- and while it initially had a race-basis, the voice reached people beyond the black audience and touched something similar in white, middle-class culture. The Beastie Boys felt a similar feeling and used hip hop music to express themselves. Eminem emerged from a lower-middle class background to rise up through the art world and he dealt with issues of race, often feeling marginalized and confronted because he was white and an outsider to the class/race struggle that many black street rappers felt was their domain -- yet he showed through his ability, charisma and dedication that he too was part of that domain. In effect, he won his street cred by hanging in there and putting in the work.