This is more of a rant that got turned into an article idea but, the biggest factor that is turning me away from this new era of Rap & Hip-Hop is misogyny.
This is coming from a young Black woman who has lived near Atlanta her whole life. I grew up listening to Rap & Hip-Hop all the time and even then, I wasn’t old enough to understand things. Now that I’m an adult, it’s harder to turn the other cheek to a lot of things.
What baffles me the most is how men can get away with a lot whereas women in that genre are put through the wringer for things that sometimes don’t even compare.
Something that I peeped a while ago was how people perceived performances. Most expect a female rapper to be this all-time perfect performer and will ridicule them for every little thing. Their set must be visually striking, the costume and look need to be perfect, and they need to be able to dance or move so the audience doesn’t get bored. People expect all this from women whereas men can do the bare minimum of standing on stage with a bunch of people and not even sing the lyrics to their songs for most of the set. When they are called out on it, people usually come to their defense that men don’t need to do all of that *cue the eye roll*.
Another thing that gets under my skin is the blanket disrespect that many of them throw toward black women. There are several mainstream rappers who have evidence out against them that prove they are colorists toward dark skin women. Women can come out and tell their experience of not being allowed in the area by a rapper because they only want light-skinned women. Some of them have been bold enough to go far as to prove their colorists within their own songs. I never want to engage with artists that can be okay with spitting that type of mistreatment to dark skin women.
I would say that there are few new-era of rappers that are not misogynistic, and I think that the problem is that there are very few. It’s gotten to the point where once I hear that you as a rapper have done or said something terribly wrong to a woman or a group of people (because several are homophobic as well) with no remorse for your actions, I am completely okay with not listening to your music or pertaining to anything that must deal with you. It’s gotten to the point where most of the rap that I listen to today is by female rappers.
Something else that bothers me in the realm of Rap is the media side of it. Hip-hop/Rap centered “journalism” is probably at its lowest right now when it comes to the constant disrespect, lies, gaslighting, and vulgarity used against women. Two examples that automatically come to mind when I think of this are The Breakfast Club and DJ Akademiks (can’t stand that man). Just recently DJ Akademiks had the audacity to come at Lil Wayne’s 23-year-old daughter over who she chooses to date and used tried to retract the vulgar language he referred to her as. The wrong type of people is given the platform in the community to spew negativity against women and back the wrongdoings of men.
The boys will be boys and many other excuses that have been allowed for men in Hip-Hop have gone on for too long. We can only wish for there to be some sort of awakening that in the future we can work towards a better environment when it comes to gender equality in Hip-Hop.