Battle Between the Sexes has come a long way baby!

In 1973 Billie Jean King defeated former player Bobby Riggs in a tennis match deemed the battle of the sexes featured on 60 minutes as a bit of a novelty. The hip-hop video of popping between the sexes (below) speaks of the long way we've come in this battle of the sexes. Before women in hip-hop had to be one of the boys. The young women in this video use their femininity and the masculinity of hip-hop dance to their kinetic narrative and the men can play the soft side of their performance, too. Hip-hop ya don't stop.

Ludicrous Video: "Obama Thinks I'm Good, Bitch!"

farcical: broadly or extravagantly humorous; resembling farce; "the wild farcical exuberance of a clown"; "ludicrous green hair"

absurd: incongruous;inviting ridicule; "the absurd excuse that the dog ate his homework"; "that's a cockeyed idea"; "ask a nonsensical question and get a nonsensical answer"; "a contribution so small as to be laughable"; "it is ludicrous to call a cottage a mansion"; "a preposterous attempt to ...
wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn

Idiotic or unthinkable, often to the point of being funny
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ludicrous

So many things to talk about this Monday August 4th. Let's see a year ago, I had my debut at Joe's Pub and premiered "Strapped (She Come Fifty)" about Coretta Scott King, Nina Simone and Daisy Bates in honor of the 50th anniversary of the Little Rock Nine. Got a video of the song from the Cornelia Street Café performance on Jul 22nd coming soon.

Was checking out Myspace IMPACT and ran across the MTV campaign's Big Question about HIV called LOOKING GOOD OR STAYING ALIVE. The videos posted by Lupe Fiasco, Wyclef and Ne-Yo are rife with the wrong commentary. We get so caught up in the obvious, we miss what's going on that is driving the show about HIV or Herpes or any conversations about sex in public culture. Namely, it's all about OTHER people doing the right thing. Never telling their own intimate stories about their own changes in lifestyle. Cuz' we know popular artists are ROLE MODELS for sex.

To start the week off, a quick share about some really witty commentary on the Ludacris video for Obama.

ill Doctrine has the fabulous witty social commentary videos on YouTube and this one is priceless and speaks for itself. ill Doctrine is a hip-hop video blog hosted by Jay Smooth, creator of the hip hop music blog and founder of New York's longest running hip-hop radio show, WBAI's Underground Railroad.I love it when a brother tells it like it is about hip-hop utterly ludicrous misogyny with wit and humor. Illdoctine's video is true satire! Tell me what you think about the Ludacris video and this commentary.


Obama's Ludacris Issue



Check out the Ludacris video if you haven't seen it yet.

Women in Hip-Hop

Hey my post yesterday was a little lame to me because I wasn't even featured as much as I thought. Watched the video after the post. Was in a hurry. Impeccability was missing-LOL.

OK so today I ran across this nice short video on women in hip-hop with a variety of sisters speaking. I clearly am not doing my own good PR cuz what I have to say about women in hip-hop is so different. We are not taking responsibility for the context of our victimhood. As musicians and dancers, we continue to let male artists in hip-hop act like they are the music. Women's dance is driving not only the music but the beats that are being created. One sister in the video is right, you pay for white titties but you get black ass for free. What makes us think so low of ourselves that we continue to not only perpetuate it but let it thrive among young black women.

I was at the premiere, I mentioned last week, for the CNN report BLACK in AMERICA. Soledad O'Brien made a really provocative comment when someone complained about the Obama cover last week on the New Yorker. She said a few things. One was if white children were dropping out of high school at 505 rate, white mothers would be insisting on Congressional hearings. I assert we women who are mothers, sisters who get the cat calls, and more are not devoid of doing this, but we are trapped in the conversation that no one REALLY listens to us, pays for us, honors us. When we get to the source of that...change gon' come!

Hip-hop, Fathers and the reaction to having a daughter

A male friend of mine whom I had not spoken to for a while informed me that he had some good news to share. He had had a baby. She was now 7 months old. The proud papa is a traditionally minded Jamaican man. Opens doors. Thinks his future wife should never have to work if she doesn't want to and definitely not while she is pregnant. Once told me that all men want a respectable smart business savy woman by day and a slut at night. He's a young man doing quite well in real estate in Brooklyn. Despite his traditional thinking, he's baby's mama remains just a girlfriend.

Fatherhood relative to daughters is uniquely distinct from the relationship to a son. As the new daddy shared his newfound doting on this little 7-month old female being, he shared how it was affecting his listening habits relative to hip-hop. Born in Jamaica, he was raised up in the Caribbean enclave of Bed-Stuy Brooklyn. (Go Brooklyn!!) He grew up a fan of Biggie and Jay-Z. He told me he especially admired Jay-Z as both rapper and business man (see post and video refuting that Jay-Z smacked a women in Africa in 2004). What's interesting is that ever since my friend's little girl came into the picture, his interest in hip-hop's misogyny has done a 180º. He said essentially he listens differently to all the ways men represent women now. (Pictured: three-time Grammy Award-winning rapper and actor Chris Bridges aka Ludacris with his daughter).

I shared a not-so surprised acknowledgement of this phenomenon. It happened with Nas too and a host a men who love hip-hop whom I have known or written about. I wrote about Nas in a book to be released by Michael Eric Dyson in Jan 2009 devoted to the great Nasty Nas (more on that to come). Nas actually created the anthem "I Can" for his daughter because all the hip-hop out there was so misogynistic. I only wish men would realize, I told my friend, this revelation long before they had a female child. It's imperative they begin to, that men are willing to discover the impact this music has on their disrespect of not only women, but themselves esp. in the public sphere.

According to Dr. Emerson Eggerichs in his book titled, Love and Respect: The Love She Most Desires, The Respect He Desperately Needs, the needs of men often differ from that of women. Men often yearn for respect, while women generally want to feel loved. That may be but perhaps we need a bit more of the reverse.

Some men think nothing of making a living pimping women as bling

AMERICAN WOMEN & HIP-HOP (11/28/07)

Last November NBC Nightly News did a series called African American Women: Where They Stand. It included the video linked above. In it, Irv Gotti, a hip-hop producer/director argues that some women just can't help themselves on the video set and claims no responsibility in the matter. The head of The Inc (Formerly Murder Inc.) record label, Gotti says it's hard to market female emcees because they have to be good to look at, too, and he says he asks his 15 year old daughter to confirm if the women in his "scantily-clad videos" look hot. He uses her as a litmus test!! Train 'em young in the art of misogyny and women will keep the practice going -- that's hegemony at its best. Why they don't call me on these shows as an expert?!??!! I could say I don't know, but I am starting to realize it's because they don't know I am here. Press releases, baby! I haven't gotten my own word out in that realm. That's what 2008 is about - getting on the top of the roladex.

This past week, I finished a essay about misogyny relative to the music and videos of Nas for a book to be published in 2008 by Michael Eric Dyson. This essay might be my PR in this larger conversation about hip-hop, gender stratification, and power. Wanted to share some "axioms" I came up with the generate thinking outside the box. They are ratehr obvious but they are not generalizations in the manner we mostly here about misogyny.

Here's a sample:

Years ago, I read a chapter by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, a queer studies scholar, that had me question the limits of my available thinking about sexuality despite my expertise in the study of gender and the body. As a professor of hip-hop music, her writing left me with a provocative thought: What would help students interested in hip-hop question the limits of their own thinking about misogyny and its impact on women and men? Hip-hop discourse rarely steps away from cliché conversations about misogyny, so I created a list of axioms following Sedgwick's lead concerning Nas and masculinity in hip-hop. The list includes ideas most know but don't seem to consider in their analysis of hip-hop (cf. Sedgwick 1993):

• Sometimes Nas [and other male artists] spends a lot of time rapping about manhood and masculinity, other times not.
• Some male and female hip-hop heads, of all races and all classes, experience Nas's portrayal of masculinity as deeply embedded in a matrix of gender meanings and differences. Others do not.
• Many male and female heads have their richest mental/emotional/kinetic involvement when Nas rhymes about acts they don't do, or even don't want to do ("Understandable smooth shit that murderers move with" - "The Thief's Theme" from Street's Disciple).
• Sometimes Nas's performances are embedded in gendered contexts resonant with meaning, narrative, and connectedness to actual relationships in his life (e.g., brothers in hip-hop, his father, his wife, his daughter, to children); sometimes it is important that they not be (murderers, Mafia bosses); at other times, it may not occur to Nas, his audience, or his critics that they might be.

I want to get people to think about, consider, that there is little willingness in hip-hop to go to the edge of what's familiar and look beyond simply labeling songs and videos as misogynist to discover what drives not only individual misogyny, but the institutional subordination of girls and women relative to wealth (economic power), power (political power) and prestige (social status) (cf. Weber 1968).

Instead we often settle for what is widely accepted as true. Keepin' it real, which has fast become cliché in and of itself, is no longer expanding knowledge. It is limiting it. (Do no reprint without permission of the author, Kyra Gaunt © 2008).

Irv Gotti's logic escapes me but I've heard it before. Doesn't even matter what he said. What I am left with is how often men are asked questions about the misogyny in hip-hop and their answers tend to be cliché, accomodating, justified, and a rationalization at best. They have no compassion or sensitivity to the real lives affected by the subordination of women in rap videos.

“If is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it” - Upton Sinclair

This quote appeared in Al Gore's film AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH and it's so fitting relative to what this male directors are up to and up against.

Irv Gotti: "People with real jobs and real lives ...just want to be entertained!" You could say the same thing about when whites loved to gather around and watch black men (and in some cases women) being hanged. It was a social event and the murderous activity was also an incovenient truth back when. This is one of the things that is at the heart of the lack of intimacy, trust and generosity among the black youth and in our communities.