Hip- Hop Culture

Originating in the Bronx and spreading around the world as a multi- billion-dollar business, “hip-hop has created a culture and spawned a lifestyle that incorporates politics, style, art and technology”. However even though Hip Hop has affected many, influenced and inspired generations of people to create better circumstances for themselves it has also been charged with praising violence, misogyny and homophobia. In the Hip Hop world women are seen merely as objects, put into music videos where they are the majority and made to look sexy in order to increase the masculinity of the male performer. A common music video these days would have a female to male ratio of around 10 to 1, and these completely naked women would be huddled around the performer, as if they were servants or “whores” ready to heed to his very command. However looking at it in a different perspective these men only show that they are incredibly insecure, and need to where flashy objects and have women around them all the time in order to feel confident of themselves. In the Beauty Myth, Naomi Wolf argues“... Women must make their beauty glitter as a bid for attention that is otherwise grudgingly given” (106). “Men who glitter, on the other hand, are either low –status or not real men: gold teeth, flashy jewellery, ice skaters, Liberace. Real men are matte”(106). With this said, men in hip-hop videos have been sucked into this culture that is fake and superficial. By wearing chains and expensive clothes, these men like women are trying to breach a higher status. However in the Hip Hop culture these women are referring to as bitches’, ‘hoes’, adding to their image of being nothing but eye candy. This culture however is not different from the rest of American culture where female bodies are objectified in magazines, movies, advertisements, and TV shows. As a result the only way men can make a connection to women in popular culture is through sexuality. This why “a girl learns that stories happen to ‘beautiful’ women, whether they are interesting or not, stories do not happen to women who are not beautiful” (61).

With Hip Hop culture objectifying women’s bodies, creating them to be sex objects it is even more horrifying to find out that it is that kind of talk that will get you signed as an artist. I cannot think of a case where an artist has made it in the industry without referring to a woman as a “bitch”. In this culture “Beauty is a currency system like the gold standard.” (12). The beauty ‘myth’ may appear to audiences out their to be about ‘intimacy and sex and life, a celebration of women” when it is actually “composed of emotional distance, politics, finance, and sexual repression”(13). Therefore even in the Hip Hop world “it is about men’s institutions and institutional power”(13).