Hyshatu Barrie

By Amarudontv.com

 

 

The Reality of Sexuality in Hip Hop

 

Since its emergence, hip hop has been like an exact science with its own set of rules. It either you follow it or don’t do it at all. To this day, we can count the change we see occurred in hip hop that’s how little there are. The hip hop industry constitutes largely of black male artists and few female artists.  This shows how sexuality is crucial in hip hop. Which beg to ask why sexuality plays an important role to this genre of music.

In most genre of music, the sole focus on what is great should be based on the voice and the lyrics behind the song.  But why in hip hop the focus is completely different?  After all, it is music with lyrics. In hip hop, being a male singer is not enough unless one emote lyrics that use the N word or the B word. We see singers such as Ll Cool J be seeing as less for singing romantic songs that target the female audience.

For the female artist such Nicki Minaj, in order to be in the high platform of the industry, must show attitude and go out their way to emasculate the men. They are force to show how powerful through their fashion sense.

In hip hop we are reminded of the term ‘heteronormative’ which promotes heterosexuality as the normal and definitely preferred sexual orientation. “A male singer romantic entreaties might lose their credibility among straight women were he to come out of the closet” (Outlaw & Yawn P77). If the heterosexual artists have trouble asserting their sexuality in term of being recognized as ‘real ‘how will it be easier for artists with different sexual orientation? The correlation of sexual identity with music should be at minimum. “Gay consumers played an [important] in keeping the musicians’ closet doors shut” (Outlaw P348).A heterosexual artist can positively impact a homosexual. The same could be the case when a non-heterosexual make a positive impact to a straight individual.

 In Gay Rappers: Too Real for Hip-Hop? Toure, who is a contributing editor at the Rolling Stone compared the significant of today’s Hip Hop ‘as large [of] a cultural stage as baseball was in the 50’s yet the mainstream is just as closed to gay rappers as the major leagues were to black men before Robinson.” (page 1). This shows how hopeful we can be to seeing upcoming changes to the hip hop industry even if it’s a slow gradual change but it might happen in time.

In hip hop, the style should only be the main focus as a way to judge an artist rather than the artist’s sexual orientation and yet it is engraved on what a real Hip Hop artist should be or not be. Like any other discriminating issue, changes will occur but at a slow pace. We have been seeing some of this changes in terms of having few artists being openly gay and yet are respectful.

 

 

 

 

Sources:

Toure, T(2003): Gay Rappers: Too Real for Hip-Hop? Section 2 Vol 1. Page 1. LexisNexis Academic. Print.

Outlaw, Paul(1995): If That's Your Boyfriend (He Wasn't Last Night). African American Review

Vol. 29, No. 2, Special Issues on The Music (Summer, 1995), pp. 347-350. Jstor. Print.