• • • low end theory

I keep starting to write something to air my annoyance at the way that feminist (and) lefty POC blogs are shitting on Nicki Minaj. And then I stop because I have other stuff to do, and because really, I could care less about defending Nicki Minaj. I think she is incredibly dope, and smart, and probably the most technically skilled rapper to break through to the mainstream since Ludacris, but she doesn’t need defending. Plus, I think a lot of her music is wack. So anyway, yes, please, call her Orientalism out. Yes. Important. But of course, in order to make that point the author has to point out that Nicki is just biting Lil’ Kim’s style, and that by contrast, “Kim was actually a talented lyricist who, for better or for worse, found a way to sell her music to a sexist music industry.” Good Black Woman Versus Bad Black Woman. We all know that story, right? Well, clearly, you didn’t see the photoshoot where Kim was rocking a burqa. Not that that’s so clearly Orientalist, but, you know, whatever. Maybe I was just irritated at this quote:

Minaj bares skin to sell shitty music to kids who can’t remember the good stuff: a close listen to her music reveals the uninspired, nonsensical lyrics, pedestrian sing-song hooks, and excessive reliance on Auto-tune that has come to characterize hip hop music today.

I’m 27. I actually remember the good old stuff pretty well. My nineteen year old sister, one of the “kids” to whom the writer is ostensibly referring, probably remembers it as well as I do. Not all of it, of course. It’s true, though: the good old stuff was good. Yay, good old stuff! The good old stuff was also hypercommodified, and no less orientalist. Remember Kim’s contemporary, Foxy Brown? Remember all the Orientalist videos male rappers put out? Very rarely in the good old stuff did we have a case in which a female rapper outshines some of the most popular rappers in the game like Nicki Minaj did, for example, on “Monster” [except on a little album called The Score], but whatever. The good old stuff. The bigger reason I want to write the post I want to write is because I am annoyed with popular “feminist” (and) POC blogs that have shitty blogging practices, blogs that are so hopelessly engulfed in the stream of popular culture and commodification that they use their space to have pointless arguments about which commodity is better, or which way to commodify oneself is better, and pretend that that is a conversation about social justice.

The feminist in me is practically climbing the walls: are we really okay with the idea that two of the most popular female hip hop artists of the last several years — Lil’ Kim and Nicki Minaj — are glorifying themselves as life-sized Barbie dolls?

Feminist me isn’t mad at Kim or Nicki. Feminist me is mad at the misogynist and racist world that gives talented, queer, strange, black women like them very few options to make music and craft images that don’t constantly police, or reduce them to, an incredibly narrow idea of what their bodies should be. How their bodies should look. Feminist me is mad that professional “feminist” and “race” blogs aren’t doing a better job of giving their readers a critical vocabulary to deconstruct the way that they look at these images, and to entertain that their own habits of looking might be part of the problem. Feminist me actually sees Kim and Nicki as negotiating the way that they are commodified as black women in very interesting, and very fucking different ways, thank you very much.

I want to write a post because I’m sick of blogs that invoke black women’s bodies as though they were immediately, automatically, and naturally in competition with one another. I’m not getting the conversation I think I want to have from the blogs I read. Maybe at some point I’ll be able to write it.