so-treu: nprfreshair: Jay-Z telling Terry...

nprfreshair:

Jay-Z telling Terry Gross about misogyny in rap lyrics: (full interview here) “A lot of these albums are made when artists are young, 17 or 18 years old, so they’ve never had any real relationships. And if you come from the neighborhoods we’re in, we have low esteem ourselves. And the women, well the girls — they have low self esteem as well. These are all dysfunctional relationships at a young age. The poet is pretty much [giving] his take on his dealings with girls at that time. He’s not in stable relationship, he’s on the road. He’s seeing girls who like him because he makes music. They spend one night together, he gets a phone number. He leaves for the next town and does the same thing over again.”

hm. this New Introspective Jay is interesting…….

I don’t know! It’s like, I’m glad that he’s starting to address the misogyny, but could you come up with a more cliché set of narratives? It’s a self-esteem problem? Dysfunctional relationships? Thing is, people make this music long before they’re on tour, and people listen to it and love it who have none of those experiences. It’s like, it’s cool to ask Jay-Z these questions, but why aren’t people asking why there’s such a massive consumer audience for it, and why those habits of consumption shape who does and doesn’t get heard, and how those patterns shape what the “mainstream” of a genre is allowed to contain or not.

I mean, it’s complicated, but I sorta wish someone would cut through the preciousness of so much of this. One of the best ways of explaining why Jay-Z is/was misogynist is because America likes to see and reward young black men for being misogynist and then tell them that their misogyny is a problem. ”He” is misogynist because “we” are. This doesn’t excuse misogyny, but it doesn’t let off the hook the fact that if Jay-Z had been rapping about social justice from the jump, he probably wouldn’t be getting interviewed by Terry Gross in the first place. The sad thing is that the old Jay-Z was a lot more in tune with that contradiction than the new one. This, to me, is the “It Gets Better” Jay-Z—might make you feel better, might even inspire some, but ultimately turns you away from the bigger issues at stake.