• • • low end theory

Oh wow. Sometimes I glance over the senior thesis I wrote as an undergraduate and think that, even though my writing was a lot more awkward back then, and I didn’t know how to put together an academically acceptable sentence worth a damn, my thinking was actually a lot less muddled, less riddled with the compulsory prohibitions of academic disciplining.

Plus, since I was writing about the politics of gender and sexuality in hip-hop music videos, I got to use the phrase “bootily endowed” without much remorse. And I got to write sentences like this: “The socially subversive fraternalism of “gangsta” rap faded into obscurity while its more socially acceptable misogynistic elements remained, and were in most instances more starkly articulated.”