Commitment Ceremony

Don't know if anyone's seen this, but I think it's awesome. It's also one of the pieces from She Likes Girls 3.

5. Rose: Interview with NPR and Time

Tricia Rose in her interview with NPR talks about women in Hip-Hop and how women have to do more to prove themselves credible as MCs and lyricists, while defending their sexuality. Rose says, "women have to address in hip-hop, at some point, their relationship to sexuality"; whether they take the Lil' Kim route to be "a rhyming stripper" or Queen Latifah who is "the tough gangster girl" and has her sexuality questioned. Rose says to make it in hip-hop you pretty much have to be hypersexual or hypertough and in commercial hip-hop women have become further marginalized and under appreciated women.

Her interview with Time Magazine on the other hand is about her book The Hip Hop Wars and how mainstream hip-hop is dead. She discusses hip-hop artists that don't sell as well as the more mainstream ones do; there's "this idea that a certain kind of sexual deviance or violent behavior defines black culture has had a huge market in commercial mainstream culture for at least 200 years. Also, sexist images, which hip-hop has a lot of, seem to do very well across the cultural spectrum. So sexuality and sexual domination sell. Racial stereotypes sell". Artists like Mos Def, Common, and Talib Kweli don't fit into these stereotypes that other hip-hop artists accept. Rose says that hip-hop hasn't always been so commercial; instead, "it was mostly for fun and for play. It wasn't primarly [sic] an economic industry, where people got involved more for money than for creativity. It had live community origins". In these interviews Rose discusses how Hip-Hop has changed from the beginning and how women rappers are forced into roles and if an artist wants to be successful, according to mainstream, s/he needs to fill the stereotypes.

Listening to this interview, I had no idea who most of the hip-hop artists she listed were. She talked about Roxanne Shante, who she said was one of the earliest female rappers to break the ice.



I also don't understand why these women will try to break out in this industry that has limited their movement and makes them fit into one of two categories. Or at least, why they don't try to do more, or aren't more vocal about trying, to break these molds.

The Time Magazine interview relates to the assumption that media matters. The media play a critical role in teaching us about the world. It seems that mainstream Hip-Hop today is a misleading form of media because everything that gets played on the radio and that people listen to is the stereotypical Hip-Hop "where people are just rhyming about killing everybody who gets in their way and never caring about a woman". There are rappers that are doing it just to sell. "Even [Jay-Z] has acknowledged that he's "dumbed his music down" so that he can sell records". I don't think listeners realize this though or that what they are hearing is only a small selection of what counts as Hip-Hop.

After reading her interview with Time, I decided to look up Mos Def on YouTube and found an interesting rock the vote campaign with him in it. After watching this, I see how different he is from 50 Cent and other similar artists. It's probably just based on what music I primarily listen to, but I never hear anything about Mos Def, and I feel like there should be a lot more interest taken in him.



EDIT: After class yesterday, I came up with a question/something I don't understand... What on earth is a tip drill? What does that even mean?

Sex Ed

I'm doing research for my gender and sexuality project and found an interesting sex ed video from the 50s. Thought I'd share.

4. Prensky: "Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants"

Marc Prensky begins his piece, "Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants", by saying the cause of the decline of U.S. education is ignored; "Our students have  changed radically. Today’s students are no longer the people our educational system  was designed to teach" (1).    Prensky goes on to say that technology has created a gap between generations; he calls it "a 'singularity' – an event which changes things so fundamentally that there is absolutely no going back" (1).  The introduction of technology, such as television, computers, video games, cell phones, etc., has dramatically changed the lives of students (K through college), who are the first generation to grow up with this technology.  As a result being constantly surrounded by technology "today's students think and process information fundamentally  differently from their predecessors" (Prensky 1).  

Prensky refers to this generation as Digital Natives because "students today are all "native speakers" of the digital language" (1).   On the other hand, those people who are not from this generation, but are interested in technology and have come to use it are known as Digital Immigrants.  He says that while they may learn to use technology, these Digital Immigrants, like real immigrants, retain an accent, that using technology doesn't come naturally to them.  According to Prensky, this remains an issue because "the single biggest problem facing education today is that our Digital Immigrant instructors, who speak an outdated language (that of the pre-digital age), are struggling to teach a population that speaks an entirely new language" (2).  He says that teachers need to change the way they present material because students today can't deal with the slow paced way they currently do.  If something worked for the teacher when they were a student, it will not by any means be guaranteed to work for this new generation of students, and teachers need to be the ones to adapt because technology is such an integral part of the lives of their students.

While reading this, I was wondering who it was supposed to be geared to.  Is it for the immigrant or the native?  Shouldn't the students take some responsibility for paying attention in class, even if it is boring?  I feel like teachers used to not care if students liked the material or not, they had to learn it anyway.

This piece was more about educating students of all ages, than teenagers.  It dealt with the reasons students learn differently due to technology and how teachers tend to resist this.  It relates to the third course assumption that media matters.  Popular culture shapes lives of all Americans whether or not they accept or resist it.  Prensky was saying that students learn differently due to the influence of computers, television, and video games and while the natives celebrate these forms, the immigrants are more hesitant to do so and abandon the methods on which they were raised.

"Digital Immigrants don't believe their students can learn successfully while watching TV  or listening to music, because they (the Immigrants) can't.  Of course not – they didn't  practice this skill constantly for all of their formative years" (3).  I think this is awesome, because my mom was always on my case when I was younger, and even my sister's now, not to do homework or study while watching t.v./listening to music, but I never had any issue with it that she assumed I did, simply because she would never be able to do it.  

3. Hine: The Rise and Fall of the American Teenager

Thomas Hine prefaces his book The Rise and Fall of the American Teenager, by telling a story of how as a teenager he had already started writing this book; the thoughts he had as a high school senior were validated in some ways by many studies he read later in life. In the introduction, Hine states what this book is about: "it's about people in their teens throughout American history - what adults expected of them, how they fit into the world they found, and how they helped shape it as well" (3). Hine says the book isn't supposed to be nostalgic and reminiscent of his teen years, that the only reason he mentioned his 16-year-old self was as a reminder that teenagers are real and that everyone was one at some point.

The first chapter is "The Teenage Mystique" and about contemporary teenagers in general and what they face in terms of laws and rules and how it differs from those in the baby boomers' generation nearly 40 years ago. Adults are both envious of teenagers and afraid of them; "the very qualities that adults find exciting and attractive about teenagers are entangled with those we find terrifying" (Hine 11). Age is seen as the only way to define and classify people; using age as the only factor is the way lawmakers and society give rights equally.

Hine says, "Europeans observed that Americans grew quickly in every way, taking on responsibilities and vices much sooner than their European counterparts" (5). If this is true, how come most European countries have a lower drinking age than America if Americans have to take on more responsibilities earlier? I also didn't understand why, if "adults envy teens for their energy, their freshness, their passion, and they seek to imitate them" (21), teenagers are given such a hard time.

Hine's mentioning of his teenage self relates to the second assumption this class is grounded in - that teenagers are not some alien life form. Hine says he introduced his teenage persona because "his role is to keep reminding me that while this is largely a history of roles and expectations, the teenagers I'm discussing aren't some exotic species - they're real people" (3).

Hine mentions that he doesn't have any teenagers, but "had plenty of offer of help from people who are. 'You can have mine to study' they say, adding that they'll take the kid back in three or four years" (3). I've heard my mom and other people joke about that, but I don't think it's funny. I think it's just another way parents/adults are mean and like to put down their kids. They knew going into it that eventually their children would be teenagers, so they should just deal with it if their kid isn't perfect.

Teenagers who want so desperately to be treated as adults, are given all these rules and laws that try to prevent them from having sex, or smoking and drinking. Teenagers know these things are associated with being an adult, so of course they do them to rebel or to be older. Parents try to stop their kids from having sex, even though they are in their prime and hormones are surging within them. No matter what, teenagers will have sex if they want to, and parents need to accept this and talk to their teens so they do it responsibly.