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?