Point of Discussion: Misogyny in Music - Music

meccalecca
Voice of Reason

Gender: Male
Location: The Land of Enchantment

Quote:

At the same time, a sizeable segment (more than one-fifth) of this genre does contain such messages, and our analysis indicates that these messages are rather extreme. [i]Although women are presented as subordinate to men in a majority of rock and country songs as noted earlier, rap stands out for the intensity and graphic nature of its lyrical objectification, exploitation, and victimization of women. Other genres, in the aggregate, make more subtle allusions to gender inequality or present more muted criticisms of women.

I disagree with this. To say that rap stands out and the rock is more subtle is to completely ignore a giant section of rock music while highlighting a very specific area of rap. This is cherry picking at its finest
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RockyRaccoon
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Age: 33
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meccalecca wrote:

Quote:

At the same time, a sizeable segment (more than one-fifth) of this genre does contain such messages, and our analysis indicates that these messages are rather extreme. [i]Although women are presented as subordinate to men in a majority of rock and country songs as noted earlier, rap stands out for the intensity and graphic nature of its lyrical objectification, exploitation, and victimization of women. Other genres, in the aggregate, make more subtle allusions to gender inequality or present more muted criticisms of women.

I disagree with this. To say that rap stands out and the rock is more subtle is to completely ignore a giant section of rock music while highlighting a very specific area of rap. This is cherry picking at its finest

I would say that's certainly a very valid criticism.

Still, the fact remains that over 1/5th of all platinum-selling hip-hop albums released between 1992 and 2000 contained strong misogynistic themes, which seems significant. However, that isn't to say that we couldn't grab every platinum-selling hair metal album from 1982-1990 and find a similar amount have similar themes.
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Skinny
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I find the idea that somebody could possibly quantify what proportion of any genre as vast as hip-hop is "misogynistic" (or any other way inclined, for that matter) pretty silly. How would you even go about aggregating that?

EDIT: Just seen the "platinum-selling" caveat. Here's another statistic: four-fifths of all platinum-selling music is vacuous shite.
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Last edited by Skinny on 03/02/2015 21:44; edited 1 time in total

Puncture Repair

Skinny wrote:

It's for the purposes of entertainment. Some of it is despicable, but these people aren't (in 99% of cases) attempting to be "role models". If an artist's audience can't distinguish between songs made for the purposes of entertainment and viable life advice, that isn't the artist's fault. Sure, you can argue that young children are easily influenced, and that the music often veers into encouragement of certain behaviours, but at that point it is up to the child's parents to step in and teach the child the difference between entertainment (however trashy) and real life. And, if the parents don't do this or are incapable of doing this, I'm afraid that it's society's fault. And so, actually, the argument does begin and end with society's own misogyny.

This is true for all music, not just hip-hop. The people who wield the most influence when it comes to the running and the shaping of our society (note: not musicians) clearly have very little interest in putting an end to this misogyny, and I think the idea that it is up to the artists - or even to the consumer - to do something about this is a harmful one that conveniently absolves some very shady people with some very shady motives of the blame that they deserve. The music we listen to is music that is representative of the society we live in, and the vast majority of people have virtually no influence whatsoever on the direction that society takes. We are taught from a young age that women are lesser beings than men (not directly, but constantly and via a huge variety of sources), and musicians taking a stand, en masse, against this particular hegemony is not only an unfair and unrealistic thing to ask for, but would arguably make very little difference. Change the society, and the music will change with it.

But society isn't something you can just change, it's built up of so many different things, like music, that all need changing to ultimately progress. Going on the parent child example, I think many parents might not even be wise enough themselves to see where misogyny might be influencing a child - especially in the internet age.

Music is almost unique from other forms of entertainment because people allow it to define them, it's a very sacred part of someone's personal culture. While a lot of people will watch whatever the latest blockbuster is, people don't usually watch movies to help define themselves. Kids who want to be a punk, listen to punk music, 'Emo' kids will listen to metalcore and so on. People, especially teenagers, idolise musicians in a way few other celebrity are idolised because they have helped define who that teenager is in their period of growing up. It's easy for a lot of us to say music and lyrics and influential because we tend to distance ourselves from the music by not being limited to one genre, but more millions of others it's one of the most influential art forms going, so I really do believe musicians have to understand the line at some point, and I don't think responsibility is placed soley on the listener. Schools, parents and politicians to many kids are 'part of the problem' and music is their way of rebelling and choosing their own influence - something they actually listen to and respond to.

Maybe I'm just sceptical, but I think culture largely dictates society, not the other way round.

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RockyRaccoon
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Skinny wrote:

I find the idea that somebody could possibly quantify what proportion of any genre as vast as hip-hop is "misogynistic" (or any other way inclined, for that matter) pretty silly. How would you even go about aggregating that?

EDIT: Just seen the "platinum-selling" caveat. Here's another statistic: four-fifths of all platinum-selling music is vacuous shite.

Quote:

Our analysis begins in 1992 because gangsta rap began to flourish around this time (Kelley 1996, 147; Smith 1997, 346; Krims 2000, 83; Watkins 2001, 389; Keyes 2002, 104; Kitwana 2002, 14). Our interest in this starting point is related to the fact that misogyny and related themes (i.e., violence) are popularly thought to be more prevalent in gangsta rap than in rap generally. Yet, these themes are not exclusive to gangsta rap, which is why we selected all rap albums rather than just gangsta albums. As noted by Krims (2000, 87), rap albums typically mix genres and so songs that contain misogynistic lyrics would have been left out of the analysis had we only sampled gangsta rap albums.

The analysis ends in 2000 because that year marked a turning point in the industry’s increasing commercialization and greater detachment from its neighborhood sources (Kitwana 1994, 23; Krims 2000, 71; Watkins 2001, 382). Our time frame thus captures a period when rap music more closely reflected grassroots values and local conditions on the street and was somewhat less commercialized than today, although the interests of record labels were important during this time period as well.

The 130 albums contained a total of 1,922 songs. Using SPSS, a simple random sample of 403 songs was drawn and then analyzed. Each song was listened to twice in its entirety by the authors, while simultaneously reading the lyrics. The lyrics were obtained from The Original Hip-Hop/Rap Lyrics Archive (http://www.ohhla.com/all.html). Each line was coded to identify major misogynistic themes. Misogyny refers to lyrics that encourage, condone, or glorify the objectification, exploitation, or victimization of women. In cases of uncertainty regarding the meaning of a particular word or phrase, we consulted The Rap Dictionary (http://www.rapdict.org), a comprehensive online dictionary of rap terms. During the coding, careful attention was paid to the context in which the lyrics were stated. This is especially important in rap, given that it is rooted in the Black oral tradition of signifying and other communicative practices (Smitherman 1997, 4). Signifying is a way of speaking that involves ritual insult (commonly referred to as ‘‘playing the dozens’’) and double entendre (see also Keyes 2002; Lee 2005, 83). With signifying, words have alternative meanings beyond their conventional usages and should not necessarily be taken literally. In our coding, we were careful to interpret the lyrics within their larger contexts. Finally, an independent researcher coded a random subset (16% of the sample songs) to assess intercoder reliability. With respect to misogyny, agreement occurred in 73.4% of the songs, indicating fairly strong consensus.

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meccalecca
Voice of Reason

Gender: Male
Location: The Land of Enchantment

As much as objectification of women is prevalent in rap. Pretty much all of our female pop stars careers are built on the objectification of these women. That's really probably far worse.
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Skinny
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Puncture Repair wrote:

But society isn't something you can just change, it's built up of so many different things, like music, that all need changing to ultimately progress. Going on the parent child example, I think many parents might not even be wise enough themselves to see where misogyny might be influencing a child - especially in the internet age.

Music is almost unique from other forms of entertainment because people allow it to define them, it's a very sacred part of someone's personal culture. While a lot of people will watch whatever the latest blockbuster is, people don't usually watch movies to help define themselves. Kids who want to be a punk, listen to punk music, 'Emo' kids will listen to metalcore and so on. People, especially teenagers, idolise musicians in a way few other celebrity are idolised because they have helped define who that teenager is in their period of growing up. It's easy for a lot of us to say music and lyrics and influential because we tend to distance ourselves from the music by not being limited to one genre, but more millions of others it's one of the most influential art forms going, so I really do believe musicians have to understand the line at some point, and I don't think responsibility is placed soley on the listener. Schools, parents and politicians to many kids are 'part of the problem' and music is their way of rebelling and choosing their own influence - something they actually listen to and respond to.

Maybe I'm just sceptical, but I think culture largely dictates society, not the other way round.

I spent large parts of my formative years listening to music that could very reasonably be accused of encouraging/glorifying violence, homophobia, racism, sexual abuse, a general mistrust of and disrespect for women, the relentless and shameless chase of wealth and material possessions, etcetera etcetera, and I do not believe that any of those things are right or acceptable. That said, I was born with access to an education that taught me (be it through my parents, my peers, my teachers, the books I read, whatever) that those things were largely deplorable. Other people do not have access to that same sort of education, and that is society's fault. Our fate is largely decided by people who have very little interest in teaching the masses that they need anything other than the dangling carrot provided by those one-in-a-million, glorified success stories that our capitalist system throws up from time to time, and those same people are actively preventing people from learning the difference between right and wrong because it would threaten their status. Calling on musicians to become the voices we need is ridiculous - we need to figure the problem out for ourselves, but it's difficult when those in power are determined that it doesn't happen. I don't think musicians have a social responsibility to teach us right from wrong - in fact, I'd argue that it might actually be beneficial that they show us the best and worst sides of our society, warts and all, so that we don't fall into the trap of believing that everything is fine the way it is.

Maybe I'm just cynical, but I think our voices (and, by extension, the voices of the musicians we listen to) are a drop in the ocean in the current system we're living in, and to blame musicians for something that is merely symptomatic of a much, much, much larger problem is simply a case of us lying to ourselves.

As I said, when society changes, the music will change with it. For now, the music we have is representative of the world we live in, and I think - on balance - that it's probably for the best.
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Kiki

Misogyny has no place in modern music. Fortunately, the majority of popular music has little of such. Society and it's music artists are very open minded these days. Smile

RockyRaccoon
Is it solipsistic in here or is it just me?

Gender: Male
Age: 33
Location: Maryland

Moderator

Skinny wrote:

As I said, when society changes, the music will change with it. For now, the music we have is representative of the world we live in, and I think - on balance - that it's probably for the best.

Ironically, it seems like you and the writers of the study agree on that point (and I do as well)

Quote:

Given its sources, we argue that changing the content of this music—specifically with respect to the portrayal of women—requires in part changing the conditions under which it is created, conditions that lie at the intersection of three important forces: Socioeconomic disadvantage and associated gender relations in local communities, the material interests of the record industry, and the larger cultural objectification of women and associated norms of hegemonic masculinity.

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