Misogyny: a glance on rap music

Rap music and its associated genres – such as hip-hop, R&B and trap – are turning very popular nowadays, specially amongst teens. Lyrics usually stand for social issues like racial inequity and corruption, playing a huge role in influencing people’s opinions and sometimes even making a change in the world. However, rap culture has faced its own issues in terms of not always getting the right message across, particularly about women, as misogynystic thinking and behaviour are often implied in the majority of the rapper’s lyrics and videos. This is a sad aspect of our popular culture that desperately needs to be reanalysed since it is clearly unfair for both sides.

Over the decades, rap music has been connoted as being antifeministic. By paying attention to some rap hits, it is almost impossible to ignore the infinite traces of sexism which these songs embed, probably due to the fact that rap industry has always been ruled by men. Some of the singers often refer to females as being “gold diggers” and usually depict them as promiscuous, glorifying themselves by “owning” many women – the more, the merrier. The famous rapper Eminem, for instance, has made various depreciatory mentions to women in his songs throughout time. Being so, this violation of values, such as gender and opportunity equality, is more than ever an issue nowadays and must be fought. The time to be naive is over; it is now time for people to raise their voices on the matter and stop normalizing women objectification.

In order to solve the problem, it is crucial for celebrities to make use of their platform to spread awareness to subjects like this. As we all know, the amount of credit famous people are given is surreal: trendsetters, lifestyle influencers, opinion-makers – the nicknames are immense. Therefore, for them to take part of the discussion is very importante. The by now well-known female rapper Nicki Minaj often brings the issue of misogyny amongst rap culture up by talking about it in interviews and also on her social media (more specifically on her Twitter account). The artist is famous for always speaking her mind and even has a song called “Chun-Li”, where she exploits the gender role matter by drawing a parallel between her and the animated video game character Chun-Li, one of the first female heroines to reject the stereotypical roles of girlfriend, onlooker and wallflower.

In conclusion, the use of sexist lyrics and female bashful portrayals in songs and videos are problems that need to be fixed since they assuredly encourage disbelief towards women and their position in society, alongside their rights. Moreover, accepting and doing nothing to change it will lead to the perpetuation of a system which diminishes and spreads hate against women, dragging society to a point-of-no-return, humanly speaking – that dark place where many women were put by causality of fade, yet they fought throughout time to escape from. All in all, to embrace our spirit of change is fundamental, and so is the urge to embrace our differences.