1 post tagged “common”

This is a paper I wrote my senior year of college, found it and it really hit home. I modified some, but its generally a feeling I hold true to this day.

I Used to Love H.E.R, but… what if the Microphone is a Metaphorical Penis?

“Little [GIRL], you’re not allowed to stay/ You have to evolve inevitably/ And I’ve sure come a long way…”  — “Getting Grown,” Cee-Lo Green

Scholars of 19th century female authors often ask “Is the pen a metaphorical penis?”. Over the course of my career as a hip-hop fan I have asked, a similar question, “Is the microphone a metaphorical penis?” One scholar notes, that  “artist’s most essential quality, is masterly execution, which is a kind of male gift, and especially marks off men from women... The male quality is the creative gift.” I ask this question of the microphone, as the microphone is often equivalent to the pen in hip-hop, as they both become the way an artist communicates to an audience. At this juncture in our nation’s history, hip-hop has become synonymous with black male voices, and expressions of black masculinity, and in creating a space for women in hip-hop, one aspect of hip-hop that has seemingly left out women, is the way that hip-hop has been gendered as a woman when an artist expresses their love of the art form, truly supporting the notion that the pen/microphone is a metaphorical penis.

For some time now I have truly felt that hip-hop had been “the only man I could depend on.” I say this taking the risk of personifying hip-hop as a man, when so many of the male voices I was hearing were telling me it was a woman. In any case hip-hop has served different purposes for me over the course of my life, but over all has acted almost like another older brother among my many pretend ones, another prevalent and important male voice(s) in my life.  
 
In my early childhood, groups like Outkast, Goodie Mob, Run D.M.C. and N.W.A. would speak to me through not only male voices but through my older male cousins taste’s in music. As I got older, artists would speak to me on my own. Warren G & Nate Dog, Snoop and Dr. Dre would talk to the girl who had run with pre-adolescent gang bangers, Richie Rich would remind me that there was “something about the west coast, that [made] me wanna ride (shake it west side, throw your hands up lets ride)”, and Tupac would become the first rapper I could ever remember having a crush on. Mos Def and Talib Kweli, The Roots — oh Tariq/Black Thought how you spoke to the backpacker inside— would set me upon my underground venture when I’d swear that I listened to the Mountain Brothers because they were good, and not just because they were Asian. Regardless, hip-hop has been through everything I have been through, has been along side me, a shoulder to cry on, a voice to reassure me, or feed fuel to my fire when need be. All of this through mostly male voices, sounding like older brothers, uncles, friends and in extreme cases boyfriends as they reminded me I was beautiful.

There was a time however when no voice spoke to me more clearly than Cee-lo did in his track, “Getting Grown,” off of Cee-lo Green and His Perfect Imperfections.  The track really hit me at a moment where I was dealing with my own growth spurt. Senior year had come and senior year was about to go. I felt like he was talking specifically to me in his first verse of this song, simply change “boy” to girl, and there was my Uncle Cee-lo telling me that yes, my new life was coming, and not to fear it (quoted above).

Cee-Lo "Getting Grown"

“Magtonic,” he’d say between sections, “[You] never won’t be perfect I know/ but workin on it is worse than [you] know / Life is just learning as you go.”  Most of all he’d tell me “Oooo, time changed but it feels the same/ There's no tellin what tommorow will bring/ Even if I could I wouldn't change a thang,” letting me know I wasn’t alone. He would reassure me as he concluded, “Say, young [woman], there's no need to cry/ Because I know you will get by/ Look your destiny in the eye.”

DAMN. That was it. The song had done something to me, had changed my outlook in such a way that I was ready for the end, ready for the beginning. And I started thinking, this kind of voice, is the voice hip-hop had been when “it found me.”

It’s arguable that voices like  Cee-lo’s, do not reflect standardized visions of black masculinity that we see elsewhere in hip-hop, the second I heard this song I was reminded that in my eyes, hip-hop is not the “chick” Common met when he was ten years old, but that hip-hop is truly a matter of black male voice, and black masculinity. It is my firm belief that anyone who loves hip-hop loves H.I.M. as opposed to H.E.R. So I ask, if hip-hop were a person why would it be a woman, when the voices that we hear the most, are male? Someone pointed out to me that it’s an art flooded with men, so of course hip-hop will be personified as a woman, hyper-hetero-masculinity being a key component in the structuring of hip-hop personas and hip-hop content. And yet another person pointed out that in industries that are dominated by men you will often find that they gender objects as women, as if it were some symbol of control and as if it somehow upheld notions of patriarchy, and the mastering of domains (ships and cars being named after women were the first things that came to mind).
 
And that’s when a friend who was writing her thesis on female authors of the 19th Century pointed me in the direction of a few texts that look at the paternalistic nature of language and male domination of the literary world. Margaret Homans writes, “Women’s place in language, from the perspective of an androcentric literary tradition, is with the literal, the silent object of representation, the dead mother, the absent referent, so that within a literary text the shift from figurative to literal connotes a shift from the place of the signifier, the place of the speaking subject to the place of the absent object.” If we apply this to hip-hop we can see a similar pattern as men personify hip-hop in terms of being a woman, and only become the subject in their own work through either a boast or a confessional, which are also attributes of male identity, as they are “master’s of a the creative gift” and as the only way they can critique themselves, their ability to master something without compromising their role as masters is to turn such critique into a confessional. Where as women, in both the 19th century and today, “Women who do conceive of themselves as subjects — that is, as present, thinking women rather than as “woman”— must continually guard against fulfilling those imposed definitions by being returned to the position of the object.”  Women in the rap world, as they are forced to defend themselves, in such a way that even if they boast as men would, they remain the object their work speaks of In some cases however there can be an exception to the rule.
 

I’d like to use Jean Grae’s “Give It Up” off of her album, This Week as an example of this exception and to explain why I feel hip-hop should be portrayed as a man, but I must acknowledge that because she is writing a sort of hip-hop love song, she is also making herself the object being discussed. This song details Grae’s experience as an underground hip-hop artist contemplating if she should break into the mainstream hip-hop world and sign with a major label, through detailing a supposed romantic relationship Grae has with a man. As Grae tells the listener how she feels about his man she ingeniously inserts the names of major hip-hop labels into her text and uses their names as actual words, both to enhance the story she is telling but also, to assert her feelings towards this male dominated industry. Some examples include,  “ I need to enter a space and probe his interscope…. He’s not a bad boy, I’ve never sampled this… I wanna rock a fella so bad, oh man.”  While these references are clever, they still uphold traditional gender roles, yet the emotion you see in this song, both lyrically and in her tone somehow forces you to see why she is stuck in such a role. As a “nearly spoken word” piece, she emotes through her voice and you can see how truly deeply she cares about this “man” or as I am arguing how truly deeply she cares about, hip-hop. In place of a chorus, Grae discusses her insecurities regarding this relationship and then flips her tone the second time she brings up these insecurities found in the first break, once again illustrating the sort of feelings most would have when entering a relationship with anyone, but also those of someone in her career. The first time around she says:

“Maybe it shouldn’t be us two/ and maybe I’m just not the one whose right/
and maybe we can’t be together tonight/ and maybe you need another girl/
and maybe I just can’t be in your world/ and maybe we just can’t be together/ for you, whatever.”

The second time around she tells us that no, maybe she was wrong the first time.

“Maybe it should be us two together/  and maybe I’m the one for you forever/ and maybe we’re supposed to be together tonight/ and maybe everything is just right/ and maybe I’m your love till the end of time/ and maybe I’m supposed to be your and you mine/ and maybe yes its all right/ and for you still forever.”

What Grae is saying in her lines, the contradictory sentiments she is going through, is not only what other hip-hop artists have expressed when they themselves are personifying hip-hop as a person, but she is also portraying it in a way that some how seems more real, more serious and more true to the actual industry and what goes on it. In contemplating her dilemma, to sign, not to sign, to love him, not to love him she says, “catching feelings truly upset when he had to go school me on the ways of catching a mate,” and is in other words expressing her frustration with having to be taught how to act within this industry, and how to find a record label (or “mate”) she is told by men what she must do as a woman once again asserting traditional gender roles. Yet as this is a common experience I once
again must question if men could see exactly why, as a result of this very dilemma, hip-hop should be seen as a man.

Common, in “I Used to Love H.E.R. expresses his own frustration in his relationship with hip-hop saying “I did her, not

just to say that I did it/ But I'm committed, but so many niggaz hit it/ That she's just not the same lettin all these groupies do her/I see niggaz slammin her, and takin her to the sewer/ But I'ma take her back hopin that the shit stop/ Cause who I'm talkin bout y'all is hip-hop.” Here you have both a black female discussing a medium dominated by male voices, her insecurity as an artist, and vulnerability as a woman prevalent with in, and a black male discussing that same medium with both a critique of the art form, but also part boast. If hip-hop is about boasting, confessing and critiquing, any time it is personified are we rarely critique the very gaze by which it is established, unless we are discussing the ways artists portray themselves. If that is the case, as someone who is notoriously homophobic, Common defends not only his right to love hip-hop as if it were a woman, but also to assert his masculinity even further, because what artist can truly stay true school in writing a love song, what does a black man in the entertainment industry sacrifice by not upholding a hyper-heterosexual image? Why must artists within this male dominated media, defend their gender/ sexuality by further perpetuating stereotypes?

There is a commonly held belief that hip-hop and love songs do not mix, that hip-hop love songs inevitably fail. However, the few exceptions to this rule have always been when the love of the very art from is discussed. In “Love Jones” an article by Miles Marshall Lewis (The Village Voice, 3/9/99) he reviews Things Fall Apart, by The Roots, but begins arguing that at the time he reviewed the album, the new version of a hip-hop love song was not going to sound like L.L. Cool J’s “I Need Love,” but would instead exhibit a “love jones” for hip-hop itself.  Only one artist that I am aware of has been able to express this love through the personification of hip-hop, but has done so with out gendering it and I would go as far to argue that while Grae’s attempt to personify hip-hop as a man is fitting of her work, and Common was the first to ever do this so explicitly, this artist does so flawlessly, without subjecting the listener to view hip-hop as a male or female creature.

In “Act Too (The Love of My Life)” off of The Roots album, Things Fall Apart, Black Thought opens the song with a verse describing a seemingly spiritual experience. But quickly follows with:

The Roots @ Coachella - Act Too (The Love of My Life)

"When it came to gettin mine I ain't tryin, to argue/ Sometimes I wouldn'ta made it if it wasn't for you/ Hip-Hop, you the love of my life and that's true/ When I was handlin the shit I had to do/ It was all for you, from the door for you/ Speak through you, gettin paper on tour for you/ From the start, Thought was down by law for you/ Used to hit up every corner store wall for you /We ripped shit, and kept it hardcore for you/ I remember late nights, steady rockin the mic/ Hip-Hop, you the love of my life.”

However, in an attempt to make this truly “I Used to Love H.E.R.” Part II, Common steps back into the scene and continues his masculine bantering saying things like:

“Usin, no protection, told H.E.R. on _Resurrection_/ Caught in the Hype Williams, and lost H.E.R. direction/ Gettin eight/ate in sections where I wouldn't eat H.E.R./ An under the counter love, so _Silent_-ly I _Treat_ H.E.R./ Her Daddy'll beat H.E.R., eyes all Puff-ed/ In the mix on tape, niggaz had her in the buff/ When we touch, it was more than just a fuck/ The Police, in her I found peace (like who?)/ Like Malcolm in the East/ Seen H.E.R. on the streets of New York, trickin off/ Tried to make a hit with H.E.R. but my dick went soft…”

The era of hip-hop has been synonymous with the black male voice, as it is the one of the only mediums that has allowed the expressions of black masculinity to exist, and be presented to a mass audience. However, because it has stood alone amongst other aspects of mainstream media as the only outlet for these men, the generalizations regarding black masculinity that have been perpetuated by rap personas — the balla, the thug, the multimillion dollar hip-hop mogul, the pimp, the black nationalist— force me to admit that there is a possibility that the answer to my question is simply the fact that these representations of hip-hop as a woman are a “give in” as this medium is wrought with masculine bravado and performances of machismo. To complicate my question, I must say that when discussing this paper with others, one person noted that if the mic really is a metaphorical penis, it might be weird to sing into a mic if it looked like a vagina, or was a metaphorical vagina. And yet another person presented me with the notion that if the mic is a metaphorical penis then perhaps a lot of these artists should consider the fact that they must look like they are performing oral sex (symbolically and quite literally in appearance) upon a man. These simple questions make me wonder if it perhaps isn’t that I am arguing that hip-hop should only be seen as a man, and not a woman, but rather that as hip-hop is something so personal, spaces should be created where upon women and or men, can discuss their jonesing for the art, with out feeling the need to say, “I love it like I would love a man/woman,” but instead simply say “I LOVE HIP-HOP/ I HAVE A RELATIONSHIP WITH HIP-HOP!”

Marshall argues that those who attempt to address this jonesing, are exhibiting a sort of self-reflection, or expression that when broken down, is simply an expression of a pure interest in the art, a pure involvement and pure love. If that is the case, loving hip-hop to whatever degree, purist or not, is loving not only the music, but also the voices behind it, be they male or female, and it is just that in my eyes those voices are my brother’s, my lover’s and my best friends.