I just read an article by a feminist writer who has completely written off Kanye West for his recent track, "Monster," that includes images of white women and corpses and black women as vampires and beasts. Watch the video and you might understand.
In reading about and watching interviews with women who have created aliases, the general explanation has been that the persona's have been created as a sort of escapism. Nicki Minaj took respite from a rough childhood by creating characters and living her life through them. Sasha Fierce, Beyonce Knowles' alter-ego, was recently "killed off" by Beyonce who said that she no longer needed the overly-aggressive, -strong, -sassy, -sexy character. I watched an interview of her in which she said that transforming into Sasha was a "out-of-body experience," created to protect herself but she is now confident enough to merge her two selves onstage and off. In an entirely different regard, Queen Latifah created her alias in direct response to the mistreatment of women by male rappers. Her intention for the empowerment of women was clear: "'If you think you are a queen, you are going to make people treat you like that and you'll start feeling like that."
I am not sure that I can get behind Leland's argument that reinvention or the creation of a stage persona "knocks a leg from under female authority." I could hold up Queen Latifah and Lady GaGa as prime examples of this: they have utilized stage monikers specifically intended to break down some of those damaging aspects of hegemony. In Queen Latifah's case: she gives voice to black feminists. In Lady GaGa's case: she reaches out to those living in what she calls the "trash glitter environment," populated largely by the sexual wallflowers, those on the fringe of mainstream heterosexual society. I don't believe either could have been as effective as role models and leaders of black feminism and non-heterosexual acceptance respectively without these persona's.
With this said, I also believe that these persona's are still, however authentic they are to the individual artists, caricatures of lived experience. In some respects, I agree that "mainstream hip-hop is...incompatible with a feminist conception of womanhood," for its continued denigration of women. But I would also add, as stated on the PBS site, that the greatest consumer demographic of commercial hip-hop is white. "White consumers...buy into stereotypes of blackness based on violence and caricature, while people of color also consume images of black manhood commodified as one-dimensional and devoid of social responsibility." I think it is important for us to remember that artists, including Kanye, are simply caricatures of the black male experience in American and perhaps of themselves.
But I wouldn't give up hope on all hip-hop or rap as dynamic, respectable and effective tools for feminism just yet. Gwendolyn Pough writes in “Hip-Hop Soul Divas and Rap Music: Critiquing the Love That Hate Produced" that "while we may not like what black women rappers have to say, specifically that their songs are not always positive, empowering, or socially responsible, all of their messages are ultimately educative because in one way or another, they teach lessons about some of the real-life struggles facing hip hop generation black women." If it takes an amplified persona to educate the mainstream, then I can get behind that. But we also take the good with the bad when we don't exercise our autonomy in choosing what music we listen to (i.e. Top-40 radio). There is A LOT of incredible music out there, created by women and men alike, that is positive in its message to and about women. And I'd much rather listen to them than Kanye West.
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