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Posts tagged gender

let-your-beauty-unfold:

Bon Iver: And I told you to be patient, and I told you to be fine. I told you to be balanced, and I told you to be kind, but now all your love is wasted. And then who the hell was I?

Death Cab: So one last touch and then you’ll go and we’ll pretend that it meant something so much more. But it was vile, and it was cheap and you are beautiful but you don’t mean a thing to me. Yeah, you are beautiful but you don’t mean a thing to me

Radiohead: But I can’t help the feeling I could blow through the ceiling if I just turn and run. And it wears me out… It wears me out. If I could be who you wanted, if I could be who you wanted all the time… all the time.

Brand New: You are calm and reposed, let your beauty unfold. Pale white like the skin stretched over your bones, spring keeps you ever close. You are secondhand smoke, you are so fragile and thin standing trial for your sins. Holding onto yourself the best you can. You are the smell before rain, you are the blood in my veins.

Nicki Minaj: You a stupid hoe, you a you a stupid hoe. You a stupid hoe, you a you a stupid hoe. You a stupid hoe, you a you a stupid hoe. You a stupid hoe, you a you a stupid hoe. You a stupid hoe, yeah you a you a stupid hoe. You a stupid hoe you a you a stupid hoe. You stupid stupid, you a stupid hoe.

HEY GUYS, WERE YOU AWARE THAT WHITE MALE PEOPLE ARE THE ONLY PEOPLE WHO CAN MAKE GOOD MUSIC? THE MORE YOU KNOW!

Seriously though, this is fucking dumb. Here’s why.

I like whiny indie rock just as much as the next person does (and quite a bit more than most people do, just look at my Last.fm account for proof of my years-long love affair with Saddle Creek and its ilk) but Nicki Minaj is a phenomenal artist and it’s not fair to compare her to musicians in a completely different genre.

It’s also not fair to compare the most poignant lyrics of those other bands to the most repetitive and insipid of hers, as if that’s somehow an accurate summary of their relative talents, a balanced measure of their respective merit. I’ve had the “guilty pleasures versus so-called real art” discussion on this blog many times before, but I’m not even going there with this one. I’m not comparing alternative music to rap. I’m straight up saying I have respect for Nicki Minaj’s work. She’s written some catchy little rhymes. She’s also written devastatingly clever verses on gender, race, society, and interpersonal relationships. If she doesn’t tackle those issues in a serious enough way for you, and you can’t give her credit for that, then you can at least admit she put a hell of an effort into the costumes, choreography, and visual design of her Grammy performance when Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon barely even bothered to comb his hair for the same awards ceremony. Again, I don’t want to have the “real art is about the music and not the packaging” debate. It’s tired. (Not to mention it involves its own level of sexism: just look to Lana Del Rey if you wonder how the music world would react to a female performer with the same alleged lack of stage presence as, say, Radiohead’s Thom Yorke.)

Plus I’m sick of defending my own argument about Nicki’s “Stupid Hoe”, which is that it’s a parody of hip-hop feuds, an exaggerated cartoonish track poking fun at herself for her beef with Lil’ Kim, during the course of which she’s made some statements that are seemingly hypocritical and anti-feminist.

But let’s assume for now that “Stupid Hoe” is meant to be taken at face value and is completely earnest, not ironic. It still doesn’t make sense to compare those lyrics to examples of other artists’ best work. If I tried, I could probably find lyrics by Bon Iver, Radiohead, and Death Cab For Cutie that, taken out of context, seem just as shallow and mindless as the ones chosen to represent Nicki. I could definitely find some embarrassingly awful Brand New lyrics, and I say that as someone who will admit to practically deifying Jesse Lacey for the majority of her formative years.

At the time that I’m reblogging this post, it has over four thousand notes. And I’m willing to bet that only a handful of those four thousand Tumblr users have bothered to listen to a Nicki Minaj song that wasn’t a music video single, cleaned up for pop radio. I’m also willing to bet that the majority of those four thousand Tumblr users have yet to check their male privilege or their white privilege and consider the possibility that just because someone uses language differently than you do doesn’t mean they have nothing worthwhile to say.

Maybe I’m taking this too seriously. But delve into a full-length album by a female rapper sometime with the same open mind and appreciative, curious ear that you usually reserve for Pitchfork darlings and see if some of my fervor doesn’t rub off on you.

dionthesocialist:

Things I’ve learned from internet discussions of Lana Dey Rey:

Girls are not allowed to have unique voices. Guys can mumble and barely enunciate a lot of their words (Thom Yorke, Elliott Smith, Conor Oberst, Justin Vernon, etc.), but when women sing, they must all sound like only slight variations of each other and must maintain perfect pitch at all times and have highly choreographed dance routines in all of their performances. Lord forbid they awkwardly sway back and forth while they sing, like pretty much every male in the history of indie rock.

thecounterculture:

thismesseduplife:

kirstenelisabeth:

Dear men,

Here’s something I think you all should know. We girls talk to multiple people or guys we are interested in because we are afraid that if we settle for just one, they’ll disappoint us and break our hearts. It does not mean we are whores/sluts or indecent by any means. It’s when a girl acts on those sexual feelings for those multiple people when she becomes a whore/slut and indecent. You made us this way, keep that in mind. There was someone, someone like you, who hurt us bad enough to not trust anyone else again.

Do not over look us because we’re “crushing” on someone else. You never know, you could be better for us than that other person.

Sincerely,

Kirsten

Basically.

Ok I need to stop getting all angry woman that likes to have sex on y’all right now, but this. To a T.

It’s when a girl acts on those sexual feelings for those multiple people when she becomes a whore/slut and indecent.

You know, I’m really not comfortable with this. Why do you have to tear down other women in order to assert your right to interact with guys in any way you want? You’re not “indecent” for flirting with multiple dudes, but another girl also isn’t “indecent” for sleeping with multiple dudes. She’s a fucking human being, and her sex life isn’t fair game for anyone to judge.

My fellow fabulous females, I know it’s easier to call other girls whores and disparage their promiscuous behavior, in order to distinguish yourself from them, than it is to bear the slut label yourself. I know it sucks to have guys call you a slut. I know how badly you want to prove you aren’t one. But prove it the hard way. Prove you’re not a inappropriately lustful woman by proving there’s no such thing as an inappropriately lustful woman. Teach guys, and other girls, that there’s nothing indecent about female sexuality, whatever form it takes for you - whether that’s being a virgin who sends flirty text messages to only one guy, a vixen who sleeps with every person she meets, or somewhere in between.

Because distinguishing yourself from those indecent kinds of girls might help get guys off your back right now, but it will hurt you in the long run. If ever your behavior is slightly ambiguous, if ever the powers that be decide to shift the location of the line where one passes from sexy babe territory into slutty trash territory, if ever you’re forced to realize that the world isn’t just black and white, you’re going to wish you didn’t run around thinking you had the right to say who’s “indecent” and who’s not.