Cinderella Ate Hip Hop: Nicki Minaj vs. Peggy Orenstein

Or: If she ate, then let her ate and watch the money pile up…

So, white feminists are all upset about “princess culture”: “ONOES, what is it doing to our girls, encouraging them to succumb to outdated stereotypes about femininity, passivity, and marriage?” Peggy Orenstein’s new book “Cinderella Ate My Daughter” is one installment in this trend, which can be summed by this quote from the 2006 NYTimes article upon which Orenstein’s book builds:

As a feminist mother — not to mention a nostalgic product of the Grranimals era — I have been taken by surprise by the princess craze and the girlie-girl culture that has risen around it. What happened to William wanting a doll and not dressing your cat in an apron? Whither Marlo Thomas? I watch my fellow mothers, women who once swore they’d never be dependent on a man, smile indulgently at daughters who warble “So This Is Love” or insist on being called Snow White. I wonder if they’d concede so readily to sons who begged for combat fatigues and mock AK-47s.

More to the point, when my own girl makes her daily beeline for the dress-up corner of her preschool classroom — something I’m convinced she does largely to torture me — I worry about what playing Little Mermaid is teaching her. I’ve spent much of my career writing about experiences that undermine girls’ well-being, warning parents that a preoccupation with body and beauty (encouraged by films, TV, magazines and, yes, toys) is perilous to their daughters’ mental and physical health. Am I now supposed to shrug and forget all that? If trafficking in stereotypes doesn’t matter at 3, when does it matter? At 6? Eight? Thirteen?

Although Orenstein’s book is actually more even-handed than the general white liberal feminist condemnation of princess culture as uniformly disempowering, it does still assume that princess culture is a problem, because princesses (and all the stereotypically feminine attributes they ideally represent) are bad. Princesses are passive, all body and no mind, future trophy wives who just wait around to be saved by some dude.

Nicki Minaj’s “Moment for Life” video resignifies the iconography of princess culture, mainly in the form of the Cinderella story. She wears a light blue gown, as does Disney’s Cinderella, and she has “glass” slippers. Moreover, she has a ghetto fairy godmother whose British accent is anything but posh. (Interestingly, she has a somewhat complicated and conflictual relationship even with her fairy godmother.) Now, where Minaj most obviously departs from the standard princess narrative is in the song’s lyrics: The “moment” she wants to cherish is not being “saved” by some prince charming, but her accomplishments as an artist. The first verse is all about Minaj’s accomplishments, and her rise to her current level of success. The princess narrative tells women that the most important thing they can do/desire is a fairytale wedding. Minaj uses the imagery of a fairy tale wedding to indicate that the most important thing she’s ever done is dominate mainstream American hip hop.

Nicki Minaj - New Music - More Music Videos

Just as Beyonce’s Video Phone critiques white liberal feminist notions of the “male gaze,” Minaj critiques white liberal feminist views of “princess culture.” Clearly this “rewriting” of white liberal feminist narratives is becoming a common strategy used by black female mainstream musicians; I wonder if we can go further and say it’s a black feminist aesthetic strategy generally?

What everybody doesn’t seem to know about Kanye West’s “Monster”

UMG is being quite strict about policing copies of the video, so your best bet is to google for the most recent and reliable stream.

I finished up a few things over winter break, so I’ve had some time to think more carefully about Kanye West’s “Monster.” The video has gotten a lot of attention, especially for its liberal use of dead women. Now, I’m the last person to minimize misogyny in music, but I think any responsible reading of the video will need to be carefully attuned and attentive to the various contexts that inform the making and reception of the video. So, let’s keep in mind the following:

· Thriller. It might be the most important music video ever. It might be the most important music video by a black artist ever. And, it’s about zombies. Clearly West’s video draws on/calls on Thriller.

· Thriller’s legacy, including but not limited to: NIN’s “Closer,” Rihanna’s “Disturbia.”

· The zeitgeist: Zombies and Vampires are seriously everywhere. There’s The Walking Dead, True Blood, Dead Set, Being Human, the Twilight Series, the Vampire Diaries, the enduring legacy of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Let Me In/Let the Right One In…the list goes on and on. Then there’s Lady Gaga’s whole post-goth monster obsession. Note too that both men and women are portrayed as monsters (zombies, vampires, etc.) in the video.

· Sarcasm. In Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, Angela Davis repeatedly notes the tendency for mainstream white/male audiences to always take speech by black women literally, i.e., at face value. They seemed incapable of recognizing or admitting that black women were intellectually capable of figurative speech (sarcasm, irony, literature). West’s “Everybody knows I’m a motherf*cking monster” is pretty obviously meant to be taken sarcastically. I don’t think he really thinks he is a monster. Similarly, Jay undercuts the whole “monster-as-metaphor-for-macho-hiphop-posturing” by saying that the monstrous persona is really just an attempt to hide his emotional vulnerability. Salon’s Tracy Clark-Flory seems to be guilty of exactly this inability to recognize black figurative speech as such: http://www.salon.com/life/feature/2011/01/11/kanye_dead_women/

· And, one really, super-important historico-cultural consideration: anti-black racism. Two specific forms/tropes of anti-black racism seem particularly relevant to West’s video. First, there’s the portrayal of black men as hypersexualized, predatory monsters who would ravage white women were it not for the protection of white men. In other words, remember Birth of a Nation. Second, there is the tendency (identified most notably by bell hooks in the late 80s/early 90s) for white/mainstream media to act as though the misogyny in hip hop is unique to black culture (i.e., caused by/evidence of black men’s monstrosity), and not emblematic of and thoroughly imbued in mainstream/white American culture. As Catherine Clement has shown, European art music has its own obsession with dead women; name a famous, cherished opera, and it almost certainly includes the death of a woman as a major plot point and source of musical pleasure. There’s Carmen, La Boheme, Tosca, Madam Butterfly, Don Giovanni, Tristan und Isolde…While I certainly think feminists need to question the video’s use of dead women, I worry that many such feminist criticisms are tinged with (perhaps even grounded in) racist assumptions about hip hop and black men.

So, before we go condemning the video as egregiously misogynist, as endorsing the trafficking of women, etc. etc., let’s consider the idea that Kanye is using figurative speech to comment on anti-black racism. Perhaps the claim here is this: Because of anti-black racist attitudes about black men, and especially about what black men do to white women, everybody seems to have think I’m some kind of exceptionally horrific monster, when I’m really just your regular old run-of-the mill asshole.

It’s also interesting to me that the people who condemn the video’s misogyny never look at Nikki Minaj’s performance, which is frequently lauded (especially by those critics who don’t comment on the video’s treatment of women) as the best performance on the track. I’m not at all going to argue that women can’t be misogynist—they can be and quite often are. For example, in this video, I’m not entirely happy with the somewhat trite and stereotypical deployment of the virgin/whore dichotomy. However, I think Nikki’s performance impacts the way West’s and Jay’s verses must be interpreted. Nikki actually visually and vocally stages the very “doubleness” required for figurative speech to work (Interestingly, many black artists adopt this alter ego, perhaps explicitly in order to make it obvious that they’re making shit up, and should not be interpreted literally). There’s mean aggressive Nikki and girly Nikki—we hear these two vocal personae throughout her work, and they appear on this track too. NM uses girly Nikki to undercut the whole “great rapper as monster” conceit that West and Jay develop in their verses. The content of her verse argues, just as her technique demonstrates, that she is, at least at this moment, more technically proficient and critically acclaimed than these other two more established male artists. What’s really interesting is that the ueber-femme “good girl,” the one who’s outwardly not the monster, actually gives the best lines and shows her technical and commercial dominance as an artist. She asserts:

Let me get this straight, wait, I’m the rookie?/but my features and my shows ten times your pay?/Fifty K for a verse, no album out…And I’ll say Bride of Chucky is child’s play/Just killed another career it’s a mild day/Besides ‘Ye they can’t stand besides me.

So the outwardly least monstrous figure—the captive “good girl”—is lyrically, technically, and commercially most “monstrous”. Her game is more devastating than a horror film, she kills careers, etc. Now, we could take this to be some version of (1) “Never trust a big butt and a smile,” or (2) It’s always the hot white women who destroy civilizations (Battlestar Gallactica, hello?), but I don’t think the claim here is that women are “poisonous” and need to be killed (or, as West says earlier, asphyxiated and put in a sarcophagus). West and Jay spend the first part of the video performing what superficially appears to be standard misogyny-as-macho-posturing: their power over women is supposedly evidence of their greatness as men and as rappers. However, they are totally pwnd by a young, femme female rapper in a pink wig whose voice is about as cute and high pitched as bell hooks on helium. So, NM’s performance makes it really hard for us to take KW and Jay are seriously arguing that we ought to treat women like monsters, and women are only good when they’re dead. Instead, they’re saying: “You think we’res sooooo awful. You think we butcher women, that we’re sociopathic, inuman beasts. But really, we’re not. In fact, perhaps you’re projecting your own misogyny onto us.”

I won’t go so far as to say the video doesn’t have any problems. I’m still chewing on my impression that the video tends to portray white women as dead victims, but black women as dangerous monsters. I just want everybody to slow down and think a lot more carefully about the video and the rappers’ performances. Perhaps b/c it’s pop music, people think a superficial reading is sufficient. As I’ve only begun to show above, this video is a lot more complicated and nuanced than any unilateral (or, to use my favorite piece of Hegel jargon, “one-sided”) proclamation about the video can admit.

Fascinating 2010 Music Trends That I Will Examine Further If They Continue In 2011

This is just a quick round-up of some trends I noted in the past year’s mainstream commercial pop. I’ll say a bit about them below, but these analyses are definitely in beta. It will be interesting to see if they develop further, mainly b/c then we’ll have some more (i.e., enough) material to think through…

1. The 90s are back, pt. 1: Pop House

What 70s G-funk was to 90s hip hop, 90s pop house (Black Box, Snap!, etc., basically stuff that was on pop radio in the US in the early 1990s; Chicagoans would call it “B96” stuff) was to 2010’s hip hop. Leaving aside Usher’s transformation into latter-day house divo, there are plenty of examples of direct sampling of 90s pop house tracks:

Kanye West (feat. Jay-Z, Rick Ross, and Swizz Beatz) “Power Remix”—the second half samples Snap!’s classic “I Got The Power”

Lil Wayne and Eminem, “No Love,” takes its title, and a sample, from Haddaway’s “What Is Love”

Usher’s “DJ Got Us Fallin In Love” lifts a lyric and a melody from Soul ll Soul’s “Back To Life

Here’s the Haddaway track, my favorite of the bunch:

One of the interesting questions this trend raises is the “no homo” problem, i.e.,given the “queerness” of many of these 90s house tracks (e.g., Haddaway), how are these mainstream hip hop and R&B artists—mainly male artists—dealing with the perceived queerness of the songs they’re appropriating?

2. The 90s are back, pt. 2: Wait, have we moved on to appropriating the 00s?

So, there’s this track “Animal,” not by the Strokes, but by a band called Neon Trees. The vocals are a clear rip of/homage to Julian Casablancas (in timbre, articulation, and melodic structure), just as the repeated eighth-note bassline with minimal guitar in the verse/jangly guitar in the chorus is very, very This Is It-era Strokes. The Neon Trees’ vocalist shares Casablancas’ distinctive tendency to crescendo on second-syllable vowels. Take a listen:

And here are the Strokes, for comparison:

3. Screw vocoders, we’re going to actually sing as though our voices were processed

I’m really fascinated by this trend. On the one hand, vocal processing is ev.ery.where—Ke$ha, Black Eyed Peas, all over the place. Perhaps in response to this, we’re now seeing vocalists manually mimic digital effects. There are two examples I can think of off the top of my head.

First, and perhaps most obviously, Gaga’s (well, here, it’s the backup singers, around 1:40) mimicking of the sound of a busy signal in “Telephone” (in the beginning she also mimics the sound of a signal breaking up):

Then, there’s Tayo Cruz’s “Dynamite,” where he sings the repeated words, rather than having his vocals cut up in production to create the repeats:

4. The Power Ballad Is Back, or, everybody seems to love Journey and 80s Bon Jovi, so let’s write songs that sound like they do

I think this is brilliant. Journey and Bon Jovi have been popular bar/karaoke/wedding music for several years. So, now, bands are writing songs that sound like these other popular songs. And they get lots of radio play; people can like these songs directly, as they don’t have to deal with the “baggage” of these older, somewhat corny/cheesy/trite songs. There are two main examples I can think of:

First, there is Kings of Leon’s “Use Somebody.” This is straight up Journey-esque power balad. One small example: this track’s soaring backing vocals (oh-woah-oh, oh-woah-oh-oh) aren’t too far off Journey’s “street light peo-po-oh-oh-ooooah.” Please think of “Don’t Stop Belevin’” as you listen to “Use Somebody”:

And for comparison:

And, while we’re on the topic of Kings of Leon, can I just mention that “Radioactive” is clearly drawing heavily on the Breeder’s “Cannonball”?

Then, even more brilliantly, there’s "Heart Heart Heartbreak" by Boys Like Girls. This song has choruses that recreate the feel of Bon Jovi’s Slippery When Wet, and verses that sound like standard post-emo pop-punk. Listen to the talkbox and "wo-oah"s in the chorus--they're very "Living on a Prayer":

5. Mainstream Hip Hop turns to Yacht Rock

This is one of the more immediately puzzling—and perhaps theoretically interesting—trends of the year. Is this just evidence of the exchangeability of all commodities (i.e., that the “use value” or “original meaning” of the sampled songs is so easily evacuated by commodification that it doesn’t mean anything for black dudes to be sampling tracks by/for 80s preppy whites)? Or is there some sort of meaning/intention behind black artists’ appropriation of prepster anthems?

Here are two main examples. First, Jay-Z’s “Forever Young,” which samples Alphaville’s original:

Even weirder is the Black Eyed Peas’ use of Dirty Dancing’s “I’ve Had the Time of My Life”:

And, I do seriously hope that in 2011 somebody can figure out something else, other than “Mick Jagger,” that rhymes with “swagger.”