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CHAPTER 21

Hip Hop Women, Sexuality, and Online Magazines: An Examination of

‘Drive By’ Discourse

Donyell L. Roseboro

In Medias Res: The Middle of Hip Hop

Hip hop, in its varied forms (rap, graffiti, dj-ing, and break dancing), began as an oppositional stance, one that talked back to a world that was dominated by White, middle class values (Phillips, Reddick-Morgan, & Stephens, 2005). In its evolution, this talking back has consumed and been consumed by youth who live outside of the discourse that hip hop claims to represent—that of poor and disenfranchised Black folks. Indeed, hip hop now speaks for a music industry largely controlled by White media moguls who select and market a hip hop image that sells. In this commoditization, commercialization, and consuming process, marketable hip hop identities are those which reinforce stereotypical presumptions about Black people and Black culture as lacking depth and inferior (Asante, 2008; Rose, 2008).

The title of this chapter, “Hip Hop Women, Sexuality, And Online Magazines: An Examination of ‘Drive By’ Discourse,” emerged from a section in the online version of VIBE magazine; the section, entitled, “Drive by News,” captures the central point I will extend—in a virtual world with abbreviated discourses (e.g., texting, blogging, tweeting), young people can learn/develop sexual identities in less time than that required by face-to-face interactions. What messages about sexual identity emerge from surface—drive by—readings of visual images and how does the written context of the visual image disrupt the visual discursive pattern?

Current digital social networking systems, marked by tweeters and bloggers in online environments, literally and metaphorically translates/defines race and gender, beauty, and sexuality across time and space such that possibilities become standards (or standards unravel) in unimaginable speed. If we consider this translation as an intersection between a positivist paradigm that embraces the quantifiable relationships that these networking systems represent and a postmodern framework that allows us to wear multiple identities, then we understand how, in such an era, gender and sexuality expectations are simultaneously reified and undone. Because information, in online mediums, is multidirectional and cyber-spatially contextualized, competing truths can travel synchronously without hindrance or contestation.

This synchronous travel allows us to simultaneously reify and disrupt normative gendered, raced, and sexed expectations without the confines of temporal and spatial distance. For groups who historically operate with inherited oppositional identities, such as Black women (hooks, 2003), online social mediums can, therefore, allow for the more immediate tracing of gendered, raced, and sexed discursive patterns. How and/or in what manner representations of Black/Brown women in the popular imagination has evolved over time is now, instead of a historical pursuit, focused on print media and television imagery, also (and, perhaps, instead), a cyber-spaced one that comes imbued with particular challenges (e.g., how is sexuality construed, configured, and contextualized in online environments? how do individuals represent, misrepresent, alter, or erase themselves in such environments?)

More specifically, online magazines, targeted specifically for Black teens and young adults, present images of hypersexualized women; yet, this discourse comes with corollary textual messages from female hip hop[i] artists who purposefully and selectively use sex to gain power, status, and/or money. The tension between this hip hop Black feminist framework—one that claims power from the misogynistic images in hip hop (see, for example jamilia, 2002; Morgan, 1999; Zook, 1995)[ii] and other generations of feminists who clearly contest the objectification and commodification of Black women’s bodies (see, for example, Collins, 2005, 2006; hooks, 2003, 2009; Spillers, 1997) marks the emergence of a different kind of Black feminist discourse, one that embraces the problematic as powerful and that writes/reads more complicated meanings onto surface representations (Pough, 2002, 2003, 2004). The central question that I will address in this paper is: How do race, gender, and sexuality interface in online hip hop mediums, mediums that target youth audiences?

The History of Hip Hop in the Normal Space-time Continuum

From its jagged beginnings in the mid 1970s through the 1990s the music of hip hop included a number of different dimensions—the innovative rhyming of The Sugar Hill Gang, the political commentaries of Public Enemy, the lyricism of Run DMC or Salt & Pepa, and the soulful mixes of LL Cool J and Queen Latifah; all represented different branches/interpretations of rap and hip hop.[iii] By the 1980s hip hop had hit the big screen with a series of films including Breakin’ (1984), Breakin’ 2: Electric Bugaloo (1984), and Krush Groove (1985). Hip hop had taken such a hold of U. S. popular culture by the 1990s that The Source magazine editor Bakari Kitwana categorized young people born between 1965 and 1984 as the use of the term “hip hop generation.” This generation, he argued, distanced themselves from the preceding generation (Collins, 2006). In positioning themselves at odds with their predecessors, the Civil Rights generation, the hip hop generation adopted a mantra of resistance that became more than the typical adolescent rebellion. This was a resistance that implicitly undercut the politics of “the struggle,” the collective movement ideology that grounded/shaped/inspired much of African American youth identity development during the 1950s and 1960s.

When Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls were murdered in 1996 and 1997 respectively, the context of hip hop changed irrevocably; suddenly the violence that had erupted from the music reached inward and dismantled the music and its people from within. These two very public murders and the conspiracy theories that quickly emerged following their deaths occurred in tandem with the beginning of the digital revolution in the U.S. and the world. According to Rose (2008), the 1990s witnessed the mass consolidation of record labels and radio stations by a few wealthy investors and conglomerates. This, coupled with the launch of Netscape Navigator in the mid 1990s (and subsequent extension of internet capabilities available to the lay public), created a more narrowly controlled hip hop industry, while simultaneously extending the marketing networks for the message of hip hop. In short, at the same time that mostly-White industry executives selectively designed the message of hip hop that could be sold, the internet flattened[iv] the global market.

Theoretical Musings

It seems self evident that the internet could further fragmented an already fragmented self. Various authors across multiple disciplines have discussed self identity as an ongoing, complicated process that is always socially and historically contextualized (e.g. Anzaldua, 1987; Collins, 2000; Dubois, 1903; Gilligan, 1982; hooks, 2000 & 2003; Qin & Lykes, 2006). Indeed, the study of the self has engrossed scholars in philosophy, psychology, psychoanalysis, and cultural studies for millennia. Theorizing identity, in the internet age, requires us to evoke a different language, different analytical metaphors that might explain the human existence in cyberspace. Nakamura (2002) “coined the term ‘cybertype’ to describe the distinctive ways that the internet propagates, disseminates, and commodifies images of race and racism” (p. 3). Perhaps the most complicated tension in cyberspace is that disembodied communication allows individuals to shed the identities that interfere in conversations with those who are non-Othered. Cyberspace is the ultimate colored world in which race loses its permanency and becomes, in some respects, a washable identity. People can color it on or off as they see fit (with the question of how disentangled from our racialized identities we can ever get always remaining).

The Illusiveness of Space: Migration and Displacement in the Cyber-universe

Black people in the U.S. have moved and been moved for generations. This movement has recently been categorized into thirteen distinct patterns including the great migrations of Blacks from the rural south to urban areas in the northern and Midwestern U.S. (Schomburg Center for Research, Dodson, & Diouf, 2005). Lemann (1992) notes that over six and a half million Black Americans left southern areas between 1910 and 1970. By the end of this period “Black America was only half southern, and less than a quarter rural; ‘urban’ had become a euphemism for Black…by the time the great migration was over…race relations stood out nearly everywhere as the one thing most plainly wrong with America” (pp. 6-7). The physical relocation of Black people from southern to northern parts of the country reshaped the social fabric of newly vacated and inhabited areas. Just as Black people gained some sense of economic opportunity in the north and Midwest, so did they endure segregation into low income housing, political disenfranchisement by corrupt politicians and processes, and employment battles for low wage jobs.

Though physical migration as a raced and gendered pattern has been examined by numerous scholars across varied disciplines (Baldwin, 2007; Gregory, 2005; Hunt, Hunt, & Falk, 2008; Lemann, 1992; Sernett, 1997; Stack, 1996), it has not been explored as a virtual phenomenon to study the reconstruction of Blackness (or race, in general) on the internet. While Nakamura’s (2002, 2008) language gives different voice to the expression of race and gender on the internet, it does not address the tangible and intangible implications for identity in moving from a face-to-face world to a virtual one, and it does not consider this movement as part of a larger, historical migratory pattern of people of color. If we consider the internet using a migratory metaphor, then we naturally recall the headlines of the 1990s that spoke of the “digital migration” (speaking of the move to internet use) and more recent headlines announcing the migration to digital television. Generally speaking, migration, in these contexts, refers to a consumer-producer relationship in which consumers take advantage of new media products.

In contrast, migration, as a cultural metaphor, can help us to configure a way of thinking about race in cyber-space using different language. Let me delineate the corresponding images that migration imbues—packing (and unpacking), settling (and unsettling), searching (and discovering), wandering (and wondering), starting (and stopping), losing (and gaining). Each of these images engenders physical and socio-cultural interpretations; I can, for example, literally pack a suitcase just as I culturally unpack the meaning of a complicated term. I can literally settle into a new home just as my presence psychologically unsettles my angry white neighbor. Migration, in a socio-cultural sense thus speaks to the ways that people exist in relationships, the structures and processes that shape interactions, and the mediums that make movement possible.

Such a migratory metaphor also creates possibilities for deconstructing the ways that race and gender interface, for women of color, in cyberspace. Black women scholars have, for generations, spoken of the complexities in defining oneself beyond race in a world that discursively centers race (Collins, 2005 & 2006; Cooper, 1892/1988; hooks, 2003, Robnett, 1997; Wing, 1997). In this centering, some have ignored the ways we multiply identify as raced and gendered and the ways that those identifications occur as part of interior—intersubjective—or intramural conversations—within the same raced and gendered community (Spillers, 1996, 2003). In a face-to-face world in which one’s body transmits definitions of and assumptions about identity, women of color are required to negotiate such complexity. In this negotiation, they must “come out”—articulate an identity position or purposefully choose to remain silent (Roseboro, 2006). Obviously, cyberspace presents different possibilities for the corporeal, particularly if we understand this corporeality as bound by language and “trapped between divergent cultural mappings” (Spillers, 1996, p. 88). Such entrapment certainly poses an interesting dilemma for Black women who have historically been physically enslaved because they were Black and psychologically bound because they were sexual chattel. To then suggest that language and culture present another layer of bondage seems unpalatable.

If we are to then consider the ways that cyberspace might free women of color, a migratory analysis allows us to consider movement as a medium through which to understand the internet as a possible space of reclamation—of distanced-bodied linguistic interplay contextualized by the intangible dimensions of cyberspace. Operating from the assumption that we never completely lose our bodies, I suggest that the internet does not disembody us; rather, it distances the body from discourse. It is somewhat removed but not detached. This removal is temporary and, as such, means that we must always return to the body. The identifying language that we claim, create, or construct in cyberspace thus represents a cyclical exchange between embodied identities that we perform in face-to-face interactions and the selve(s) we articulate online. In this exchange, we engage in differently situated cultural practices (Dimitriadus, 2009), move between differently spaced communications, adjust our language accordingly, and integrate (or are integrated) into distinct spatial contexts.

Youth, Hip Hop, and the Movement of a Generation

Perhaps one immutable constant in hip hop is its persistence as an expression, marker, or conveyor of youth culture (Collins, 2006, Neal, 2002, & Rose, 2008). In its present form, hip hop lyrically captures thug life and markets that life as a commodity that needs no tangible connection to the economic disparities that constructed and maintain ghettos across the United States. Whenever there is a market, there are consumers and producers. In as much as hip hop began as and perhaps hopes/claims to be a discourse of discontent, there will always be a looming question of authorship and production; in whose image is hip hop truly cast? This question of authorship in hip hop implies that the genre, in its movement into accepted capitalist markets, may not represent the very people it claims to represent.[v]

Numerous scholars, both within and beyond academia, have celebrated, critiqued, and bemoaned hip hop as a site of discursive tension, one marked by the politics of performance and the intersections of race, class, gender, and sexuality (e.g. Asante, 2008; Collins, 2005, 2006; Neal, 2004; Rose, 1994, 2008). This performative and very public tension led Rose (2008) to declare that “hip hop is in a terrible crisis” (p. 1). Implied in her statement is that this crisis is one of identity, that somehow, in its integration into capitalist consumer markets, hip hop has lost or forgotten who “it” is. Though hip hop is not universally presented and/or interpreted as a homogenous entity, Rose’s statement touches on what I believe to be a continued expectation of hip hop—that despite its location, literally and figurative, it maintain an oppositional identity, that it represent one bastion of protest/resistance to oppressive structural practices. Though other scholars have and continue to debate this crises and the perpetuation of racist, sexist, and heterosexist performances within hip hop, I am shifting the focus of this discussion to cyberspace.

If, as many scholars of media culture have argued, youth are spending more time online, then a study of the intersection of hip hop and cyberspace might extend the public conversation of the future of hip hop and, by implication, the future of Black youth culture (as it is publicly enacted and interpreted). The numbers of youth using the internet are not surprising to those of us who work with them. According to a survey done by Princeton Research Associates International (2007/2008), 93% of teens use the internet (up from 87% in 2004). Of those, 63% reported using the internet daily, 81% used it to visit websites for movies, music, sports stars, or TV shows while 65% used it to visit social networking sites like MySpace or Facebook. Seventy-one percent of them own a cell phone, 77% of them own a gaming system (e.g. Xbox, Playstation, or Wii), and 74% of them own an IPod or portable music device. They are as Kelsey (2008) has proclaimed, “Generation MySpace” with 24 hour access to virtual clubs whose processes and lingo are purposefully designed to limit/restrict/prevent parent access.

For youth of color the safe spaces of the “real” world are increasingly becoming illusive (Fine & Ruglis, 2009). According to Fine & Ruglis, youth of color interpret their assignment to dilapidated schools with under qualified teachers as banishment, one for which they are implicitly and quietly responsible. This permanent association with failing structures pushes young people towards a “discourse of personal responsibility and shame,” one that identifies the student as failing, unsalvageable, and without recourse (p. 25). Once students inherit or accept this failure, they are displaced from schools and tracked into prisons and detention centers. Their journey represents part of a larger migratory pattern in which those of us who “work in schools and prisons and witness the soft coercive migration of youth of color, especially poor youth of color, out of sites of public education and into militarized and carceral corners of the public sphere” (Fine & Ruglis, 2009, p. 20). This migration, from legitimate to illegitimate space, marks Black youth as dispossessed, lacking, and unwanted. Perhaps most important, it displaces them from sites of possible dignified independence to sites of permanent control.

In this migration, we continue to confront the complex comingling of race, gender, and sexuality. In the tangible world of hip hop, women occupy a strange space. Just as their sexuality is exploited to sell records, some claim that sexual performance as an exercise of power. In an interview with Cane (2009), Lil’ Kim says “One thing about me is that I’m very much like the Black Madonna. I love to reinvent myself and that's because I am a very free person. I do what I feel and I love who I am” (¶10). In that same interview, however, Cane asks Kim about the deletion of the female hip hop artist category from the Grammy awards. In her response, Kim argues that the deletion sends a larger message—“…you don’t delete it because we are a huge part of why the industry is so sexy and so fly. At the end of the day, female rappers like myself, Missy, Eve—we've sold a lot more records than a lot of guys” (¶ 13). In her response Kim interprets the importance of female hip hop arts through a corporate lens; the quantity of records sold denotes one’s worthiness. But she also suggests that the popularity of the industry depends on the sexuality of the very women who are exploited by it.

The intersection of race, gender, and sexuality in hip hop comes through clearly in the lyrics and public personas of female rap artists. Lil’ Kim’s reconstruction of her body has been questioned by fans for years yet Kim has remained largely silent on the issue (Cane, 2009). Missy Elliott, as another example, literally shed much of her body after she hit the hip hop scene. In an interview with Rolling Stone Elliott talks about her image when she first gained fame.

I think that happened for a reason. I wasn't what people wanted to see—the light skin with the long hair blowing in the wind and the Janet Jackson six-pack. So it was honestly better that way, because I got the chance to guest-appear on records, and they loved the records so much that by the time they got the chance to see me, it really didn't matter. They didn't have a chance to judge, like, "OK, who's the big mama on the TV screen?" (Eliscu, 2003, ¶ 4)

In an interview with (n.d.), Elliott adds that her body size and success broadened the image of what women could be in hip hop. She specifically says, “After people had seen me in videos, I realized that maybe I didn't have to change. I think it opened a lot of doors [for other women]” (n.d., ¶ 6). But, by the time she appears on the Ellen DeGeneres show in 2008, Missy had lost seventy pounds and was, in the minds of some fans, falling victim to corporate definitions of beauty. When considering the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality in hip hop, using the words of Kim and Elliott, I was struck by their mutual focus on Madonna, a White, female pop star, as their symbol/model of feminine success in the music industry. While Kim specifically refers to herself as the Black Madonna, Missy also evokes the Madonna metaphor in her 2003 interview with Rolling Stone. The comparison is a fascinating one, particularly considering that Madonna clearly claims her sexuality in her public persona, promotes it as an expression of freedom, and uses it to make millions in the music industry (Cairnes, 2009; King, 1999; NY Rock, 1998). Madonna’s success has also been attributed to her ability to reinvent/ remake/redistribute her image to a public that evolves and to a music industry that generally controls the dissemination of artists’ images. Madonna’s ability, as a White woman in her fifties whose entertainment career has spanned three decades, to shape the expectations and beliefs of Black female hip hop artists in their thirties (whose music is consumed by youth), represents the tension in defining a uniform gendered, sexed discourse in hip hop.

This inability to define a singular gendered, sexed discourse in hip hop does not suggest that there are not singular constructions of gender and sexuality in hip hop; there is certainly a widely disseminated version of gender identity that privileges heterosexuality draped over hypersexual feminine women and super cool manly men. A number of scholars have captured this tension in examining the language of hop hop—pimps, moguls, hos, and vixens—and, in this capture, they illuminate the limited representations of beauty that emerge (Collins, 2005, 2006; Dyson, 2007; Sharpley-Whiting, 2007). Sharpley-Whiting suggests that the dominant images of women in hip hop are those of mulattas, fairer skinned, long-haired women who do not reflect the incredible range of skin shades and hair textures in Blackness. As mulattas, they are not quite White, exist somewhere between the norm and the exotic, and, in their hybridity, occupy a different space—a space that is both Othered and coveted. It is a space mapped onto the body of Black women and men, a space in which lightness (in skin color and weight) matters more for women. As Dyson (2007) adds,

When you survey the landscape, here’s what you get: the extension of the crotch politics of Black machismo; the subordination of black female desire to Black male desire; the re-colonization of the Black female body by the imperialistic gaze of the Black male. Black men want to dominate women according to their own sexual desire. (p. 21)

If we translate Dyson’s language into the migratory metaphor that I introduced earlier in this chapter, then we can begin to articulate the relationship between race, gender, and sexuality as one shaped by patterned movement from one colonizing space to another—from White spaces to Black spaces, both of which operate with patriarchal structures that shape the dynamic relationships between and within these spaces. In other words, the space of hip hop, in its popularly, commercialized presence, reinscribes the white, capitalist, heterosexist patriarchy that hooks (2003) says frames our current interactions. In as much as hip hop started as a movement against White America, it has not translated that discourse of resistance to gendered and sexed norms.

In the Mix: Looking at Gender and Sexuality

for Youth of Color in Cyberspace

Given the push of youth of color out of legitimate spaces and to illegitimate ones in the face -to-face world alongside the contradictory messages about gender and sexuality in hip hop, we must consider the migration of such youth into cyberspace as a migration replete with hope and expectation, one defined by the belief that, surely, in cyberspace, life might be different. With this general framework, I conducted a conceptual content analysis (Krippendorf, 1980, 2004; White & Marsh, 2006) of the online version of VIBE magazine, a magazine that defines itself as the magazine that is re-defining hip hop. I sought to identify the movement of race, gender, and sexuality via this particular online medium targeted specifically to youth of color. In my analysis of twelve web page archives and 300 articles included with those archives, I coded the documents, identified conceptual patterns, and conducted constant comparative analysis to select themes and to extrapolate relationships between themes. Because I used the “drive by” metaphor as a lens through which to examine the data, I read the documents quickly and took notes only on headlines and captions. To enhance the analysis, I looked at visual-spatial patterns inherent in the web site design, movement of text and images particular to each web page, and placement of bodies alongside text. In the end, I identified three primary thematic categories: violence, life, and success.

The Context: VIBE Magazine Re-designed

In the summer of 2009 I started a preliminary analysis of online hip hop magazines targeted to youth of color. After reviewing VIBE, Sister 2 Sister, Honey, and Hoodgrown, I selected VIBE as the primary source to study because it had the widest circulation and had been publishing the longest. Quincy Jones founded VIBE magazine in 1992 with the support of Time Warner chairman Steven J. Ross. By 2005 the magazine had a guaranteed circulation of 850,000 (Media, 2006). When the magazine abruptly ceased circulation in June of 2009, The New York Times remarked,

In the current context—a black president, rap stars so ubiquitous even your mom knows who 50 Cent is, pop songs that feature drive-bys from the M.C.’s of the moment—Vibe would seem less necessary. But it’s worth remembering what an easy target rap was in the culture wars of the early ‘90s; Vibe did not sanitize rap so much as give it its cultural due. If there were no Vibe, contemporary black music and culture would not be quite so writ into the mainstream (Carr, 2009, ¶ 4).

VIBE, in many ways, served as the medium by which hip hop became a unit (as opposed to disparate factions) and was translated to mainstream America. By 2006, the magazine was purchased by the WICKS group and, at that time, owners hoped “to extend the VIBE brand into multiple media platforms and distribution channels, while strengthening its unique position among its base of young multicultural consumers” (Business Wire, 2006, ¶ 4). By June of 2009, VIBE abruptly shut down citing lagging sales and reduced circulation. So for several months, I had nothing to study; this led me to consider the meaning of and future of hip hop without online magazines, particularly VIBE, which for so long had disseminated the stories of hip hop, packaging them in a way to appeal to mass audiences.

By August of 2009 VIBE was undergoing a resurrection. Purchased by InterMedia[vi] partners, a private equity fund, and led by new editor Jermaine Hall, the magazine shifted its focus from print to online delivery—the print version is now published quarterly while the online version is updated by the minute (New York Times, 2009). When the web site returned, I was stunned by the differences in design. The old VIBE site had been defined by its Black background; the resurrected VIBE sparkled in its Whiteness. The new site was, for lack of a better word, busy. It was framed by a movie advertisement from the John Travolta, Denzel Washington film, The Taking of Pelham 123 which, if you clicked on it, resonated with the sound of gun shots. As I studied the new design, I contemplated how the site was newly framed; it had moved Black and Brown bodies from a dimension of Blackness to a universe of Whiteness with, interestingly enough, more white bodies interspersed in news articles. The site was not only physically White, but was framed by advertisements, of varied forms, all representing clear corporate connections. Indeed, these ads (from Apple and McDonalds to name two) reinforced the delicate existence of the magazine—without them, the magazine could not survive.

In examining the articles and their corresponding photos I noted a few things, some of these were not surprising. Of the 224 photos I examined, 163 of those were of men (73%) while 61 were of women (27%). While women were obviously underrepresented, it seemed that the same women continued to appear in photos with Beyonce, Rihanna, Jill Scott, Eve, Foxy Brown, Alicia Keys, Erika Bayduh, Mariah Carey, and Kim Kardashian most often depicted. Of every web page “cover” that I viewed, Chris Brown and Rihanna were depicted—separately. There were standing sections covering news, music, culture, VIBE TV, and blogs. Often, culture sections covered the release or popularity of a new technical gadget (e.g. iphones, the new Apple Tablet) but they also covered fashion trends, and decision-making dilemmas (e.g. “Did Mos Def Sell out for a Cell Phone Company?” posted March 22, 2010). And, perhaps the least surprising but also most thought provoking trend was the increasing presence of white folks; Asher Roth, Zac Posen, Collie Budz, Lady Gaga, Daniel Merriwheather, even Sarah Palin all grace the cover of the online hip hop magazine.

Being Booked and Making a Mark: Thematic Representations in VIBE

On February 18, 2010, VIBE ran a news story entitled “Drake Being Falsely Booked for Shows.” When I initially coded this headline, I associated booked with the category violence. Obviously, to be booked means that one has engaged in some sort of illegal activity, been caught by the police, and subsequently charged for the crime. But as I considered the relationships between this particular code and the other themes of life and success, I realized that booked has another meaning; one can book an artist, event, or location. To be booked, in the entertainment industry, means that one is popular, earning money, and gaining recognition. So while the initial headline pointed to a recurring theme of crime in the magazine, the alternative meaning of being booked represents a more necessary connection to hip hop—one can be popular without going to jail or having a prison record (e.g. Jay-Z, Mos Def, Beyonce), but one cannot be successful without selling tickets to concerts, getting radio air time, and promoting records at marketing events. On one hand the metaphor represents a segregation of artist from fans, while on the other hand, the comparison illuminates the artist’s public performance in front of fans.

The power of the first metaphor persists, however, as rappers revolve in and out of prison. Dyson (2007) argues that this prison metaphor reflects the lives of Black male rappers in as much as the prison has become a “tragic natural,” a space that has captured and been embraced by Black males (p. 14). Just as this metaphor suggests that Black male bodies are objects to be incarcerated and controlled, so does the metaphor offer redemptive hope. In the pen, separate from the free world, Black rappers can repent and contemplate their wrongs, work to reconstruct an identity that is more “passable,” and emerge from prison, phoenix-like, newly formed. As hip hop has evolved and this prison metaphor taken root, it shapes the language used to communicate through and disseminate VIBE. Of the headlines I examined, there were twenty seven words and phrases (many of them repeated in various iterations of multiple headlines) that I coded and categorized as violent—e.g. shooting, murder, gun, crime, whip-lashed. While these violent themes were explicit, the alternative definition of booking was implicit; every time a rappers goes to jail she or he loses money, opportunities, and fame (although the belief still exists that jail time boosts a rapper’s street credibility and, ultimately her or his record sales).

To add another layer to this metaphor of booking, VIBE posted a “Higher Learning Quiz: Does Your Favorite MC have a Diploma?” on March 28, 2010. In it, there were ten rappers and ten questions. For each rapper, readers were supposed to decide if the rapper received a (a) high school diploma, (b) college degree, or (c) neither. Of the ten listed, six of them had some college education (and four of the six had college degrees), two had high school diplomas and two had neither. Obviously, rappers are lyricists and poets, able to reappropriate, reconstruct, and resurrect words in rhythmic ways. If six of the ten listed in this survey had some college education, then it stands to reason that we need to consider the metaphorical implications of book (as dictionary defined)—a bound collection of pages, a published work, or a bound set of blank sheets. Literally, a book can be filled with words or without words; it can be bound or it can be electronic. Figuratively, a book can facilitate readers’ escape from or connection to the world. For a rapper, however, the intellectual persona remains questionable; few make the college graduate image part of their public persona.

What makes this metaphor problematic is that it tells us something about the roots of rap and hip hop. If the bookish intellectual image does not sell and is, therefore, rejected by the very artists who lived this reality, then we must ask why? Dyson (2007) offers one possible response. He argues, “the metaphysical root of hip hop is connected to the ghetto whether or not many of its artists grew up there” (p. 11). The ghetto, as we know it, lacks the resources, the tangible artifacts of wealthy, upper class reality—high priced cars, homes, name brand clothes. From this position then, any rapper who connects with the ghetto can become the Horatio Alger of hip hop, the rags to riches model of success. Though Alger’s characters do possess a desire for intellectual inquiry, this inquiry was never dependent on books. Instead, Alger’s character’s success depended most on their moral character and common sense (Sandlin, 2006). If in marrying themselves to the ghetto, hip hop artists articulate a rags to riches narrative, one that is dependent on street smarts (e.g. common sense) to succeed, then the relative absence of books from artists’ performed narratives should come as no surprise.

That six of the ten artists in the VIBE Higher Learning Quiz do have some college education suggests at least one interesting possibility—the hip hop industry of today has no more room for real thugs from the ghetto, no more time to deal with the Tupacs, Biggies, and 50 cents of the world. If VIBE is any indication of what has become the norm in hip hop, then it behooves us to take note of which rappers they highlight; David Banner who attended Southern University, Ludacris who has a business management degree from Georgia State University, and Plies who graduated from Southern Florida with a nursing degree all represent rappers who in their move to fame somehow shed the image of the book toting, on-foot college student in pursuit of a formal educational experience.

Finally, the absence of women rappers from VIBE’s higher learning quiz is noticeable. Of the ten featured artists, only one is female— Nicki Minaj. This is puzzling considering that they do still exist. As we consider the metaphorical implications of booking to Lil’ Kim, Foxy Brown, and Missy Elliott, neither attended college. Of the three, Lil Kim and Foxy both have served jail time. Missy boasts the most success with six of her albums being certified Platinum by the Recording Industry Associates of America (RIAA). Though not a rapper, Beyonce has been recognized by the RIAA as the “Queen of gold and platinum in the past decade” and by Billboard as the “female artist of the decade” (Pedersen, 2010, ¶ 1 & 13). Beyonce attended high school, but it’s not clear whether or not she received a diploma. Clearly, she is renowned worldwide and, launched her last tour in November 2009 in Croatia (King, 2009). Rihanna left her home country of Barbados at 16, moved to the U.S. and launched her singing career; no mention is made of her having earned her diploma or GED along the way. Using these six female hip hop artists, I noted an interesting trend; none of them attended college and the most successful, Beyoncé, perhaps has not even a high school diploma or equivalent. Though this educational comparison was not a part of the intent of my original study, the facts that arose after I started this project offer some intriguing questions: (1) Why does it seem that successful female hip hop artists are less formally educated? and (2) If they are, does this fact lend credence to the notion that because female’s success in Hip Hop is so closely linked to women’s sexuality, that, for women, there is an inverse correlation between academic training and financial success? While I do not have time, in the space of this paper to answer these questions, I pose them as a point of beginning for another inquiry.

In being booked, for performances and prison time, artists (as represented by VIBE) are intensely concerned with leaving a mark. This mark leaving relates specifically to their financial success, their life experiences, and their world fame/notoriety. Headlines cover issues such as, the past, history, rebirth, reuniting, revival, getting married, interracial relationships, and health. Leaving a mark means that an artist emerges, performs, evolves, and sits down as VIBE blogger Murphy (2010) argues in “Murphy’s Law: Whitney & Mariah…Sit Down.” Citing age (Whitney at 46 and Mariah at 39) and a number of failed or embarrassing performances (including Houston’s disappointing concert in Brisbane, Australia), Murphy ends his commentary by saying, “Goodnight divas. It’s time to salvage what’s left of your remarkable, legendary careers. At least we’ve still got Sade” (¶ 6). Though Whitney and Mariah are not hip hop artists, Murphy’s commentary suggests that they are being judged through a hip hop lens, one that claims to have a particular insight into the desires of pop/youth culture. In the hip hop world, artists come and go, their time in the spotlight does not span decades.

This is due, at least in part, to the currency of hip hop—both its corporate and temporal influences. The hip hop that is marketed is the hip hop that makes money and that hip hop must be trendy, what’s “in,” and what’s desired. From a gendered and sexed perspective then, older women (and perhaps men, although one could argue that men are given more leeway—Russell Simmons, for example, at the age of 50 was still doing Def Poetry on HBO) cannot be the face of hip hop. The question thus becomes, “when and how do artists age out of hip hop?” And does this aging out come earlier for women who, as Lil Kim said, make the industry so “sexy” and “fly?”

Of Prisons and Closets: Or, When Moving on Up

Scrambles the Personal and Political

When Collins (2005) compares racism to imprisonment and sexual oppression to being closeted, she calls forth two metaphors that speak to the lives of Black women in hip hop. Without question, many of the images of women in hip hop are sexually exploitive, positioning women as objects—they can be either vixens or hos, but the distinction between the two is negligible. The best analogy I can make is that of the prostitute and escort; both are sexually objectified and used, the former is blue collar, while the latter is white collar. Hip hop language also shifts in its depiction of women from bitches to glamazons—both exercise power, the latter with a bit more finesse. Men in hip hop can be moguls or pimps—the former elicits images of Jay-Z in a limousine, while the other calls forth images of DJ (Hustle and Flow) in his broken down ride. They can be gangsta or mafia—the former elicits images of Tupac, shot four times, while the latter calls forth images of Three 6 Mafia winning a Grammy award for their soundtrack “It’s Hard out Here for a Pimp”; gangstas’ lives end in tragedy, mafia bosses do not face the same inevitable fate.

Given these comparisons, the metaphors identified in my study of VIBE’s online magazine extend our understanding of how hip hop; and the people who construct it, believe in it, and live it, represents much more than a struggle for money and power. If it is also a story of being booked and bookless, then it is a story of alternate spaces. If, in being booked, artists either lose their freedom of expression or they enter stage right to embrace a space of unlimited expressive possibilities, then hip hop is about negotiating those spaces, whether they be tangible or metaphorical. If hip hop is a rags to riches story predicated upon some sort of intellectual inquiry, but lacking (or rejecting) book knowledge, then it is a story of alternative intellectual space—a space without the binding that books imbue. Finally, if hip hop is a story about leaving one’s mark, then it is about life, a life that demands professional success and some personal normalcy.

In this examination I have studied hip hop through the lens of migration and I have arrived at hip hop existing in a rather in-between space. Though it originated in urban areas, ghettos, many of its current artists have no roots in the ghetto. Though is originated as an art form of resistance, its acceptance into and marketing by mainstream corporate media have altered that rebellious voice. Though it’s original mass dissemination came through shelf magazines like VIBE, its current existence is dependent on online spaces with a capability of revision that does not exist with print media. It is, perhaps, a third space, one that exists between what seem like oppositional categories (Moje et. al., 2004). In between first spaces (informal spaces like interactions and media) and second spaces (formal spaces like school and church), third spaces allow for the intersection of disparate meanings, actions, and discourses (Lynch, 2008/2009). Tiemann (2008) adds that third spaces shape political awareness and foster the relational skills necessary for working with and through contradiction in public life.

As the migration of Black people represents a history of movement from one oppressive space to a differently oppressive space, so has the movement from face-to-face representations to online delivery mediums created new possibilities for the construction of raced, gendered, and sexed identities. But such construction also offers new opportunities for racist and sexist image dissemination online. If in the face-to-face world, youth of color are being moved to the carceral sphere, then the crime-ridden, booking discourse of VIBE’s online magazine simply recreates that sphere in cyberspace. VIBE’s dependence on online advertisements also contributes to the re-framing of the magazine as one that is constricted and controlled by corporate America. Considering the magazine’s recent demise and resurrection, the possibility that it could freely market whatever image of hip hop it wishes to market seem slim at best. Perhaps the new owners should consider a slogan change, from “redefining hip hop” to “writing hip hop in the image that keeps us afloat.”

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Notes

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[i] I do not have time, in the space of this chapter, to elaborate on the complicated nature of hip hop. Peoples (2008) identifies hip hop as an umbrella term that encompasses at least four connected yet distinct representations—DJ-ing, graffiti art, rap, and break dancing.

[ii] Hip hop feminists do not embrace the misogyny in hip hop, but they do claim the critical space engendered by those images

[iii] I do not have the time and space in this paper to do justice to the history of Hip Hop. Other authors have articulated that history in complexity and depth. See, for example, Bakari Kitwana’s (2002) The Hip Hop Generation: Young Blacks and the Crisis in African American Culture. New York: BasicCivitas Books.

[iv] Thomas Friedman (2005) extended this concept in his book The World is Flat.

[v] In 2006 whites made up 60.1 percent of the consumers of hip hop while blacks made up 25 percent (Rose, 2008, p. 88).

[vi] Interestingly, InterMedia also owns The Gospel Channel and Thomas Nelson, Inc., the largest worldwide publisher of Christian products.

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