Kanye: Contradicting Misogynist or Misunderstood Esotericism?

Hip-hop and rap music have an interesting position in American society. On one side, it’s seen as a terrorizing menace that perpetuates criminal and sexist ideals, and to others it represents a non-conformist voice reflecting urban communities and their right to be heard. I’m getting my feet wet on this particular genre of music and while I’m still just getting acquainted, it hasn’t taken me long to realize there are powerful messages behind the surface that deviates from what most perceive.

Kanye West is a prominent figure in the realm of hip-hop. Controversial, sure, but regardless whether you agree with his methods or not, this guy is artistically brilliant and very socially aware. Without critically analyzing his actions and lyrics, Kanye seems strikingly prideful and pompous with little regard to others. But knowing that nothing is actually as it seems, I caught interest in this bombastic icon. Kanye’s music embraces obscurity and isn’t easily grasped in the light of day. He uses fantasy, satire, and hyperbole to stream together an autobiography or point of view, with little concern to literal translation. This underlines the consideration that rap/hip-hop is, by definition, poetry.

His new video for the song Monster roused a backlash of anger over the obvious use of female exploitation. The apparent displays of violence and brutal sexual treatment toward women caused enough controversy for MTV to ban the video after receiving a slew of petitions. My reaction wasn’t different. I felt puzzled and irritated that someone with a history of powerful metaphors and context would completely degrade his credibility as one who fights injustices of the system. I was curious how someone can fight for the rights of one minority group while slandering another, in tandem, and determined to find a deeper, less offensive meaning.

Let’s think about Kanye’s past involvement with women. The infamous dramatics of interrupting Taylor Swift to defend Beyonce left everyone outraged and left me scratching my head. The whole incident wasn’t that big of a deal… and did anybody consider the fact he was absolutely RIGHT? His context was making a solid point- that black women aren't recognized for their talent as much as white women, even when it's basically unquestionable who's more deserving. Aftermath media stories of a broken up Swift left shaking on stage because of another angry black male were obnoxious. Poor Taylor? Please. I’m sure she’ll figure a way to eventually fight through the mental anguish. Keeping consistent with Kanye’s relation with women, I’m starting to think this video is just exposing the injustices of white women vs. minority women.

I found some insight on the blogosphere that noticed a story being told here. In the video, all of the completely dead women are white, while women of color were in a zombie, otherwise “monster,” state. I see here that Kanye is playing up the role (monster) given to him by America and further suggesting this role doesn’t just yield to the individual, rather a label all people of color have been and are continually stricken with. He’s virtually personifying the role people not only wanted to see, but forced him to embody. Nicki Minaj’s guest appearance is clearly categorizing the roles women have to pick from: Controlling bitch or innocent plaything. There’s an important undertone in the video, like I suspected, but I’m still not sure if I agree with it.

As someone who’s passionate about fighting against injustices and for civil liberties/human rights, I proudly stand in defense of every voice, idea, person that struggles to survive America. Kanye as a self-proclaimed mama’s boy shouldn’t ignore the objectification, backbreaking pressure, standards and boundaries all women are subjected to. Fighting against one "ism" should be fighting against all "isms." He’s become apart of the imperfections he stands against. Remaining secure in one perspective of a group without considering another lens is making the same mistake as the ignorant majority. And by grouping people into a framed judgment is muffling the efforts of progressive rebels fighting alongside. With all this said, there's no doubt that being oppressed in one area doesn't mean you're not privileged in another- and I'm aware my counterpoint is relatively weak, but it's important to consider. Ultimately, my respect Kanye as an artist and an intellect is unwavering, but he’s still evolving and he is holding to ideas that should be provoked. Just probably not ones that the majority disputes- always ignore the majority.

Lara Logan and Media Sexism

A few weeks ago, there was an explosive conversation (debate) in my Race, Gender and the Media class. It started with somebody mentioning Lara Logan, the CBS news correspondent who was sexually assaulted while covering the Egyptian protests. Logan, accord­ing to an offi­cial CBS announce­ment, was attacked by a group of about 200 Egyp­tians and “suf­fered a bru­tal and sus­tained sex­ual assault and beat­ing before being saved by a group of women and an esti­mated 20 Egypt­ian sol­diers.” Unfortunately, the reaction to Logan’s tragedy was not of sympathy or respect, rather an intense media debate about women’s place in danger zones. Instead of criticism being focused on the mob who attacked Logan, it was placed directly on Logan herself. This woman was actually assaulted, then blamed for it because she’s attractive, has blonde hair and should have known what she was getting herself into.

Of course, this is disgusting. I have trouble glorifying these comments by acknowledging them. Funny enough, someone in class had the audacity to agree. Basically, this person asked how anyone can really be surprised? Elaborating that this is pretty much expected when you put an attractive female in a barbaric place like Egypt. My (correct) professor went off. Rightfully so! Here’s the problem with this: This woman gets the one of the biggest career opportunities to cover this protest, she’s fiercely competing with men to get this chance, she’s already mustering more courage than most people could think of, and then suddenly she’s supposed to say, “Oh, wait, ya know guys, I’m a woman, this is probably not such a good idea, I mean, I might get raped or something right? Please give me more protection.” Why would she think this? Her job is implicitly dangerous. Suggesting that women need more protection is condemning women as a burden, more expensive to employ and more demanding to protect. Anything could happen at any time, to any human. The fact women are more likely to get raped doesn’t discount that we’re less likely to be a target of murder. There’s possible danger for everybody; saying women need extra protection is vocalizing a difference between men and women and, by definition, is sexist.

The second half to this problem is the assumption, or stereotype, of Egypt as an uncivilized, barbaric country, expected to behave like this. Life in Cairo is actually very progressive and Westernized. Women appear unveiled and have rights and are not, in fact, public raping tools. The combination of this erroneous stereotype and sexism as justification for Lara Logan’s sexual assault is severely flawed.

There is no consolation for a woman that was forced to endure such brutal attacks, but there is seriously no right to blame the victim. The people in my class weren’t malicious for thinking such things, but even the most unconscious sexism is socially toxic.

The Jurisdiction of Reality Repulsion

“In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.”—Andy Warhol

“In the future, everyone will be anonymous for 15 minutes.”--Banksy

We have entered ourselves in a nuclear holocaust. In a perfect world, I would never know the names Situation, Snooki, Lauren Conrad, or Danielle Staub...but this is what the current famous-for-nothing modern era has brought us. Reality stars. Why are they lurking in every dark corner of life with nauseating tenacity? Situational Mike is making 5 million this year. If that doesn't evoke the bile in your throat, then I envy your stomach. Why are these seemingly good-for-nothing-nobodies so popular in our culture? Owe it up to PR.

Now, this is not the type of industry I ever plan to engage in. I do have standards after all. Although, I will say reality stars' publicists are very impressive. Injecting meaning and value into a sub-par product.

While reality TV is much more prevalent than it has ever been, the credit to these asininity advocates belongs to the publicists tackle on smart business. If you plug “reality stars becoming stars” into Google, you’ll unearth plenty of sites teaching you how to constructively treat you’re newfound, undeserved stardom! It’s interesting how easily you can fudge up fame. Be careful not to “burn out your controversy,” or “be yourself, because real people are boring.” Hmmrmph…

When Jersey Shore aired an episode depicting a male character slapping another female, basically nothing happened. What did happen was a "suspended" Twitter account for illegitimate behavior. Fascinating. Don’t be quick discount the possibility this is a brilliant publicity stunt. This makes people have to figure out why! Behavior on the show has no cause and effect relationship with a Twitter account, so this character must be super enticing. Scandal and juicy controversy are sexy to society. We have to know more, even if our mind is tingling with numbness.

This epidemic conjunction with PR and reality TV has started to bleed out of the aorta and out of control. Now, public relations itself has become a target of the perverted humiliation thanks to the reality hooker herself, Kim Kardashian. Her newest reality show called “Spin Crowd” depicts the realm of entertainment PR in an exaggerated, morose way. At least she nailed the desired verisimilitude from the get go by graciously calling it the "Spin Crowd"....thanks Kimmy! Genuine publicists loooove the term "spin."

Whether reality television and their stars agree with us or not, they’re there, and successfully so. Publicity is an amazing tool that empowers the otherwise mundane, into an omnipotent, megalomaniac entity.

We've Made a Fetish out of our 'Stuff'

So I read this book....and I want to talk about it. It's called The Code of Advertising: Fetishism and the Political Economy of Meaning in the Consumer Society, by Sut Jhally. It covers the basics of Marxism, and its relations to products, and the labor force.

Jhally makes it apparent we don't know about our products. Questions concerning the production, distribution, exchange, and consumption of any goods today are frivolous in our climate of advanced capitalism. Who's hands touched this? What were the working conditions like? How much did he/she get paid for it? Was it a child? We are alienated from these worthy questions.

Indifference to the inherent foundation of our goods has led to a mind-blowing phenomenon called commodity fetishism. “Commodity fetishism is seen when an excessive proportion of individual activities are channeled through the market so that the commercialized sector of our lives is unduly large.”

I’ve never had to think twice about the concept of “surplus-value” or profit. Jhally explains there is an exchange of equals in the workforce, worker’s labor for worker’s wage. Although, with this basis, how is profit possible? The shocking, yet not so shocking, fact that workers are producing more value with their labor than their own labor is worth, has bled into the political economics of broadcast media.

Cable networks sell audience-viewing time to advertisers for more money than I can sit comfortably with. The cliffhanger rests in how much are we, as an audience, worth? Networks fill the empty time they own by buying the watching power of the audience, or the capacity to watch. Advertisers buy our watching power (consciousness) from networks for more than what was originally paid, thus valorizing (establish and maintain the price of a commodity by governmental action) our consciousness. We're actually working when we watch TV.

We are paying the networks through our own consciousness. That's irritating. Think you get out of it with new technology like TiVo and Fios? Nope. The cyclical motion of us working in a non-media environment to pay for those commodities validates us right back where we started. Our money, our time, and our mind is handed over to broadcasting networks whether we like it or not.

So why? Why do we even watch TV? Studies show it's addictive, that we don't even really like it, that we feel guilty when we admit just how much we actually watch. Interesting...

Now, I’ve never been convinced of anything extremely negative about the realm of advertising. Although, it only took the first few points of The Code of Advertising to significantly make me question my sense of security.

Jhally’s impressively unbiased view of his observations initially made me assume he was a critique of advertisement. His illustration of Marxism unveiled worker suffrage that seemingly has no signs of improvement. We’re under the mercy of advertisement. His comeback to the defense of advertisement was that it doesn’t offer a reality that isn’t there; rather it reflects aspects of our social life that can be taken interpretively. This isn’t an outlandish concept, although it’s not exactly....soothing. Perhaps it is not advertising I should scapegoat, instead, the industry is merely trying to survive in the world of capitalism. Ultimately, my scope has been broadly widened.