The most vocal opponents of hip hop over the years have always missed the point.
The industry may overwhelmingly vapid now, but the most disillusioned among fans are those that remember what rap as a social and not only musical form once had the potential to be. Opportunities for cultural critique in hip hop were, by the time ‘Keep Ya Head Up’ appeared, boundless. “Welfare Queen” had already entered the cultural lexicon; black citizenship had been undermined by the beating of Rodney King; black men had been demonized and emasculated by the political lynching of Willie Horton; I could go on.
Hip hop became a space for blacks to secure their own cultural identity, distinct from and resistant to a dominant American culture to which they clearly did not belong. It was a calling card for cultural resistance, and I consider Tupac to have been one of the most important figures in the movement.
‘Keep Ya Head Up’ stands out among most other tracks in the hip hop catalog for me because it’s the product of something we don’t see very often in the black community — even less so in the rap community: male feminism. In its treatment of race, gender and class, ‘Keep Ya Head Up’ is a song that attempts to encapsulate, not only the experience of America’s struggling black women, but also the black men continually undermining them.
Clearly a product of it’s time, it’s a song that asks black men — and black America — to be better.
Recently I received (yet another) recruiting correspondence from the armed services.
Notice something?
That the military actively recruits in socioeconomically disadvantaged areas largely populated by, but not limited to, minorities is no secret; I experienced as much in high school, and was always keyed in to the fact that the military puts serious energy into convincing minority and/or poor Americans with little hope of going to college that the the Armed Services can offer a “better life.”
Well, I happen still to be a minority. But I am not, at the moment, socioeconomically disadvantaged; and as a member of a University community, I’m certainly not living within a soc/ec disadvantaged area.
So what’s the story with the brown faces? And handsome ones, at that. Pity I wouldn’t be able to take advantage, even if I wanted to. Or would I?
“If I had all the money in the world — if I were a wealthy girl,” who happened to be heterosexual — I’d likely be marrying a less wealthy, less educated man despite declining rates of (opposite-sex) marriage overall, according to a study released last week by the Pew Center.
The reverse is, of course, true for men, for whom the economic dependability inherent to marriage is becoming increasingly more important, with men more often playing the dependent. Makes sense. What I tend to think of as marriage-age women (late 20s – 40s) belong to the generations responsible for producing more college-educated women than men. Gender roles are shifting — though not becoming less binary, mind you.
But this article and others like it strike me as easy fodder for the “Marriage is changing / All hope is lost” crew, i.e. social conservatives – a further reminder of how tightly our nation seems to hold to an outdated conception of marriage, despite it being an institution with all forms of easily acknowledged social, economic and political barriers. A conception, no less, that is doomed not to last, if the dead canaries about our nation’s feet are any indication. (Why hello, divorce rate.)
More than one person has mentioned that the (admittedly, sad) marriage trends of African Americans are good indication of the declining state — some would say ’significance’ — of marriage.
But really, we needn’t look further than the same-sex marriage movement: reifying a dusty institution with one hand, subverting its cultural and social norms with the other.
