VIEW #1
Lil girls talk back to Lil Wayne
In 10 years, will Lil Wayne join Jay Z and come to regret his misogynistic lyrics?
Lots of people are talking about the “Open Letter to Lil’ Wayne,” a song written by two 9 and 10 year old girls known as Watoto From The Nile who call out the rapper on his misogynistic lyrics and disrespect towards women. Check out the video:
The description under the video reads:
Letter to Lil Wayne” is a candid evidence of official from Watoto From The Nile. Growing bushed and fed up with the unceasing humiliation of Negroid women exclusive of Hip Hop music, they vocalise their views and opinions on this melodic track.
What questions does this music video raise?
As an advocate for media literacy I LOVE that this song raises critical questions about authors, audiences, responsibility and representation. These are some of the questions I think it raises.
- Should authors be responsible for the messages they disseminate?
- Do these representations and messages matter?
- How do different audiences interpret these messages and representations?
- Who benefits from these messages? Who is harmed?
- Why are these messages so dominant?
- What is the role of parents?
- What enabled these girls to talk back in this form?
- What does it mean for us to re-represent ourselves when we are unsatisfied with the ways others represent us?
Many of these questions can be applied to so many texts– which is important, because clearly Lil Wayne is only one rapper, and part of a larger issue. While the girls focus on Wayne, this song creates an opportunity for us to acknowledge and challenge an industry and society that constantly reinforces misogyny (hatred towards women).
What questions do you have?
Constructive Criticism, Backlash and Impact
The Crunk Feminist Collective offered some insightful questions and thoughts about the video. They point out some contradictions and points of confusion, while acknowledging that one text cannot cover all points and that there is power in little black girlsspeaking up!
Often when individual artists are criticized, there is a flood of defensive backlash from theartist and his/her fans. Reading the youtube comments will give you a taste of it. A quote from feminist Robin Morgan puts these moments (backlash and all) in perspective for me: “It’s not about blame, but about responsibility; not about guilt, but about change.”
Lil Wayne may or may not take responsibility or change– but the truth is, this Open Letter asks this of all of us. By talking back, Watoto From The Nile remind us that we all have a role to play in this picture– if we indeed love our people, and specifically our women and girls.
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On Watoto From The Nile
- Letter to Lil Wayne
This musical open letter to Lil’ Wayne is getting lot of love!
I want to join the chorus and give a big ol’ YAY to black girls creating media and saying what’s on their minds! Speaking back to Wayne’s misogyny is super important
That said, I wonder about the limits of such a message.
Steve Harvey’s views on women are not progressive. He’s simply peddling a morerespectable sort of black gender relations that still have women in the role of subservient sex goddesses but with a bit more modesty. To set him up as a positive alternative to Wayne misses his own belief in narrow gender roles for men and women. The song disparages Wayne for being single and seems to imply that ideally he should be married or that if he was acting right he would be. Erykah Badu is signaled as a “good” artist despite having worked with Wayne(and she’s single too; tweets is watchin’).
Wayne gets constructive as wholly negative and Lauryn Hill et. al as wholly positive. That good vs. evil split is a little too easy and doesn’t get at the complexity of the issues I have with Wayne’s music. For me it’s not so much the “calling women out their names” as it is his objectification of women that informs his word choice and the earlier trauma in his life that may impact his behavior.
When we are young and maybe a little influenced by our parents, we can go a little too hard in the virtuous/Queen/good black people paint. In speaking back to Wayne and other rappers with misogynistic lyrics we have to be careful we don’t end up creating a new box for women, that is just as limiting if a bit more respectful. The “Madonna” is just as limiting as the “whore”, even if she gets more props.
I ain’t mad at them though and I definitely am sending them love, particularly since they are getting such hateful comments on the video’s Youtube page.
Congratulations, Watoto From The Nile, for rekindling a conversation that needs to be had!
Mission Statement
The Crunk Feminist Collective (CFC) will create a space of support and camaraderie for hip hop generation feminists of color, queer and straight, in the academy and without, by building a rhetorical community, in which we can discuss our ideas, express our crunk feminist selves, fellowship with one another, debate and challenge one another, and support each other, as we struggle together to articulate our feminist goals, ideas, visions, and dreams in ways that are both personally and professionally beneficial.
The CFC aims to articulate a crunk feminist consciousness for women and men of color, who came of age in the Hip Hop Generation, by creating a community of scholars-activists from varied professions, who share our intellectual work in online blog communities, at conferences, through activist organizations, and in print publications and who share our commitment to nurturing and sustaining one another through progressive feminist visions. This collective is a forum where we seek to speak our own truths, and to both magnify and encourage the feminist credos that shape and inform our lives and that we use to engage and transform our world. Crunk Feminism is the animating principle of our collective work together and derives from our commitment to feminist principles and politics, and also from our unapologetic embrace of those new cultural resources, which provide or offer the potential for resistance. Crunk(ness) is our mode of resistance that finds its particular expression in the rhetorical, cultural, and intellectual practices of a contemporary generation.
Beat-driven and bass-laden, Crunk music blends Hip Hop culture and Southern Black culture in ways that are sometimes seamless, but more often dissonant. Its location as part of Southern Black culture references the South both as the location that brought many of us together and as the place where many of us still do vibrant and important intellectual and political work. The term “Crunk” was initially coined from a contraction of “crazy” or “chronic” (weed) and “drunk” and was used to describe a state of uber-intoxication, where a person is “crazy drunk,” out of their right mind, and under the influence. But where merely getting crunk signaled that you were out of your mind, a crunk feminist mode of resistance will help you get your mind right, as they say in the South. As part of a larger women-of-color feminist politic, crunkness, in its insistence on the primacy of the beat, contains a notion of movement, timing, and of meaning making through sound, that is especially productive for our work together. Percussion by definition refers to “the sound, vibration or shock caused by the striking together of two bodies.” Combining terms like Crunk and Feminism, and the cultural, gendered, and racial histories signified in each, is a percussive moment, one that signals the kind of productive dissonance that occurs as we work at the edges of disciplines, on the margins of social life, and in the vexed spaces between academic and non-academic communities. Our relationship to feminism and our world is bound up with a proclivity for the percussive, as we divorce ourselves from “correct” or hegemonic ways of being in favor of following the rhythm of our own heartbeats. In other words, what others may call audacious and crazy, we call CRUNK because we are drunk off the heady theory of feminism that proclaims that another world is possible. We resist others’ attempts to stifle our voices, acting belligerent when necessary and getting buck when we have to. Crunk feminists don’t take no mess from nobody!
Have a question? Contact us at crunkfeminists@gmail.com
>via: http://crunkfeministcollective.wordpress.com/2011/03/03/on-watoto-from-the-ni...
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VIEW #2
Shad - Keep Shining
thefacultyof on Feb 1, 2011
Artist: Shad (http://www.shadk.com)
Title: Keep Shining
Album: TSOL (2010 Black Box / Decon)
To me, the "Keep Shining" video is an ode to the strong and often under-appreciated spirits of women. This video was designed as a candid and thought/emotion-provoking concept. My goals were to create a candid and uplifting experience that featured a wide diversity of women and girls and to also unearth what I felt lay beneath the lyrics: A call to claim one's voice. Early on, I realized a key to this concept: Shad barely appears in the video. The ladies own the lyrics. For me, it's as if Shad is saying "take it, own it, your voice belongs to you." It was my intention to show strength, vulnerability, joy, catharsis and reclamation of the spirit of all those who appeared in these 3 minutes and 44 seconds. My hope is that it will speak to women, girls, men and boys and everything in between. Let's all "Keep Shining".