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Gender And Sexuality In Popular Modern Music Analysis

808 Words4 Pages

Gender and Sexuality in Popular Modern Music The corpus to be analyzed is comprised of the Billboard Top 100 songs as of the week of October 7, 2017, which will cover a broad spectrum of musical genres, including pop, rap, and country. These songs represent cultural attitudes and embody how the youth of today see themselves and others, as well as influencing listeners. Some messages in these popular songs underscore inequalities and oppressions in our society, showcasing the prejudices and discriminations that women and non-heteronormative people face. Furthermore, these songs actually serve to strengthen existing prejudices, increasing these attitudes in listeners. The target audience of this category of music, which is to say the “hottest …show more content…

Yo Gotti describes how the strippers that he sleeps with make a lot of money, saying that his “hoes rake it up”, and warning to “never trust a big butt and a smile”. The overall message of the song is one that demonizes women, and it is worth noting that the singer is black, and “woman hating [is] a recourse of the powerless” (Andersen 2016). Putting women down is how low-status men (in this case, black men) attempt to uplift themselves, and one attack against black women is criticizing any attempts at independence and self-assertion as aggressiveness and being a lesbian. As a result, black women develop homophobic attitudes and ostracize black lesbians for being “un-Black…[and] a threat to Black nationhood” (Andersen 2016). Their fear of anything outside of heteronormativity contributes to the multifold oppression that black lesbians face, rejected by both their gender and race. Homophobia is a pervasive theme in rap music because black men are racially oppressed and attempt to make up for it with violence and hypermasculinity; in fact, “hip hop heteros rely heavily on the inappropriate faggot in order to even exist. In a really twisted sort of way, they rely on the verbal bashing of fags in order to substantiate their manhood” according to one rap artist (Oware 2010). Black lesbians suffer most from these hypermasculine attitudes, which attack

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