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Entertainment November 30, 2016
When you take a look at some popular hip-hop songs songs today, it’s quite easy to find traces of macho culture.
In Kanye West’s song “Champions (Round & Round)” he raps:
Supermodels think I’m handsome
You might think I’m too aggressive
Really I think I’m too passive
‘Til I pull out the chopper, start blastin’
In the beginning of this song, he’s not just talking about his perceived aggression, but he also uses his “chopper” – or rifle – as a threatening and violent image. The song continues:
I blow the check up, detonation
Kill ‘em one by one, final destination
Time my destination . . .
I’m a mothafuckin’ champion
This right here the fuckin’ anthem
You get the picture.
Macho guys are typically pictured in an obnoxiously tight muscle shirt or as the man who won’t let his girlfriend talk to anyone else at a party. According to the dictionary, someone who is macho manifests behavior “in an assertive or dominating way.” In much simpler terms, it is the “tough guy” image that perpetuates violent and domineering behavior.
Hip-hop culture often encourages this type of aggression and toughness. According to an interview on Everyday Feminism about macho culture, LA security guard Warren Reed believes that “image is everything. If a guy doesn’t fit this certain mold, they get picked on. Kids emulate that to fit in.” Although his family expected him to be tough, Reed was one of many men who did not see himself that way. These expectations then led him to withdraw from his community.
Now, nobody here is trying to bash Kanye West or the song at all. In fact, “Champions” is a great song that takes listeners back to music’s hip-hop roots, which emerged around the late 1970s to 1980s, with songs like NWA’s protest song from their 1988 “Straight Outta Compton” album, “Fuck Tha Police.”
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Avid hip-hop followers (or those who watched Dr. Dre’s film, “Straight Outta Compton”) already know that hip-hop culture started when the New York Cross-Bronx expressway was constructed, displacing a number of black and Hispanic families. Hip-hop, then, became a part of the black identity; younger generations of these displaced families used the music style as an outlet to channel the aggression that stemmed from crime-ridden, impoverished, desperate ghettos. Hip-hop’s favored reality has been the gritty, angry and rebellious depictions of the inner city. But somewhere along the way, this history got lost in translation.
Hip-hop became increasingly popular when “Yo! MTV Raps” aired in 1989. Prior to this show, hip-hop hadn’t been given much airtime because producers feared their predominantly white audiences wouldn’t be receptive to black culture. Hip-hop’s popularity today proves those producers wrong. Instead of ignoring the genre, MTV found that hip-hop was especially marketable to white suburban teens, thus encouraging its commercialization.
Soon after, music shifted from the political anthems of KRS-One to the hyper-violent, hyper-masculine and hyper-sexualized music we hear today. Producers and artists started to create a new artist persona that consisted of caricatured blackness based on violence and one-dimensional characters who lack social consciousness. For example, in Vanilla Ice’s “Ice Ice Baby” (1990), Vanilla Ice is featured in a dark, empty parking lot that he and his “black crew” vandalize. As he’s singing his song about how “the party is jumping with the bass kicked in,” he sports baggy attire, pierced ears and long, gold necklaces while maintaining his angry, “macho” expression.
As ridiculous as this may sound, Vanilla Ice was instructed to act this way. When Vanilla Ice was interviewed in Robert Clift’s documentary, “Blacking Up: Hip-Hop’s Remix of Race and Identity,” Vanilla Ice says that he initially wrote the song at sixteen and was surprised at its rapid growth in popularity.
“I was getting paid left and right; money was flowing in and I didn’t know there was any consequence at that point,” he tells Clift. “I thought everybody knew what they were doing and then I realized I was a puppet for this whole thing. I did a lot of things I didn’t wanna do. I’d say, ‘Hell no, I ain’t doing that.’ But then they’d go, ‘Here’s a million dollars,’ and I was just like, ‘Hell yes I’m doing that.’ The image was pop, new kids on the block type thing. I was a novelty act.”
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So in reality, major record labels have been controlling the creative process for a long time. These labels favored violent, “masculine” music over the original sociopolitical messages of hip-hop out of a fear that audiences wouldn’t respond to any deviations from the formulaic rap we see today. So it’s not entirely the artist’s fault for producing this type of work. The reason the hip-hop we listen to today is predominantly macho is because, simply put, macho sells.
But as Everyday Feminism discusses, macho culture hurts. It not only hurts the women who are expected to submit to these sexist ideals, it also hurts the men who fall outside of the current definition of masculinity. According to the article, macho culture can:
Just as Reed was expected to act in a hypo-masculine way, other men and women are growing to consider the macho ideal as normal. They can be influenced to believe it’s okay for men to be aggressive. That it’s okay to yell at your partner or to be violent towards other people if it means proving yourself.
Not only that, but this emphasis on masculinity promotes heteronormative ideologies that shun feminine qualities in men. By definition, “heteronormative” is a worldview that promotes heterosexuality (a romantic or sexual attraction between persons of the opposite sex or gender) as the normal or preferred sexual orientation. Heteronormative ideologies, for example, support the idea that if a man is feminine, then he’s gay. These beliefs marginalize queer artists, listeners and communities for not being “man enough.”
It would be easy to say that the sure-fire way to combat this problem is to educate the masses, but it’s more complicated than that, especially when there are bigger, more powerful corporations controlling whether or not a message is successful. As Jon Tribble, a publisher, editor and educator, tells Everyday Feminism, “What I fear is that [people] will accept that a fairly limited version of themselves in the world is enough.”
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So although educating people isn’t going to make everything squeaky clean again, it’s still important to start a dialogue about the influence of hip-hop macho behavior on young men and women. We need to start having conversations about how there is more than one way to be considered a man and that there are better ways to treat women. Hip-hop is great, but it’s important to remember that the messages promoted in the music don’t always have to be followed, especially those that endorse such limited binaries of hypo-masculine and macho behavior.
