Online Exclusive: Commentary- Essence's War On Rap Hits Black Men

Vibe.com, February 25th, 2005

Popular music is just a mirror into society, and the idea that rap music has single-handedly marginalized women from society is shortsighted and offensive. Since the SugarHill Gang went pop, rap music's cartoonish exaggeration of all things hip hop and inner city has been at the seat of its popularity. Once political and message-heavy, the music has changed with the taste of its primary consumers-young white teenagers. These kids, with no identity or social awareness of their own are starved for authentic grit of any sort. Record companies aren't thinking about the affects of the content of the music. They love hip hop because it sells across demographics.

Groups that would protest rappers dismiss the companies behind them, instead preferring to attack the artists, who are merely trying to turn a profit and meet projected sales numbers by giving the market what it wants. Essence and others, by demonizing the genre, are holding the wrong people accountable. The social discrimination and marginalization of women isn't a rap problem. Hip hop didn't create these things.

The b-side of the mix is, whether real or imagined, there always seems to be some repression of black maleness in the zeitgeist. The simultaneous denigration and celebration of the female form in rap, for me, seems like a natural reflex to that. There is an unrealistic prototype for Mr. Right growing out of beauty salon squawking and talk show psycho-babblists, something I call the Denzel Washington Paradigm.

Black women seem to have the expectation that a man can be all things- devoid of flaws and human frailty. He must be hard and soft, rich and handsome, doting and polite, tough but with a thin string of vulnerability- all of this, one cue, in all the proper measure (all the time). But even Denzel cheated on his wife. The perfect man, giving, loving and absent of any flaw, simply does not exist. Many young black men feel increasingly impotent in this world where we are constantly falling short of someone else's demands and (we) desperately want to dismantle the power of women and others to dictate an agenda by becoming "pimps" (ie. street-made men who master all, and can not be deconstructed by women or other men of any color).

There are a lot of black male identity dialogs on top of a real battle of the sexes going on in the black community. There is a struggle to set the parameters for manhood, and sexuality has become its own weapon. Hip hop reflects this struggle, among others.

jimi izrael is a journalist and opinion writer living in Cleveland Heights, Ohio. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Philadelphia Enquirer. His column, "What It Iz," can be found at www.blackvoices.com. He blogs occasionally at www.jimiizrael.com.