Hilary Berwick
Sample Annotated Playlist
AAS181
To Assert Machismo is also to Devalue
For Michael Eric Dyson, hip hop has at least one function: for Dyson, “rap functions…as a source of racial identity, permitting forms of boasting and asserting machismo for devalued black men suffering from social degradation” (Dyson, 64). That is, for Dyson, one of the more powerful arguments against the rhetoric of “rap is about violence, which makes it bad” is the fact that rap (as Dyson refers to hip hop) allows a devalued subject position—that of the devalued black male—to speak from a position of power. Dyson saw hip hop as offering black men a way to speak for themselves in a society that has continually spoken for them, and against them.
We can see evidence of this in an early West Coast rap song, Eazy E’s Boyz in Da Hood. This song tells the story of a typical day in Eazy E’s life, wherein he “woke up quick, at about noon” and within the first verse, we can see that he gets no love, even from his mother: “I gotta get drunk before the day begins, before my mother starts bitching about my friends.” He sees “young niggas in the hood throwing out gang signs,” so he grabs his weapon, although “just as [he] thought, the fools kept stepping.” The really crucial line for our purposes, though, is in the chorus. Eazy sort of half-sings, half-chants, “The boys in the hood are always hard. You come talking that trash, we’ll pull your card. Knowing nothing in life but to be legit—don’t quote me, boy, ‘cause I aint said shit.” Eazy describes the kind of disenfranchisement and devaluing that Dyson sees—no job opportunities, no love, no trust, a life wherein even your friends will steal from you. And yet, Eazy has access to at least one empowering truth: the boys in the hood are always hard. Eazy is describing himself here, giving his “devalued black male” experience the right to speak for itself, and to declare itself ruler of its own domain.
One of the reasons this song is a good example of what Dyson is talking about, however, is because it also shows that, while the black male in the song is being empowered, black females in the song are being disrespected. Eazy sings about how he’s been “jockin the bitches, and slappin the hos”, and when he is not pleased with a comment made by one of the women in his company, he “...grabbed the stupid bitch by her nappy ass weave” and then “reached back like a pimp and slapped the ho.” Even at first glance, we can see that asserting machismo also devalues at the same time that it uplifts.
2Pac complicates this further, telling the audience that it may not be about him and his story after all in the song All About You. Here, the “you” seems to be the audience member, the assumedly-female listener that 2Pac sees at every single show: “Every other city we go, every other video—no matter where I go, I see the same ho”. The whole song is sung “to” girls who variously will or will not let 2Pac hit it—or even have good talk, for that matter. To Tupac it seems almost like a joke; he laughs throughout the track, and when Snoop comes on, he’s laughing even more: that same girl, not just in Tupac’s video, not just in Montell Jordan’s and Nate Dogg’s videos, but at the Million Man March? The same girl as the Warren G video? Having a song by men about women may not seem like a way to introduce gender into the conversation, but this song seems to point to the fact that it’s never just “about” men. Any conversation about men and masculinity—and the machismo of the devalued male—is already talking about women, and the various ways we value men and women. This song shows how the empowerment of disenfranchised men will affect women—even if the song doesn’t explicitly disrespect them the way Eazy does.
We can see a more contemporary example of this same concept in Lil Wayne’s Mrs. Officer feat Bobby Valentino. In this song, Lil Wayne gets pulled over and is overtaken by fantasies of making the attractive female cop “sing like a cop car.” She knows Wayne is “from the street” and all she wants him to do is “fuck the police.” The power relationship that we would assume from the story—young black man being pulled over by a cop—would not tip in Wayne’s favor. That is, the cop usually has the power, not the young black man. Part of what Wayne does in sexualizing this cop is to turn that power formation on its head. That’s part of what offends people—Wayne is disempowering the female cop, and he is disrespecting her, insofar as he’s trying to move from a position of disenfranchisement or devaluing of black men toward a position in which he has more power. Part of him detracting from her power is sexualizing her. In this way, we can see echoes of Eazy E’s devalued “bitches and hos”: Wayne is getting his power to the detriment of the woman in the song. Unlike “Boyz in the Hood,” at least, Wayne gives the woman in his song some of his wittier lines: “I said lady what’s your number? She said 9-1-1.”
Discussion questions:
1. What does Dyson mean by “asserting machismo,” and how do we see it in these songs? What other songs do we see it in?
2. Does asserting machismo always have to devalue women?
3. How does race play into this conversation?
4. Is Dyson’s argument—this is a useful thing rap does, allowing this disenfranchised voice—satisfy? Does it hold water? Is it clear, or is it overly simplistic? How might we complicate it?
