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Rap music is so diverse in its themes, its style, its content but when it becomes a vehicle to be talked about in mainstream news, the rap that gets in national news is always the rap music that perpetuates misogyny that is most obscene in its lyrics and then this comes to stand for what rap is. Really its for me the perfect paradigm of colonialism, that is to say, we think of rap music as a little third-world country, that young white consumers are able to go to and take out of it whatever they want. We would have to acknowledge that what young white consumers, primarily male, oftentimes suburban, most got energized by in rap music was misogyny, obscenity, pugilistic eroticism and therefore that form of rap began to make the largest sums of money.

bell hooks  

The quote seems to be taken from a transcript of a 1997 Media Education Foundation event titled “cultural criticism and transformation” with bell hooks. Here’s a pdf of the transcript. The part the quote comes form starts on page 18 and is titled “Rap: Authentic Expression or Market Transcript.”


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