Commodity In The Music Industry

The Hip Hop music industry is infamous for being controversial. In the article Hip Hop’s Betrayal of Black Women there’s a debate on whether the exploitation and constant verbal slander of women should be acceptable just because it sales records. It presents the question that why is it that male poverty breeds sexism? Even though women may have lived in the same environment males still see women as the enemy in their music in an effort to sell records.

In her article “The Venus Hip Hop and the Pink Ghetto: Negotiating Spaces for Women,” Imani Perry argues that the objectification of women in the music industry is normalized in our society. Her purpose is to persuade us that most feminists who fight against the objectification and exploitation of women are ultimately colonized by the sexual fantasies of men. As a law professor at Rutgers Law School, Perry structures her text in a very effective manner. Using a general-to-specific organization scheme, she begins by outlining the recurring image of sexualized women in music videos, then presenting various cases of prominent feminist figures in the music industry.

Throughout history, the roles of women and men have always differed to some degree. In ancient Greece, the traditional roles were clear-cut and defined. Women stayed home to care for children and do housework while men left to work. This system of society was not too far off the hunter gatherer concept where women cared for the house and the men hunted. Intriguingly enough, despite the customary submissive role, women had a more multifaceted role and image in society as juxtaposed with the rather simple role men played. Morals for the two were also different. Men obviously had the upper hand with women being the traditional passive.

Charlotte Bunch once said “Sexual, racial, gender, violence, and other forms of discrimination and violence in a culture cannot be eliminated without changing culture.” Our society experiences all of these problems and I would like to focus on the gender perspective in the 21st century and how women have had more of an influence in music than people actually realize. Men have dominated the music industry and business but women have been the underlying reason as for why men and other females have been so successful in the music scene.

In ancient Greek time women were seen as being delicate and placed on figurative pedestals. They were expected to take care of the house but had word in the decision of the order and way things should run in the house.

This source compares to another one I have mentioned. Both Amber Robertson and Elizabeth Robertson reference Greek philosophy and the view that women were considered inferior because of the bodies they exist in. The male form was the finer one, women’s bodies

McFarland 2003 argues that the origin of Misogyny in music, not only in hip hop is the society and culture it has for so long endeared. Normally, people in America have valued the boy child, to endowing men as adults (McFarland, 102). At the same time, they have considered women as subjects to men who should show total submission. This argument has found many backups, with scholars and authors arguing that the American culture is the force

“When I stop calling their music garbage I began to listen and find commonalities between the methods of their music and mine. To me the music share the same anger, frustration, fears, and romanticize yet critical observations of black and brown communities feel with drugs, guns, and violence.” Page 5 Absent of this description is the important role that sex plays in the music and communities of the six young girls in the study. The cost of selling sex is African-American females being viewed as sexual objects thus suffering from sexual harassment, rape, and sexual assault. page 47

Everyone loves music, don’t they? Or at least grow up listening to it? I Sold My Soul to Rock and Roll by Kristina Grey, the text I read, made Rock and Roll seem controversial to the general knowledge I already had on this "loud" and "raucous" music. In my head, rock stars had crazy fun nights and partied on every tour they adjourned. However, Grey expressed how the lives of males in Rock and Roll were, because of this I agree that women are not portrayed accurately in the category of “white music," and I say this because I am studying women's feminism.

The ancient Greeks had very clear ideas about many things in life. In particular, this clarity can be exemplified as a binary system of worldview by looking at things in black-and-white perspectives to avoid ambiguity. A person is either free or a slave, a native Greek or a foreigner, rich or poor, royalty or not, and in the case of gender, either a man or a woman. This kind of dichotomy was a good way to impose social order and maintain harmony in Greek society because their social hierarchy was quite rigid. However, from the early myth of Hesiod's Theogony where misogyny is quite obvious, ancient Greek literature soon takes a more enlightened view of female roles in Greek society as their civilization develops further.

Members of this all-girl band consisted of African American women, Asian women, white women, Hispanic women, and women of Native American descent. In the back of my mind, I was perplexed that this group even existed given the time period– mid 1900’s. But then I realized that World War II switched up society and negotiated previous gender roles. Women took on once “male roles” in society, like working in the factory. Initially, I did not think of music as one of these male dominated platforms.

The topic of femininity in pop culture is important today because women are still far from achieving equality with men socially, economically, and politically. Music is a huge part of everyday life and affects millions of people. The music industry is intertwined throughout many outlets of the media. From commercials, to television, to the radio, music is a part of everybody’s daily life. What is noteworthy about trendy music today is that the messages that the artists are singing about can influence the listener's behavior, even though they may not consciously know this. With many popular anthems being so influential in every aspect of today’s world, we have to closely look at the correlation between music and how this alters how people act in today’s culture. Those who’ve been closely following the trends in country music over the last few years have had a sense that songs that objectify and degrade women (“bro-country”) have been on the rise, but it was only anecdotal evidence that we could

The treatment of the male appropriation of birth seems particularly partial. This whole chapter puts too much weight on the initiatory character of Greek pederasty and little on those anthropological of sex segregated societies the problems the distribution of evidence poses in classical Greece. Perhaps, in the historiographical introduction, where the pattern of fifth-century Greek history is said to confirm the larger hypothesis of a connection between state formation and the subordination of women produces forced and so unconvincing interpretations of important and complex texts and evidence. For those interested in ancient Greek scientific and medical views on human reproduction and the takeover of female lore about childbearing by Hippocratic gynecology to have had effects that extend to the present

Most popular music today is driven by violence and sex. These musicians put out albums that glorify violence and promote causal sex. When the albums are being produced, the artist does not think of how it will affect the perspective merchant. When

In Athens, Ancient Greece, it was hard to be a woman because women were not only considered the weaker sex next to men, but also had very little rights, “Our noble magistrate, why waste you words on these sub-human creatures…” (Aristophanes 199). The women of Athens around 400 B.C.E. were mainly seen as sexual objects and housewives, not by only the men, but the women themselves. This shows in Aristophanes writing: