GWSS 241 Blog Post 3

Winter Roberts
May 20, 2020
GWSS 241
Blog Post 3

Identity has, in one way or another, played into the development and popularity of practically every major genre we have focused on in class. The exclusion of identities by race or sex is often a major source of novel stylings which, averse to the celebration of non-white male origins, often comes to exclude those same creators. The transgression of the rigidity and celebration of sexual identity is also a major player in rock, punk, and modern protest hip-hop.

Protest in hip-hop has been historically comprised of ideas around the marginalization, murder, and many other trespasses of equal rights for black individuals and communities. In “Final Chorus: Planet Rock, The End of the Record” from The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness, Kevin Young discusses “the urban decay of the South Bronx,” where landlords burned buildings with tenants in black communities to collect insurance and escape sinking land value due to gang activity, in-turn inciting the early success and continued correlation to hip-hop in black communities like the admittedly less characteristic, though aptly referenced, “Planet Rock” by Afrika Bambaataa. He goes further to discuss the development of earlier genres, like punk, which “eschew[ed] any black sound” despite it’s “parentage in the blues” (Young). Music born, in large part, as the result of blues, following the troubled eeriness of Bo Diddley’s “In The Pines” and other stylings; from the struggle of marginalized people.

Beyoncé’s “Lemonade,” as discussed in NPR’s The Record “Close To Home: A Conversation About Beyoncé's 'Lemonade',” continues the tradition of pop protest discussed by Kevin Young and extends it, invoking her black and female identities to emphasize issues faced by black women. The album, similar to some of her early and less well-recognized work, functions as “a collective call-to-arms for black women” who experience the same struggles she does (Bradley). Though the article never explicitly discusses the changes in Bey’s relationship with her husband after he cheated (they even went so far as to renew their marriage vows), they do discuss her identification with and gratitude to black female artists across all media from antebellum to present day.

Identity; The politics, the protest, the art, as much as we may desire to eliminate them as factors toward inequalities in the modern world, will never go away. Beyond the conservative illusion of separation, identity connects us as nothing else can. The struggles each community and sub-community face and the celebration of identity that comes with these struggles, the same as genres divide and collect audiences, help bring us together where we are separated.

DJ Selection:
“Commes Des Garçons” by Frank Ocean, by its literal translation means “like boys.” Ocean celebrates his sexual identity in a space that still resists it by singing about a sexual relationship with a man at all.
“Sad Forever” by Lauv discusses mental issues, namely depression, as a factor of identity and how it affects him and others.

Readings:

Young, Kevin “Final Chorus: Planet Rock, The End of the Record.” The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness, pp. 311–96.

Bradley, Regina, and Dream Hampton. Close To Home: A Conversation About Beyoncé's 'Lemonade'. 26 Apr. 2016, www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2016/04/26/475629479/close-to-home-a-conversation-about-beyonc-s-lemonade/.