So for this post, I figure I'd work off of a couple of things that Jess Bourget had said in her blog that I wanted to explore and expand a little bit.
"Becoming"
So Jess discusses the idea that teens are also viewed as needing to figure out who they will be when they grow up. I remember this being one of the biggest stressers in my life. Honestly, it still is. I think that as a culture we press our youths to figure out their lives before they've even had the chance to live it. I think it's odd that while we have this mentality that teens are becoming who they will be, we kind of ignore who they actually are. I remember that all my dreams of acting were kind of just dismissed because I was told they were just that - dreams. Dreams would never pay for food or a place to live. Even to this day, I still have people ask me "So what are you going to do after college?" As if what I'm doing now is irrelevant. As if I have to have a life fully planned out. I also think that a lot of the dismissing that happens during teenagehood is responsible for a lot of negative feelings about self worth - after all, how can you figure that out if you don't even have the space to understand yourself?
Definitely reminds me about that whole hey teens aren't some alien life form thing. Yeah. I mean cuz I honestly think that we forget that teens have their own shit going on too. I remember my Dad always telling me that I had no idea what it was like to have stress. I was too young.
Also. That Social problem picture. Yeah. That was my gpoy. without a doubt. Here's me as a teen
So here's a link to my final project, showing you what I've learned. I've applied all the skills that we've developed in class to a new topic - Youth, Media, and Hard Drug Culture.
For this week, I found a pretty cool - academic! - article about spoken word that involves youth and why it is an important source of medial expression.
The article called "Stealing the Air" by Rebecca Ingalls features ideology from the movie "Pump up the Volume", and focuses on how spoken word was derived and the purposes it is used for now. Ingalls discusses how this form of art has been derived from hip hop culture as well as from poetry as a whole. The reason I picked this was because this piece talks about how teens and youths in general are allowed through spoken word to connect with peers in a way that entices an audience to actually listen. Spoken word puts an emphasis on the voice and presence of the person performing more than poetry does because of the specific ways in which the body is used to create a message.
Through this form of art, it is argued, youth create a space where they can interact with peers by use of social commentary on many of the things which are not discussed in the daily life of a teenager. The way spoken word is done allows for the focus to be on the presence and indeed the existence of the performer as living the words that are being said. Spoken word is also very good at allowing youth - who primarily engage in this art - to vent frustrations, anger, and ways of navigating through the socio-political environment.
I found this piece while looking for something to back up a piece that I had written for another class. This piece attaches very easily to the course assumption that media matters and that teens are not some alien life form. Within spoken word, we see teens and youth digest their social surroundings, including the media as well. They take on hard issues that mean something in their life. Spoken word acts as a kind of counter-media for mass media. It relates to the concept that teens are not some alien life form because we see that they really are attached and are affected by what happens in the environment. They are not separated from the culture at large, but also have something to say about it.
Kai Davis - "Fuck I Look Like"
Hiwot Adilow - "Hiwot"
Gay Marriage
I think that spoken word is extraordinarily important as a medium of expression for youth. I personally have engaged in spoken word a lot after my brother died of a heroin overdose in order to figure out why these things happened. For me, spoken word was a way for me to make sense of my own emotional capacity while searching for an audience to listen to me. I used spoken word for healing purposes and to try to make a personal connection to my audiences, to try to reach out and create a sense of solidarity between me and others who may be feeling similarly to this.
This is a short list of songs which feature non-hip hop, non-black artists who we constantly forgive for their sexist, violent, classist, problematic natures. Because they're white and this sort of behavior doesn't fit our stereotypes of who white people who make rock and roll are. Please keep in mind that I listen to a lot of these songs, despite the fact that I consider myself conscious of feminism and intersectional oppression.
Feel free to add more with the lyrics/video when you come across something. Acknowledging these exceptions to the rule will shine some light on our own perceptions of the stereotypes and expectations of these and other artists.
Below are some big points that I pulled out of the Tricia Rose talk for today. I'd like to discuss a little bit about this experience however. I honestly don't believe that hip hop is talked about enough in American culture, despite commercial Hip Hop being extremely pervasive. The broadness of this topic is also incredible. So for my post, I think I'd like to focus on the race relations of hip hip as well as what meanings are derived from this art form, for both white youth and youth of color. I think that understanding hip hop in a historical and racial point of view is extraordinarily important to our discussion of hip hop in general. Without a cultural context, we view race, racialized prejudice, media, and consumer culture in separate boxes when they are actually points of intersectionality.
First off, I'd like to start with the video of the Tricia Rose talk at Brown and some basic points:
We don't share lived experience, but popular culture.
Cultural knowledge is spread through popular culture and the media. This knowledge comes to us in complex, mediated ways. Things are constantly reformed and moving.
Hiphop was first brought about, as Rose argues, on basketball courts. People would freestyle during the instrumental B-Sides of tapes. This was not supposed to originally be viewed as a form of art.
Prerecorded technology - like CD's and track players - helped for the first time in the of making new songs. Sampling. This access to new technology helped "create" hip hop
A culture of versioning - Prerecorded tapes and tracks that could be edited together and taken apart. This is creating within a context already present. Hip Hop's creation acted as a sort of conversation which is characteristic of the Black communities (according to Rose).
Decline and despair in urban America in Black culture as a source of creativity - working class , low-tech jobs that people were funneled into (auto repair, etc.) gave rise to a multicultural mix of people who are able to reinvent technology to their own benefit, despite downtrodden economies. A theme of hip hop and black musics is often hope despite despair.
This is a video about the controversy of hip hop that is a common debate in many cultures, but especially American culture. Dr. Rose is on the panel in this debate. The common view is that hip hop is more misogynist, more violent, more degrading, more criminal, than any other stylized form of music. It is then interesting that this is considered the last black music that has not - yet - been reappropriated for white culture. What is constantly discussed is the economic struggles which gave rise to the views of criminality and hip hop. While the video is really long, it is worth watching at the very least the first 15 minutes.
Here is an example of what I would consider (with me not being an expert by any stretch of the imagination) an example of non-commercial hip hop. The beat and kick pattern is simple and catchy with the lyrics deep and based on lived experiences of the artists in the group. The pattern in the background is a sample, something taken from some other song or melody or elsewise. This video also talks about how difficult it was in urban culture to stay clean, get money, and stay out of jail. The lyrics give a narrative of this form of hope and despair that Rose discusses in her talk at Brown University. There is even a discussion of how youth are effected by the events in black culture, the despair, as Rose calls it.
Lil' Wayne - 6 Foot 7 Foot (Ft. Cory Gunz)
Here is a popular hip hop song that I would consider commercial - made for entertainment, shallow content, catchy, and was made to make money rather than be an expression of true art or experience. This is an example of what people often refer to as the rampant misogyny, criminality, and violence that hip hop is often blamed for. This song follows much of the pattern of what Tricia Rose discusses in the form of hip hop - the sampling and conversational tone of the song - while appealing to the masses by using imagery from Inception, a film that had come out around that time. The pattern in the background repeats so much that the words and content of the song almost become intelligible. The only important thing then becomes the glimpses of phrases that can be heard, rather than the full message. There is no real narrative written here, only a song of rhyming which follows a predictable pattern of popular consumption.
Jay-Z - "Hard Knock Life"
Like the Lil Wayne video, this song also samples and in fact makes its appeal off of the hook from the Broadway musical Annie. In this song, the underlying kick patterns of Hard Knock Life, sung in the musical by the orphans of the orphanage as they are doing chores and being abused, makes up the basis of the melody which Jay-Z raps over. While he discusses certain topics that are discussed by Rose, this is a for-profit video that is geared at making money rather than expressing content. This video does however demonstrate Rose's idea of versioning with the repetitious pattern of the hook from Annie overlayed by references to popular culture (like Biggie - the Notorious B.I.G.) and displaying this "hope through despair" kind of "rags to riches story".
Lupe Fiasco - "Bitch Bad"
This video also falls under the context of commercialized hip hop, but varies from some of the other videos that we have examined. In this song and video, Lupe Fiaso - like many artists (Frank Ocean, Lauren Hill, Queen Latifa, among others) within the hip hop community which we typically don't recognize - makes a critique of the language and visual stimulation we use in order to construct ideas about what and who is acceptable through hip hop and other sources of media. He has something strong to say about the rampant misogyny, violence, and racial stereotypes which other artists use to sell their works. While he doesn't specifically say hip hop - because we can apply this critique to many forms of music which promote similar ideas - the audience is made to understand that this is a situation that is being driven not only by white supremacy, but also by internalized racism and other forms of structural oppression. Last year, I made the mistake of saying that Lupe Fiasco was the only commercialized artist to make such a stance, but a fellow student, friend, and colleague pointed out how I was playing into some of the stereotypes which Lupe Fiasco and many other artists who were discontent with the present state of hip hop were discussing.
I end with this last note on Lupe Fiasco as a catalyst to our discussion of how media affects teenagers and the perceptions which we have of black youth. Lupe Fiasco talks about how the contexts of these conversations, images, and stereotypes become coded in our understanding of ourselves from a young age and why this cycle continues. I am in no way an expert on this topic. However, it seems to me that the portrayal of negative stereotypes in commercial hip hop has lead to a cultural understanding of black youth as analogous with the popular black musics which are becoming more and more commercialized. Youth are therefore told to spend, to adopt a certain image in order to be black, to understand relationships to each other and the world at large in a specific and limited way. And while there are artists who are constantly fighting for not only recognition but a change in the systemic oppression of black youth, these stereotypes are encoded and subscribed to by society - including white and non-black societies - as a whole. Black youth are therefore seen as different from white or non-black youth - an alien culture - who adopts this mode of expression through the numerous negative representations presented by artists who are being marketed by larger cultural as having only one stereotypical situation. This proves that media matters not only to teenagers but to our growing perception of who youth and marginalized groups of people are.
I'd like to focus my post this week about a few things that were both mentioned in these texts as well as echoed in my American Teenager Museum which I didn't have the words to express until now. While these pieces are important, I'd like to take a more specified look into some of the issues concerning queer folk which are only touched upon here. I personally find that they are extraordinarily important in the discussion of queer folk because while we are discussing visibility, we are not discussing whose visibility is the one being depicted. It most certainly isn't disabled non-binary people of color. My analysis thus springs from here.
"A major concern was voiced first by lesbians and then by gays and lesbians of colour, people with HIV/AIDS, and people of other sexual minorities. Their complaints were that the [LGBTQ] movement had, for the past twenty years focused exclusively on the concerns of gays who were primarily male, decidedly white, and overwhelmingly middle class. Another concern was with the focus of the early gay liberation movement on assimilation, which sought kinship with the heterosexual mainstream on the basis of similarities." - Queer Representation in Media, Canada's Centre for Digital and Media Literacy
This quote relates directly to a lot of what we have talked about in class, as well as what the article covers. This is a subpoint, relating to how representation of the LGBTQ+ spectrum has been, by the mainstream media and queer media alike, assimilated into an image the only represents an acceptable side of the community - the white, gay, male. This passage emphasizes that while there has been progress in the images of LGBTQ+ folk, that progress has been limited to a certain ideal of what is known as assimilation - that is acceptance by the heterosexual community only as far as certain limits paint queer folk as heteronormative. The acceptance is based on the idea that queers should become just like heteronormative folk, assimilated into that culture. At the same time, part of this acceptable image is of the white gay male, which is often just as damaging as no visibility at all to many LGBTQ+ folk who have been invisible within their own communities (i.e. trans* folk, queer people of color, asexual folk, etc.).
"Certainly companies are more than eager to be tolerant and accepting of the enormous buying power of queer people, but many organizations who court queer money when it suits their needs will also act against queer interests when it’s in their best interest." - Pink Dollar Marketing,
It's all about money. Like many other events in a capitalist society, this entire passage relates to how companies will often look only to turn a profit - or when it makes their image better. It is completely normal for companies to turn a blind-eye to the actual problems which face the queer communities. So while it is taking a step in the right direction for the progression of more "allies" to the queer communities, it is not doing so for the reasons of civil rights or humanity, but for capital. These companies become exposed for their fickleness, but nothing seems to change - at least so far. This literally puts the power and agency of queer folk not in their rights to vote and be considered equal in terms of housing, job discrimination, and spousal rights, but in terms of the buying-power they possess. A queer without buying-power can then be ignored along with all of the other queer issues. No money equals literally no power. No power equals no visibility.
"...[B]rands that specifically target queer people are able to generate higher brand loyalty: queer people are generally very active when it comes to using their dollars as votes and they will stick to companies that have maintained a positive presence within queer communities. Both Witeck-Combs and The Commercial Closet highlight how loyal queer people are towards queer-friendly brands. While this is often seen as a good thing – a promise of money in exchange for more gay-friendly behaviour – it also suggests that queer people are being bought and sold by companies in exchange for treatment that heterosexuals should expect by default." - Pink Dollar Marketing
Like the previous excerpt, this passage is all about the buying power of the LGBTQ+ community and how it gets configured by the capitalist class. Now that there is representation of LGBTQ+ folk - regardless of how limited it is - there is a sense of acknowledgement from manufacturers and the market as a whole. Using the political game-playing processes of picking and choosing when and where to support the community, this article is claiming that queer money is being invested the same way as heterosexual money is. The difference between the ways in which queer money is manipulated and heteronormative money is manipulated is the political name games - the who supports what kind of image/behavior in media for the "queer agenda" - that companies play in order to get the money. By jumping on the wagon of civil rights and sociocultural acceptance of queer life, more money can be made because the queers will support it.
There have been
people of LGBTQ+ experiences throughout recorded history. They have come with
different personalities, genders, skin colors, abilities, and socioeconomic
status. What seems to be the only link between the current community of LGBTQ+
folks and those throughout history boils down to a problem of representation –
or lack thereof – in the cultures in which they inhabit. While LGBTQ+ folk have
existed for a long time, representations of them in society and culture as a
whole has been extraordinarily limited. In fact, it has been until only the
past few decades that LGBTQ+ folks have received any real amount of depiction
in cinema, television, plays, and other forms of mass media. Before the 1990’s,
a very heteronormative standard of viewing these folk has been in place. Prior
to the flourish of gay representation in the mid-90’s, most representations of
LGBTQ+ folk have been either seriously lacking, coded for gay audiences only,
or playing roles of villains and victims. Yet as this flourish of LGBTQ+
visibility has blossomed in media, so too has it become more acceptable for
queer people to exist in the public spaces in real life. Despite this
development, the pictures of these folk are not complete, complex, or truly
representative of many forms of queer life. These representations, however,
provide an outlet, especially for youths who need to see themselves as people
too, in a world which values heterosexuality more than non-heterosexuality.
These representations thus provide a very blurry sort of mirror that is very
important to a developing sense of self and identity which allows a creative
outlet of expression for youth. Ideally, as these characters of LGBTQ+ folk
become more complex, so too does our understanding of what it means to be
LGBTQ+ in a culture.
With the rise
of mass media – from the radio to the television to the Internet – has come a
rise in representational images of all types of people. However, much of these
representations only depict part of the actuality of real life – the part that
society as a whole wants to see. For LGBTQ+ people, representations have been
extraordinarily limited. While there have been hundreds of characters “coded” –
that is to say, never verbally explained in media, but understood especially to
the queer audiences who search for a mirror of themselves in media – many of
them have been either in negative lights – depicting sadness, grief, lacking
morality, or even evil incarnate – and rarely offered the roles which are
offered to heterosexual characters, people, and situations. In fact, with very
few exceptions, all of these images have been adult characters, personalities,
and situations, leaving no room and no examples for youths to follow. Even as
the perception of these LGBTQ+ folk have changed to be more inclusive, youths
have been mainly absent from the screens, insinuating that LGBTQ+ youth does
not, in fact, exist. This has created a gap in representation which was never
really been bridged until youth oriented television has allowed for representation,
the most well-known example being the television show Glee.
Yet while the
LGBTQ+ youth representations are growing slowly in the current day, LGBTQ+ folk
have been told what to wear, buy, look like, and act like throughout the
decades of mass media. Especially in the 1990’s as more LGBTQ+ populations were
being targeted as a niche market, youths have always been told how to look
queer, or buy queer, because Elton John is listening to XM Satellite Radio, and
Ellen is wearing Covergirl. Seeing as teens are a unique market themselves,
representations of LGBTQ+ consumerism has fueled a market of trend-setting
queers who look good and consume everything. So while we may assume that
progress is moving forward, simply because we can all now see at least simple
mirrors of our queer selves and be – for the most part – accepted by our peers,
what we should also be noticing is how capitalism is helping queer youth feed
into the reciprocal cycle of what Rebecca Raby calls “pleasurable consumption”
(431). In A Tangle of Discourses: Girls
Negotiating Adolescence, she makes the claim that “If teenagehood is a time
of insecurity, teenagers can buy products and brand names that will help them
negotiate that insecurity… Consumption emerges as a way for teenagers to
express their emerging individuality, and as a safe outlet for youthful
energies,” (437-8). So too is this true with queer youth who have the money and
need to self-express a queer style of life guided by Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.
This
pleasurable consumption, however, should neither be taken as positive
phenomenon, nor cast in a light of darkness, because the capitalist society in
which we live allows us to see media and consume it. So to be angry at
capitalism is to be angry at the representations we do and don’t see as
consumers of capitalism. We must approach this new representational outlet of
LGBTQ+ expression with both pride and take it with a grain of salt. While we
should work towards more complex representations of the lives of LGBTQ+ folks,
we must not lose sight of the capitalistic prospects which assimilate the queer
communities into the same capitalism that runs the heterosexual patriarchy.
Nevertheless,
these representations are indeed important, especially for youth, whom face the
biggest problems within the home. Because of the prevailing myths of LGBTQ+
folks that have been painted since the dawn of mass media, there are still
serious problems within the home for youths whom have begun to go further off
the straight and narrow path of heterosexuality. What we’re not seeing is the
homelessness and poverty of youth who are LGBTQ+ identified who are being
abandoned both by these stereotypes and the myths that many people believe
about queer life – mainly the conservative parents of these LGBTQ+ youth. For
the youths of the current age, many of whom are not finding acceptance and
stability they need in order to survive, the media becomes disillusioning once
again. These white middle-classed depictions of wealthy LGBTQ+ folk are not the
experiences of many teens who struggle with basic necessities throughout life.
As a result, not only are we focusing our glance on happy-go-luck queers, but
we’re also missing the bigger picture – that there is a real need for accurate
representation and acceptance within the media of all types of LGBTQ+ folk. As
it stands, the image is skewed.
That is not to say that it hasn’t gotten better.
Since the mid-1990’s, mass media has seen a flourishing of queer cultures which
have given rise to more acceptance and representation in both media outlets and
lived experiences. Now, queer characters can be more than just the villain or
pervert. Yet while there is room for movement, we are still missing the real
aspects of true depiction. Today’s queer character exists simply as a
caricature of queer experiences – campy like Jack on Will and Grace, or flamboyant and fashionable like Kurt on Glee. However, by adding these
characters, we are forced to face a world in which new visibility allows for
the acceptance of actual queer folk. What we can look forward to for now is
simply the growing cultural representation of LGBTQ+ folks that continues to
change and progress towards depictions of full-fledged human life. Until then,
some of us LGBTQ+ folks must be content with “representation at any cost”.
