Contraindications In A Hip-Hop World

The title of this article is “Contraindications in a Hip-Hop World: An Ethnographic Study of Black Women Hip-Hop Fans in Washington, DC.,” written by Tia L. Smith-Cooper. This article was published with UMI Microform in June 2002. In this article, Tia L. Smith-Cooper is scrutinizing the current (in 2002) problem of male rappers objectifying females and women still being content with this fact and continuing to be hip-hop fans. Not only does she attack male rappers, she also attacks female rappers such as Lil’ Kim in which the author believes she condones the fact that sex should, in a sense, be a form of currency to gain money and material things. Some may feel like Tia took a sort of feministic viewpoint on this matter. The author portrays the grave truth of rappers and how they speak of women in their music. This feministic viewpoint states that rappers often refer to women in derogatory terms such as ‘ho’ or ‘bitch’ and it seems like women are satisfied with it. But, why? This is what Dr. Smith-Cooper is trying to figure out. Since this scenario is quite contradictory if thoroughly thought of. In this study, she recruits five women to give their input on why they are hip-hop fans.
The social theory …show more content…
The authors’ hypothesis was that maybe they were not listening to the lyrics, but rather the catchy beat. To a certain extent, she was right. One of the interviewees said that they liked to dance to and listen to the beats of the music which is basically supporting the authors hypothesis. The only deviation is that Trice, one of the interviewees, stated that she didn’t mind the video vixens that much and that rap music made her feel good about her body. The cause of this could possibly be the fact that growing up, Trice felt ashamed of her big butt and body, but hip-hop music helped her embrace it. There were no tables or