Hip Hop and Inequality: Searching for the "Real" Slim Shady By S ...

the forced realities of North American slavery. Black males are portrayed as violent, a threat to society, and having an uncontrolled appetite for sex (particularly with white women). The thug and gangsta lifestyle serves to perpetuate those negative stereotypes of black males. Despite the negative social impact, contemporary capitalism, with the use of the media, can market dimensions of the thug life—the gear and mannerisms—to suburban white youth for profit so that the youth can experience the “other” digitally. The performance of rap artists becomes a vicarious and demonstrative event that captures supposed reality and reinforces implacable fantasies of the “other.” The power of the beat lies in the interactivity of contemporary media, where white suburban youth (and, indeed, all of the rest of the society) can “experience” ghetto life without having to go there.

Chapter 4 explores the archetype of the female that is brought into the mainstream of hip hop culture and the images marketed, which perpetuate the stereotype of the female whore but which can also be seen as female empowerment. In some instances, when female artists are presented as feminists (and when women fill certain roles in the videos of male hip hop artists), in the postmodern sense, they are, in fact, “wankstas” because they display intense contradiction. In one instance, they seem to suggest that black women now have a voice and are “queen bees,” yet at the same time, they perpetuate the negative stereotypes of black women as sexually loose, just as in slavery times. Wankstas are the lost sheep of the twenty-first-century feminist movement. By that, we mean a feminist consciousness has nothing to do with immediacy. It is not that wankstas do not care about feminist ideology. In fact, they have unconsciously benefited from the historical suffrage of women. The “benefits” yielded to race, class, and gender nevertheless give wankstas the ability to negotiate through deliberate marketization of their brand of talent,