The beauty of intimacy is devastating. It is a wretched and pitiful wonder. Intimacy shouldn’t be idolized, it is the slow death of the one only to rebirth a mutation of two. Unnatural comfort, awkward tongues and predictable touches. I fight and wrestle with it everyday. With strangers on the street asking for spare change. Check out clerks asking me politely if I have any coupons. Drive through speakers loudly crackling, “would you like to super size that for only five cents more?”
A look deep into the eyes is all that it takes to shatter your boundaries you have worked so hard to construct. A touch at the right time, a song in the right tone, a beam of sunlight peaking through the dark shadows of your room. Hope. Hope that somewhere, someday, someone can prove you wrong. Someone can provoke you to see beauty again.
Is Hip-Hop actually a hotbed of homoerotic messages?
Last week I came across what I thought was a somewhat obscure documentary titled “Hip Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes,” by Byron Hurt (Video clip from the documentary featured above). Little did I know that this documentary actually has won a few awards, and was highly acclaimed for exposing the sensitive/controversial issues surrounding hip hop culture, record companies, and interpersonal struggles that these musicians have come to face over the past decade.
Today’s definition of what “Hip-Hop” is, has changed drastically since its underground pros like beginning; becoming a hybrid of lazy, overly vulgar, meaningless phrases. Somewhere along the lines as Hip Hop and Rap became mainstream, the images and lyrics became more aggressive, male-driven, and ego-centric.
What deeply compelled me and struck me immediately, was the surprisingly large role that Homoeroticism plays in this genre of music. Honestly, I was a bit astonished by this. I guess it was mainly due to the fact that I never really looked at Hip-Hop from a homo-erotic perspective.
However, when I investigated deeper into this concept, It’s was almost too obvious that Hip-Hop’s aggressive, greased up, thug like images, did indeed portray hidden underpinnings of homo-erotic fantasies. It’s actually ironic.
The iconic images of artists pictured shirtless with half-naked women wrapped around their torso, mangled in expensive chains dangling from their necks; totally embodies the essence of homosexually saturated symbolism.
Furthermore, the fact that almost all mainstream Hip-Hop artists refuse to acknowledge this concept, talk about it, or even mention the word “homosexual” in a serious manner, illustrates the deep-rooted homophobic thought processes that have emerged within the music of mainstream artists today as a way of escaping inner homoerotic tendencies.
5. Because he knows that you better check yourself before you wreck yourself cuz shotgun bullets are bad for your health.
4. Member of Westside Connection, who was responsible for creating the universal “gangsta nation.”
3. One of the only rappers who went from hardcore rhyming to starring in the PG family comedy Are We There Yet?…and pulled it off.
2. His song, “it was a good day,” off the album The Predator, is something that even a middle class white girl can identify with when she’s having a good hair day.
1. One word: Friday —best mid 90′s movie about the trial and tribulations of a black man trying to get ahead in L.A.
My goal with this blog is to offend everyone in the world at least once with my words… so no one has a reason to have a heightened sense of themselves. We are all ignorant, we are all found wanting, we are all bad people sometimes.
