Wimmen Troubles

What is Kanye West's problem with women?  I understand that, as rappers (or rock lyricists) go, West is hardly the most aggressive misogynist out there.  He doesn't describe, in loving, grotesque detail, how he abuses women sexually or physically.  He doesn't make threats.  On the rare occasion he's attempted a sex rhyme ("I'm'a play some Vandross/you gon' take your pants off"), it's mostly harmless macking.  So I acknowledge that West is hardly up there with Bun B or that douchebag Eminem in terms of virulent women-hate.  From time to time, he's sincerely empathetic, not just for his community as a whole, but for women specifically.

So maybe I expected a little more from the guy.  I realize Kanye doesn't owe me anything.  But while I'm able to discount gynophobic bullshit from disposable MCs as background noise, Kanye is way too good to dismiss.  He actually has the ability to talk sense, so it's more incongruous when he acts the fool.  For me, the most impressive thing about The College Dropout was that it came from a brand-new, singular, identifiable perspective.  Musically, we'd been listening to West's smooth-ass retro-soul beats for years on hits by Jay-Z and others.  And it wasn't that West was the world's greatest MC, although he's often been underrated on the mic because of his skill as a producer.  But it was a revelation to hear it all together in one place.  And it was most compelling because of what West brought to the table as a personality—the jokes, the self-undermining asides, the suppressed anger, the defensive egotism, the whole package.  "We all self-conscious, I'm just the first to admit it" is not the sort of thing most MCs would think, let alone commit to wax.  He had the sort of personality you hoped wouldn't succumb to conformity or cynicism.

I hate "trend pieces," where writers predict the future based on a handful of random anecdotes (e.g., "Politics is nastier than ever and voters hate it!"), but it's hard for me to escape the conclusion that, recently, Kanye's been trending misogynist.  Some signs have been there from the beginning; "The New Workout Plan," from his debut, argued that women should engage in various kinds of physical torment (crunches, Pilates, multiple-partner blowjobs) in order to land a position as arm candy for some dickhead rapper or athlete.  Because it was a Kanye joint, it was "clever"—e.g., the testimonial from Elly May from Mobile, Alabama, who tried Kanye's workout plan and was at last "able to date outside the family"—but the ideology was clear: women as afterthoughts, accessories, commodities who had to maintain their physical form or get kicked to the curb.

The followup LP, Late Registration, was no fun whatsoever.  It sounded like an SOS from a guy who hadn't had a moment to himself for the past 18 months, and concluded with the schizo-symphonic "Gone," where Ye sounded like he was about to go all Brian Wilson on us.  But it wasn't notably anti-woman.  West did manage to wring a massive hit single out of an Oscar-winning Ray Charles impersonation and tired, boilerplate stereotypes about greedy, trifling women, but the record also contained the ultimate tortured-rapper cliche, a weepy salute to his sainted mother.

Since then, West has kept a lower profile—unless you count bum-rushing the stage at the MTV Europe awards to complain that "Touch the Sky" should have won Best Video because "Pamela Anderson was in it" and "I was jumping across canyons"—but his guest shots have grown more obnoxiously dudely.  Last year he produced and rapped on the Game's "Wouldn't Get Far," the video for which is currently on heavy rotation on MTV's Sucker Free.  The song is a totally gratuitous, mean-spirited attack on the women whom rappers employ to gyrate around in moist clothing in their videos for the purpose of enabling them to sell more records.  Apparently Game and Ye are pissed that these women, who exist in their world to be gawked at, groped, and then discarded, sometimes try to get the rappers who are profiting off their flesh to buy them shit.  Talk about missing the fucking point.  You pay these women a relative pittance to flounce around as meat, and now you're dissing them for being all about their appearance?  Even worse, as Tris has pointed out, the women the song defames are totally voiceless within hip-hop; I doubt that XXL is going to run a point-counterpoint so that Vida Guerra can have a chance to respond.  It's always a classy move to remind someone of immutably lower status how trivial they are and that they have no business even dreaming about bigger things.

Maybe you disagree, but I think Kanye's latest toss-off, his remix of Rich Boy's awesome "Throw Some D's," is even fouler.  For those of you who haven't heard the original, it's about a young dude who sells a bunch of crack and uses the proceeds to trick out his car.  Personally, I find the song hypnotically catchy.  The "D's" referenced in the joyful chorus—"Just bought a Cadillac/Throw some D's on that bitch"—are the stainless-steel spokes made by Dayton Wire Wheels, the flavor of rims the MC apparently digs.  But Kanye—remember, he's a clever guy—saw the opportunity for some wordplay, so he's repurposed the chorus so that "throw some D's on that bitch" is now about slapping D-cup breast implants on skinny women.  Now, I understand that the cars=girls parallel is nothing new; we've all heard "Maybelline" and "Little Deuce Coupe."  But usually it's not made so explicit that the woman is literally the equivalent of a car, a physical object with no agency, to be torn apart and reassembled however the owner prefers.  Maybe Kanye's just in it for the joke.  Personally, I think the joke is too stupid and obvious to succeed even as dipshit fratboy humor, but it would still be incredibly ugly even if it were funnier.  I don't know that Kanye genuinely feels that the women in his life are decorative ornamentation who should feel obligated to get mutilated by surgeons for his amusement.  If he doesn't, he should stop acting like it.

Comments

[tris mccall]

you'll be interested to know that hilary, who had the same women's-studies professors that we did, calls kanye west the one emcee she just can't take anymore. she will put up with me banging 50 -- which is vicious, of course -- but kanye's brand of misogyny is too much for her. i think it's because she finds it so *personal*: like he's really lashing out against specific women who he wants to hurt, rather than saying a bunch of garbage about macking hos in order to satisfy a genre requirement. "throw some d's" is, like, her favorite song ever, so i've sort of been standing between her and that remix. i hope she doesn't read this!

[S.M.]

Tris: that's a really good way of putting it -- it's the specificity of his approach that's so offputting. You can't dismiss it as a character piece or a hack ticking off boxes on his Keepin' It Real checklist. Then again, Kanye is about the most bitter, insecure, paranoid personality out there. He takes everything way too hard and way too personally and always lashes back with maximum nastiness. So it's unsurprising that this approach would extend to his treatment of women.

In other news, I know you'll be excited to hear that I'm listening to Tales from Topographic Oceans. I picked it up used last night for $6.99!