Pimps Up, Ho's Down

Hip Hop's Hold on Young Black Women

T. Denean Denean Sharpley-Whiting

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9780814741221
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Música

2007 Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association Emily Toth Award

Pimps Up, Ho’s Down pulls at the threads of the intricately knotted issues surrounding young black women and hip hop culture. What unravels for Tracy D. Sharpley-Whiting is a new, and problematic, politics of gender. In this fascinating and forceful book, Sharpley-Whiting, a feminist writer who is a member of the hip hop generation, interrogates the complexities of young black women's engagement with a culture that is masculinist, misogynistic, and frequently mystifying.

Beyond their portrayal in rap lyrics, the display of black women in music videos, television, film, fashion, and on the Internet is indispensable to the mass media engineered appeal of hip hop culture, the author argues. And the commercial trafficking in the images and behaviors associated with hip hop has made them appear normal, acceptable, and entertaining - both in the U.S. and around the world.

Sharpley-Whiting questions the impacts of hip hop's increasing alliance with the sex industry, the rise of groupie culture in the hip hop world, the impact of hip hop's compulsory heterosexual culture on young black women, and the permeation of the hip hop ethos into young black women's conceptions of love and romance.

The author knows her subject from the inside. Coming of age in the midst of hip hop's evolution in the late 1980s, she mixed her graduate studies with work as a runway and print model in the 1990s. Her book features interviews with exotic dancers, black hip hop groupies, and hip hop generation members Jacklyn “Diva” Bush, rapper Trina, and filmmaker Aishah Simmons, along with the voices of many “everyday” young women.

Pimps Up, Ho’s Down turns down the volume and amplifies the substance of discussions about hip hop culture and to provide a space for young black women to be heard.

1
“I SEE THE SAME HO”

Video Vixens, Beauty Culture, and Diasporic Sex Tourism

Every other video…
I see the same ho

—TUPAC (featuring Nate Dogg, YGD Tha Top Dawg), “All About U”

Watching the videos, you see the long curly hair
[and] think, “Man that would be nice to have
some long, curly hair.”

—SELA, eighteen-year-old undergraduate

Brazilian women are usually desirable, as often
women of mixed ethnicities are…. Our leaders
should make a law demanding intercultural
breeding to fill our planet… thus ending all the
world’s problems.

—ASKMEN.COM, Top 99 Most Desirable Women 2005

When Michelle “Micki” Burks decided to take on the role of eye candy in the now-defunct rap-reggae group Ruff Neck Sound System’s music videos “Stick by Me” and “Luv Bump,” little did she know that her decision would land her years later in the category of “video ho.” Her performances in the music videos did not involve provocative backside acrobatics, but her video persona in “Luv Bump” is interestingly transmogrified into a “hoochie” by the video’s end due to fast-living and hustling men. Shot in New York, the video aired in 1995 on the Rachel-hosted Black Entertainment Television format Caribbean Rhythms. At 5′8″ with long brown highlighted hair and honey-toned skin, Micki attended the prestigious Berklee School of Music in Boston from 1986 to 1990. A soprano with a superb vocal range, she toured Europe and Japan, releasing an album called Inca, and then took up modeling with Models, Inc. in Boston as a side gig until her music career took off. She met the Ruff Neck crew in the Boston music scene. Her then-boyfriend, Chris, was a well-known producer who had teamed with such venerable acts as the late Donnie Hathaway’s daughter Lahla.

When asked about the moniker “video ho,” she emphatically rejects any description of her experiences as degrading. She does nonetheless lament the portrayals of women in hip hop videos of late, stating that, “It is unnecessary. They don’t have to treat the women like that.” When asked if she would work in the emerging lucrative music video industry today if the opportunity presented itself again, the still-lithe thirty-six-year-old says with a laugh, “Yeah, if I were thinner [and] as a model not a ‘video ho.’”

While sales in the music industry continue a downward spiral that even the gestalt of rapper 50 Cent’s The Massacre (which moved over one million units in just under four days) cannot break, the music video DVD has emerged as a boon to the recording industry. In an April 7, 2004, press release, Jay Berman, Chairman of IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry), an affiliate of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), the organization responsible for the world’s largest music market, noted that music video sales are rapidly becoming an important revenue stream for the industry. The music video, popularized by the launch of cable television stations such as Black Entertainment Television (BET), Music Television (MTV), and Video Hits I (VHI), represents the lion’s share of formatting for these stations. Launched in 1980, 1981, and 1985 respectively, the first popular music video to debut on MTV was The Buggles’s “Video Killed the Radio Star,” a video that predicted rather prematurely that the music video genre would supplant the radio. Music videos have exploded, with budgets as large as some indie film projects, more developed narratives and sets, and digital technology, which has also allowed for a clearer picture and a larger than life celluloid image.¹ The hip hop music video in particular also provides brand product placement with a bumping beat. Like a four-to six-minute advertisement, the music video DVD sells music and the fabulous lifestyle signified by whatever material acquisitions are worn (or not), driven, or drank within its frames—all at a general sticker price between thirteen and eighteen dollars. Borrowing from cultural critic Greg Tate’s observations on hip hop culture in “Nigs R Us, or How Blackfolk Became Fetish Objects,” the hip hop video has “collapsed art, commerce, and interactive technology into one mutant animal.”² Similar to the film industry, which ties its potential box office take to A-list stars as well as well-known directors, the directors of music videos have become a highly sought after group, particularly veterans such as Hype Williams, Paul Hunter, Little X, and Chris Robinson.³ Recording artists recognize that the music video can make or break a career, and heavy rotation on MTV, BET, and VHI all but guarantees break-out success. Indeed, 70 percent of BET’s programming, the go-to station for urban hip hop generationers, is music videos and infomercials. And the cable station reaches some eighty million homes.⁴

In “All about U,” a Tupac Shakur, Nate Dogg, and YDG Tha Top Dawg collaboration, the rap artists bond over their disdain for “video ho’s” and “groupies” who they encounter in every city they tour and video they see. Like Micki, many of these women are singers, professional models, dancers, and aspiring actresses, earning their rent, tuition monies, or commercial exposure for a day’s work on a shoot. And some dance and shake for free for their five minutes of fame, jumping in front of the camera when Young Buck or any one of the St. Lunatics roll up on a North Nashville or North St. Louis block with a film crew in tow. As Atlanta hip hop industry insider and videographer Tiona McClodden suggests, “Many of the background video models use their bodies as demos because they know that much of what is shot will be left on the floor of the editing room. They have one opportunity. If they do something provocative enough to stand out, they anticipate that the shot just may remain in the final video.”⁵ That the impact of these sexually suggestive videos is undeniably regressive in terms of gender politics and young girls and women’s self-identity is revealed in a 2003 year-long study conducted by the Center for AIDS Research (CFAR) at Emory University. Tracking 522 Alabama girls’ hip hop video consumption and behaviors, the study revealed that a higher consumption of hip hop videos corresponded negatively with higher frequency of sexually transmitted diseases, alcohol and drug abuse (60 percent), and multiple sex partners (twice as likely).

* * *

But just as important as the complex motivations behind young women’s suggestive performances in hop-hop videos—rumps moving with the alacrity of a jackhammer, hips gyrating like a belly dancer on amphetamines, limbs akimbo, mouths agape in a perpetual state of the orgasmic “oh”—is the repetition of particular ideals of femininity. Hip hop is now as much about images as it is skills and beats. That the vast majority of the young women in these videos are either fairer-skinned, ethnically mixed, or of indeterminate ethnic/racial origins, with long, straight, or curly hair would suggest that along with the stereotype of hypersexuality and sexual accessibility, a particular type of beauty is offered up as ideal. In some respects, the majority of these women represent what historian Tiffany Patterson calls “ascriptive mulattas,” that is, those whose physical beauty transcends characteristics such as darker hues, full lips, and the like, historically prefigured as less than ideal (non-European). The “mulatta” figure, a pejorative term if ever there was one, is typically depicted as tragic because of her “in-between” racial status. Yet the “mulatta” has also been deemed in literary and film annals as the most ideal in the arena of feminine beauty, and the secretly longed for in the heterosexual marketplace of desire. This status comes about precisely because of her mixed-race heritage involving some configuration of “black” and “white,” which in the European and American male imagination signals the perfect blending of skillfulness in matters of sex (read: black) and physical beauty (read: white).

The physical appeal to both white and black men of Gabrielle Union, Ciara, Beyoncé, and Tyra Banks falls into ascriptive mulatta territory, as did that of Lena Horne and Dorothy Dandridge—just ask the men at askmen.com where Union, Ciara, Banks, and Beyoncé are ranked among the 2006 edition of the top ninety-nine most desirable women. On any given segment of MTV’s Top Twenty, or BET’s Rap City and 106 & Park, roughly 70 percent of the videos feature superbly toned, nubile, hybrid flesh. One could certainly argue that practically all seemingly black flesh in the “New World” is a hybrid given the history of transracial contact. But it is precisely because of the enormous range of blackness (as a result of consensual and non-consensual) sex that the incredibly narrow prototype of beauty is even more troubling.

As writer Kevin Powell argues in Who’s Gonna Take the Weight, hip hop generationers still do not fully appreciate the range of black women’s beauty. Even the fallout in the hip hop community from the 2002 Grammy Awards ceremony over Alicia Key’s multiple Grammy wins over India Arie hinged unfortunately (and mistakenly I would add) for some on the issue of color. Another example is the ruckus over the fall 2004 season of America’s Next Top Model (ANTM), a reality show that attempts to demystify high-fashion modeling by demonstrating that models, while born with certain assets like height, are primarily talent-development projects and that “can-do” attitudes go the distance. The show is undeniably in the service of beauty culture, which in general has been less accepting, if not hostile, to black women. However, in the 2004 season ANTM was UPN’s highest-rated program among women ages eighteen to forty-nine as well as teens. As the network’s newest cash cow, it was also one of the top ten programs among African American adults, and the highest-rated reality show among African Americans. Its host, übermodel Tyra Banks, consistently emphasizes personality over a particular “look.” Nonetheless, the conclusion of the fall 2004 season caused viewer squabbles regarding the hair and skin color of the final two contestants, Yaya DaCosta Johnson and Eva Pigford. In an interview with TV Guide’s Daniel Coleridge, the runner-up, Yaya, a Brown University graduate, responded to the interviewer’s perception of her “look” as “Afrocentric,” a perception that may have contributed to her loss:

I’m not Afrocentric, I’m just natural. But in this country, black women who don’t straighten their hair with chemical processing are stereotyped and labeled. Not all black women with straight hair need chemical processing, but I would have to to achieve that look. Just because we don’t straighten our hair doesn’t mean we’re trying to be anything else—we’re being ourselves. If anything hurts me about that, it’s that I wasn’t allowed the luxury of being myself like the other girls were. Nobody asks Cassie, Ann or Amanda to be “less white.” I’m used to having to defend my very being. That makes me a little sensitive.⁶

DaCosta Johnson’s browner skin and unprocessed hair moved her into an Afrocentric space when compared to Eva Pigford’s African American girl-next-door look with chemically straightened hair, light eyes, and lighter hue.

DaCosta Johnson’s predicament on Top Model raises old questions in this new era on assimilation, identity, and beauty. And yet, the mixing bowl with a wee bit of nutmeg and cinnamon standard of beauty endorsed ostensibly by American culture (more specifically on Madison Avenue) parallels the shifting ideas of beauty in hip hop videos that are, some would argue, necessarily still derivative of a white ideal.

In “Generation E.A.: Ethnically Ambiguous,” a feature in the Fashion & Style section of The New York Times, advertising executives and fashion magazine editors offered running commentaries that ranged from disquieting to just plain dim on marketing trends to “tweens,” teens, and hip hop generationers in both the mainstream and high-end marketplace: “Today what’s ethnically neutral, diverse, or ambiguous has tremendous appeal”; “What is perceived as good, desirable, successful is often a face whose heritage is hard to pin down”; “We’re seeing more of a desire for the exotic, left-of-center beauty… [It] represents the new reality of America, which includes considerable mixing… It’s the changing face of American beauty.”⁷ That racial categories are social constructs rather than biological realities—though this does not alter the lived experiences of those who occupy those categories—that “considerable” “race” mixing is not “a new reality” but has been historically widespread in the United States, and that America is not as “white” as it believes itself to be has been duly noted since at least the nineteenth century by writers and activists such as Frances Ellen Harper Watkins in her novel Iola Leroy. Even in The Birth of a Nation, a racist film posing as an American cinematic masterpiece, racial amalgamation is a core preoccupation because of its prevalence. The contemporary scholarly writing of philosophers of race Kwame Anthony Appiah and Naomi Zack are only a few examples of our awareness of the power of social constructs. Both Appiah and Zack have argued that “race” and therefore categories of race are biologically non-existent, dishonest, and in bad faith. That we as a culture cling to them relates more to our desires to enact and maintain social, political, and economic powers and privileges.

In effect, racial categories are themselves racist. In her 1993 book Race and Mixed Race, Zack argues presciently for the category of gray, an almost uncanny predecessor to “ethically ambiguous.” Therefore, the excited tone of discovery evoked in the “Generation E.A.” article seems more than a bit out of touch. The rhetoric that still situates whiteness at the center of American beauty culture and darker hues on this schematic shifting to the left (one wonders what right of center beauty looks like) quite simply reinforces a hierarchy of beauty, as well as the notion of fixed racial categories. Indeed, ethnic ambiguity does not guarantee racial ambiguity, particularly in relationship to those possessing “African” ethnicities and origins. One may be ethnically mixed (ambiguous) but racially marked as black.

Despite the hubbub about Generation E.A., editors and ad executives admit that whiteness continues to dominate the beauty and fashion industries. Where does, pray tell, such a hierarchy leave Generation Non-E.A. (non-ethnically ambiguous) black women? In her widely read book Beauty Myth, Naomi Wolf relates how the beauty industry essentially creates angst in women regarding their choices—Yaya DeCosta Johnson, for example. While not a treatise against the beauty industry and practices of adornment (though some critics have reductively read the book as Wolf’s feminist cri de coeur against lipstick wearing), The Beauty Myth in fact argues for something very basic: a women’s right to choose. Wolf makes the radical assertion that women should choose how they want to look, without fear of employment discrimination, or of being castigated as unfeminine, or of being subjected to the litany of other charges leveled at those whose beauty practices (or lack thereof) run counter to dominant ideas about what it means to be a woman.

Women who choose not to indulge in beauty practices are often disadvantaged and made to feel guilty for their lack of conformity in a culture that overemphasizes physical appearance. Simultaneously women who embrace beauty products and their images still “second guess” themselves and are subject to descriptions such as “high maintenance” and “not natural.” And those women who embrace beauty culture and also fall outside the current rage over Generation E.A. or Ascriptive Mulattas are left to endlessly negotiate a maze of images and ideas that are not especially affirming and seem, at each turn, to lead to a dead end.

* * *

As with the behavioral implications for hip hop video consumption, the collision between hip hop culture and beauty culture, the marketing and packaging of the “same” video girl who resembles the high-fashion model who resembles the latest Hollywood “It” girl, also has a clear and deleterious impact on what young black female consumers come to identify as desirable. And the desire to be desirable seems especially costly and laborious for young black women, as the product-hawking, image-projecting hip hop video pumps cash into the mainstream and hip hop’s multibillion-dollar fashion and beauty industries. In effect, what young black women cannot be, they now buy.

Who can forget the purchased artifices of Lil’ Kim? Her “so unpretty” motivations for doffing and donning colored contact lens, purported skin-lightening procedures, nose contourings, platinum hair, breast augmentation, and li...